Penny Arcade & Colloseum, 1906–07
Hard to believe, perhaps, but a hundred and thirteen years ago what is now Dream Cyclery at 432 George St. N., just south of Brock St., was home to Peterborough’s first motion picture theatre, the Colloseum — and, immediately before that, the Peterborough Amusement Company’s “penny arcade.” I have no photos of the penny arcade or Colloseum, so this one, from 2019, will have to do.
Signs by the door outside Dream Cyclery, 432 George St.
The forgotten history of an important building
Historically, this address at 432 George St. N. is no unrecognized slouch: in 2006 a City of Peterborough bylaw granted it a Heritage Designation.
Constructed around 1870, and known as the Henry Newton building, this property has the great distinction not only of age and design features, but also of representing the northern end of a continuous series of three-story 19th-century commercial buildings that run south to Simcoe St.
The city’s official statement of the reasons for designation details the history of its commercial occupants — but, surprisingly, makes no mention of a transformative presence in that space in 1906—7: a penny arcade that morphed into the city’s first motion picture theatre.
More history: before becoming Dream Cyclery in June 2019, 432 George St. N. was home for years to Christensen Fine Art, a gallery and custom framing business. In 1955 it was the site of T.F. O’Connor, fine china; from about 1964 to 1982 it was the Treasure Shop, which sold knick-knacks as well as china.
Nowadays, a fake-historical plaque by the door of Dream Cyclery states: “On this site in 1897 nothing happened.”
But what about 1906—7? Let’s see.
And for a touch of historical continuity, consider that earlier in 1906 a shop at this same site had bicycles as a sideline.
George Street, east side, south from Brock, streetscape. No. 432 is the first complete building on the left, when it was still (but not for much longer) Christensen Fine Art and up for sale. In earlier years, Sandy’s Department Store and a Bi-Way were in the building to the left, on the corner of Brock St. Google maps, 2018.
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For ten years – dating back to the Cinématographe’s appearance at Bradburn’s Opera House in January 1897 – travelling exhibitors had been bringing the new motion pictures to town. In 1905 motion pictures also began to be screened out of doors at Jackson Park – although disappearing each autumn as the weather turned chilly.
Examiner, July 19, 1906, p.5. In 1906 Peterborough had only two automobiles on its streets, and no motion picture theatres. That was all soon to change.
The city was by no means an easy place to break into. In April 1907 a couple of men came to town from London, Ontario, looking for a downtown spot to place a “vaudeville show.” But, a report said, it was “almost impossible to secure a store in the business section” given the “great demand for business places.”
Soon enough, though, crowds of people no longer had to go sit under the pines of Jackson Park or frequent other occasional indoor spaces to see the motion picture novelties. In that same year motion pictures found more fixed homes and settled in to stay, never again to disappear from the city’s streets – well, I guess we could say except temporarily for the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.
In 1907 three new “places of entertainment” – all showing motion pictures and charging five cents a ticket – sprang up north of Hunter on George Street in quick succession: the Colloseum, Wonderland, and the Crystal.
The age of the nickel madness
In 1906—7 a new amusement phenomenon was sweeping North America. It was the age, as a Harper’s Weekly writer put it in 1907, of “The Nickel Madness” — of the rapid establishment of the “five cent theatre” or “nickelodeon” (the latter word a combination of the price and the Greek word for theatre, and used more in the United States than in Canada). These small storefront theatres — often called “electric theatres” or “theatoriums” in the next few years — popped up everywhere across North America to demonstrate – and capitalize on – the then-amazing advent of photographic pictures that moved.
Examiner, Aug. 16, 1946, p.11, looking back on 1907, when things looked pretty good, or so it seemed.
With the boom in moving picture theatres came one of the first trade papers of the motion picture industry: The Moving Picture World. This is the title page of its first issue, March 1907. An essential resource for anyone looking into cinema history, it ran until 1927.
As cinema historian Charles Musser puts it, these new electric five-cent theatres “created a revolution in screen entertainment. . . . It is not too much to say that modern cinema began with the nickelodeon.”
They were places that, at least at first, required little capital to set up – and the nickels came flooding in. An early nickelodeon established in Pittsburgh in 1905 – running shows continuously from early in the morning until late at night – is said to have generated a profit of nearly $1,000 a week. In an article about the nickelodeon craze in December 1907, Variety magazine opined, “This line is a Klondike,” referring to the recent gold rush. The news of quick money to be made spread rapidly. Toronto had its first motion picture theatre established in March 1906. Ottawa had its first nickel theatre open in fall 1906. Hamilton, Ont., an industrial city smaller than Toronto but considerably larger than Peterborough – and also at one time called “the electric city” – had no less than six small storefront “motion picture parlors” open in 1907. Kingston, Chatham, nearby Lindsay, and other cities soon had their nickel theatres. Peterborough was simply following the trend.
