Open Doors Toronto

Every year Toronto has an open doors event that allows the public to experience several buildings that they would normally not be allowed into for free. This year I only had enough time for one stop so John Ronson and I gathered our gear early Sunday morning (May 29) and headed to the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatre.

Along the way we came across a professional looking bike race. Took a hundred pictures but really hard to make something look great. I thought removing colour except for the trim would work nice.

This guy was pretty intense. This one I like quite a bit.

The original of this next shot is really quite busy. I thought I would push the vignette as far as I could. Too far?

I think this shot works. Are the flags too distracting?

 Tried my hand a panning. Out of 20 or so tries, this is the only one close. Really hard to do!

A street vendor at the St. Lawerence Market was more than happy to pose for us.

Beautiful colours

 

Shoes for sale, anyone?

Along the way to the theatre.........

Breakfast indeed....

This is the entrance way to the Elgin Theatre. The Theatre is actually composed of 2 theatres, The Elgin and The Winter Garden. For what the tour guide said, this is the only operational 2 tiered theatre in the world.

Very difficult with all the people to get proper HDR shots (it was so dark, you had no choice). Here are some of the more expensive seats in the house.

This picture does not do the roof any justice. Simply breathtaking.

In the early 1900's this theatre was most used for Vaudeville. Greats such as Milton Burle, George and Gracie performed here. Then later, MGM purchased the theatre and this is where "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" would have been seen.

When the theatre closed down for roughly 30-40 years, the vaudeville acts just left everything behind. Today the stage backgrounds and the costumes are proudly on display.

Here is a shot of the Winter Garden theatre. The roof is made of thousands of real leaves. In the early days the vaudeville acts that would play downstairs would come upstairs to the Winter Garden for one last show. When they were doing the restoration they found that all of the paintings were done with water paint. They tried a couple of different processes to clean the walls, one that created such a pungent odour that the people watching "Cats" downstairs complained and one (the one that finally worked), was made of yeast, flour and water. Wow.

Hoped you liked this. I will be going back to their public tour on Saturday at 11. Hopefully there won't be so many people and we will get to see more behind the scene things.