Moving Picture World, May 4, 1907, p.4, announces the arrival of the nickelodeon. Peterborough had its first such establishment in January 1907, a few months before this article was published. The five-cent theatres were as much about music as motion pictures: as one 1907 ad said: “See the cinematographe and hear the music.”
A man looking into a “peep-hole” machine, this one an Edison-Kinetoscope. What viewing a moving picture at an arcade might have been like — before the pictures were projected on a wall. Wordpress.com.
The first inkling of an actual theatre in Peterborough that would present pictures (and music) day after day came in the fall of 1906 when a group of local entrepreneurs established a “penny arcade” in a storefront on George Street.
“It’s a melody played in a penny arcade . . .”
The cluster of mechanical wonders included “peep-hole” or moving-picture machines. You put a penny in a slot, looked down through an opening at the top, and there they were: a number of pictures that moved.
This was not the first time for a penny arcade in town. A couple of them had appeared in in 1903, for instance. But those had been temporary affairs, put in place for only about three weeks each. The 1906 arcade was intended as a more permanent fixture, or so the announcements made it seem.
Peterborough Daily Review, Nov. 1, 1906, p.4. Introducing the “Automatic Vaudeville” — a sign of things to come.
That November an enterprising group of “local capitalists” (as the Examiner put it) sensed an investment opportunity, taking a chance to follow one of the latest amusement trends in establishing an innovative and “electric” business venture at 432 George Street.
Here the language of the time is striking. Nowadays mainstream newspapers rarely use a word like “capitalist,” preferring instead a milder, less political term such as “businessman” (less often business woman) to identify an enterprising individual or investor. They take for granted the capitalist world as if nothing else ever existed.
At the time the papers did not name the participants in the venture. As it turned out, they included “a group of newspaper entrepreneurs,” namely Mel Hutchinson, Jim Clarke, Bert Huston, and Rolland (or Rolly) Glover, collectively known as the Peterborough Amusement Company.
For years the ground-floor space that the company took up on George Street had been occupied by Frank R.J. MacPherson’s shop (plumbing, bearing, and electrical contractors, with bicycles as a sideline). Next door on one side was a jeweller’s shop; on the other a “merchant tailor.”
Edison Phonograph Monthly, April 1906, p.4.
The temptations of the amusement arcade included an array of coin-operated devices – not just moving picture machines, but also a picture post-card vendor, a fortune-teller, and “punching bags, pneumatic punches, weighing machines, electric shock machine, gum machine, and music machines.” The previous occupant of the store, the MacPherson business, had moved across the street and handled the electrical wiring of the Amusement Company’s premises.
The penny arcade opened its doors on Saturday afternoon, November 3. That just happened to be the same day a young actor and singer also came to town: Julius Marx, who later went by the name of “Groucho.” Julius, not quite sixteen years old, was a bit player, and singer, in a little remembered melodrama called The Man of Her Choice. Even so, it was the penny arcade that proved, according to reports, to be “the most popular place in Peterborough” that evening – demonstrating its popularity “with all classes of the community.”
Review, Nov. 2, 1906, p.4.
The penny arcade was crowded all day and well until midnight. The “men, women and children” who came had “hearty laughs at the moving pictures.” They thoroughly enjoyed “having their fortunes told, testing their weight, or their capacity for electric current,” said a report. “To the youngsters it was as good as a circus, with the advantage that it did not cost as much money.” The arcade promised to be open every weekday and evening. It became an instant site of social mingling, and the proprietors were kept busy, at least at first, counting the pennies that flowed into the slots.
Examiner, Nov. 3, 1906, p.12. Admission was free, and “everything refined” — you just had to have a penny to try one of the various machines, including those for “moving pictures.”
Here again was something “new” for the city. In Canada the arcade business was still in its “comparative infancy” in comparison to the United States, as the Examiner had pointed out a few days earlier:
It is fitting that in this, as well as in other things, Peterborough should be up with the leaders, and, as a matter of fact, it is the first outside of the large cities, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa in the east to have an arcade installed on a permanent basis. . . . The work of amusing people is now recognized as a business as much as selling groceries or dry goods and there is a rapidly increasing amount of capital being invested in this branch of business enterprise.
New York Clipper, March 10, 1906, p.78. Ads posted in U.S. magazines like this one promised would-be entrepreneurs that they could quickly make a “barrel of money” by setting up an “amusement parlor” with coin-slot machines. The Clipper ads appeared regularly beginning in 1906, but petered out at the end of December 1907, marking the end of a short trend.
In December the Peterborough Amusement Company branched out a little. In the cold weather local amusement activities shifted in part to Jackson Park, on the northwest edge of the city, with huge crowds heading out that way to enjoy the skating rink and toboggan slides at the end of the street railway line. The Amusement Company took advantage by installing a number of its slot machines, including fortune-telling and athletic machines and coin-operated picture machines, inside the rink’s “building” – a structure that served as a box ball or bowling alley during the summer. This was a taste of what would happen the following June.
In January 1907 the downtown arcade closed for about ten days, supposedly to make improvements, with plans to change the moving pictures in the machines – “every machine having a new scene” – and to add free musical programs “embracing all the latest musical hits.” Patrons could come and hear the latest song, “The Mouse and the Clock.” Tuesday and Friday afternoons were to be preserved for ladies and children, with “punching bags included.” Meanwhile, the same address had an ad for “Mr. Hicks’ Committee Rooms,” with the space apparently being used temporarily for Robert Hicks’ campaign for the mayoralty.
Examiner, Dec. 20, 1906, p.11. Competition for the penny arcade’s motion pictures from the visiting Morris-Thurston Co. at the Grand Opera House.
The penny arcade business might have been a good way of making quick bucks (or pennies), but the amusements offered did not have staying power, as the Peterborough businessmen soon found out. Years later those city “capitalists” were colourfully celebrated as an example of a line of ambitious Peterborough enterprises that periodically “plunged . . . into strange bogs in pursuit of the golden ignis-fatuus.” In 1906 penny arcades were flourishing everywhere as big money-makers. Why not try it in Peterborough? The partners apparently invested the hefty sum of $150 each (over $2,500 in 2019). Long after that, an Examiner reporter remembered:
Tremendous was the first-week’s ‘take,’ as the crowds flocked about. Then began the doleful period of diminishing returns. Everybody in town who hungered for entertainment had by this time ‘seen the show.’ Sadly enough, there was no change of bill. And Peterborough, unlike the metropolitan cities, could provide no continuous flow of ‘customers.’ Wherefore it was that the entrepreneurs pocketed their losses while the arcade machines . . . vanished somewhere into the Silent Hence [from] whence no derrick or slot-machine returns.
Many of the penny arcades of those years ended up being converted to motion picture theatres, and that is what happened to the Peterborough Amusement Company’s setup. An arcade machine was more expensive than a motion picture projector (and you only needed one, or later, two, projectors in a theatre); and at one cent a view the machine could not compete with a moving picture screened in front of many more people, perhaps a couple of hundred at a time, who were each paying five cents and could move in and out constantly – every half-hour or hour or so – to view a recycled program. A theatre at that time could also have free areas jammed with standing patrons. Penny arcades, along with vaudeville and burlesque, had a tough go of it during the nickelodeon craze. By the fall of 1906, too, although there were still no dedicated motion picture theatres in town, the Grand Opera House was also occasionally throwing motion pictures out onto a big screen, which was better than looking through a peep-hole.
Motion pictures and song — Peterborough gets even more up to date with Scott’s Colloseum
In January 1907, most likely as a result of diminished returns, the Peterborough Amusement Company turned its George Street premises over to “Messrs. George Scott & Co. of Toronto.”
Examiner, Jan. 23, 1907, p.5.
Around the middle of the month George Scott applied to the city council’s Committee of the Whole to request a licence to operate a moving picture show for a period of about four months. A week later the Peterborough Amusement Company announced that on Jan. 29 it would be opening up within its premises “a series of refined, high-class and instructive moving picture exhibitions” for the benefit of “amusement-loving citizens.”
The new theatre’s program would include one of the standard elements of the five-cent “theatoriums” over the first decade of their existence: “illustrated songs” — with a vocalist accompanied by a pianist and coloured slides projected by a stereopticon. Illustrated songs dated back to concert hall entertainments of the 19th century. In the early motion picture theatres they became a popular commercial enterprise calculated not just to attract audiences but also to sell sheet music, and were thus not a far stretch from the music videos of more recent times. One account of the early years of a U.S. theatre noted, “Shop-girls were especially fond of the illustrated songs and would patronize the house liberally during the noon hour.” After a time illustrated slides were also used to advertise coming attractions (before the practice of filmed previews took over). The early theatres also usually featured “a versatile lecturer” to fill in details about the pictures.
Allowing “Citizens to Enjoy Winter Attraction,” the Colloseum promised continuous performances every evening in the weeks following, from 7 to 10, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons from 2:30 to 6. Admissions were, at least at the beginning, 10 cents for adults and 5 cents for children.
Review, Jan. 26, 1907, p.5. The name of the Colloseum presented something of an issue — and not just as in this typo — because it also sometimes appeared in print as “Coliseum” or even other variations. The opening, originally scheduled for Tuesday the 29th, came on the 30th.
Thus, Wednesday, Jan. 30, marked the beginnings of Scott’s Colloseum – which would, then, make the venue Peterborough’s first dedicated (although makeshift) motion picture house; and with Scott’s arrival and the establishment of the Colloseum, and continuing thereafter, the business of motion picture exhibition in Peterborough became more than a matter of local enterprise. The pretentiousness of the theatre’s name is notable given the tiny makeshift space it occupied. The style and number of seats remain unknown, but it was probably something like 150 to, at most, 200.
Opening night was pronounced “a gratifying success,” with a large audience turning out to enjoy “what to the majority of Peterborough’s residents is a new form of entertainment.” One of the first films shown was The Railway Signalman’s Daughter:
The thrilling incidents, fascinating situations and realistic episodes, which contribute to the rescue of the Pioneer Express, and the defeat of the plans of a gang of desperate train wreckers, although at the cost of the lives of the hero and her lover, will form an evening’s entertainment not soon forgotten.
Here, then, is a description of one of the first films witnessed by a Peterborough audience at a motion picture theatre.
Just two days later, on Friday, Feb. 1, the theatre had a slight one-day pause for an interior paint job. From then until the end of May – his four-month period – Scott advertised heavily in the newspapers, with daily notices or ads. One early notice advised: “If you want a comfortable spot to spend a pleasant half hour and see the possibilities of modern invention, come. Beautiful illustrated songs.” It outlined a romantic wonder to be seen on screen that week:
Just one girl. The one he was looking for. The new moving picture programme includes among others the story of the young man of 25 who did marry when he found his affinity, and did it quick. He saw her on the platform of the train for Buffalo. He introduced himself, proposed, was accepted, found a clergyman on the train, was married and they spent their honeymoon at Niagara Falls and lived happily ever after.
The fast-paced half-hour program included The Mysterious Dream, in which a man named Johnny Rich could be seen leaving his club in New York City and finding himself “floating high in the clouds” over the town. “You [should] see it yourselves,” the notice said. “It was real to him, but was it possible?” Another picture told the story of a “poor orphan boy who coveted his neighbour’s apples.”
Examiner, Feb. 2, 1907, p.2.
Examiner, Jan. 23, 1907, p.2.
In late January Scott had begun to place want ads locally for a “lady singer and pianist” – “work light, salary $12 per week. Must be refined” – while continuing to advertise “new ‘beautiful’ illustrated songs.”
Apparently, finding his talent locally proved a difficult task because Scott eventually settled for a Toronto pianist and singer, A.E. (Al) Harding. (There is no record of who played the piano and/or sang in the meantime.) Harding, “a pianist of more than ordinary skill,” arrived in April and became known as the “musical director” of the Colloseum. He spent the first week of May delivering a song, “The Flower of Japan,” written by a local man, Croyland Yokome, the sports editor of the Peterborough Daily Review (son of the editor, F. Richards Yokome).
Billboard, March 16, 1907, p.72. The latest offerings in popular songs, including “When the Whip-Poor-Will Sings . . .” One of my favourite titles — “Is There Any Room in Heaven for a Little Girl Like Me?” — was warbled later that year at another five-cent theatre.
After being closed for a short while “for Lent,” the theatre reopened on April 1st with The Life of a Cowboy (1906), a picture from the Edison Company directed by Edwin S. Porter (famed for The Great Bank Robbery). The various scenes of this “stirring western drama” — filmed on Staten Island, N.Y. — were said to be presented “in a realistic manner life in the West, where the Indians and their enemies, the daring cowboys, roamed the unsettled wilds” — representing a genre that would be immensely popular for decades to come and, with its standard stock of offensive, damaging stereotypes, was seldom anywhere close to being “realistic.” The film probably required a lecturer to explain what was going on because the scenes patched together in its 17 or so minutes apparently did not make a lot of sense on their own. Still, on that particular evening the film “elicited warm applause.” On the program too was the popular (and sentimental) new song, “When the Whip-Poor-Will Sings, Marguerite.”
In the second week of April the Colloseum screened scenes from George Scott’s own film of the “Big Toronto Fire” (The Great Toronto Fire, April 19, 1904). The “hall” was “crowded all evening,” the Examiner reported, and the moving pictures in general, including a number of humorous items, were (once again) said to be the “best in this line seen in the city.” The main presentation was the “marvellous series of views” of a fire that “cleaned out practically the whole of the warehouse district.”
Examiner, April 9, 1907, p.10.
Only those who actually saw the great fire in Toronto can adequately appreciate the realism of the moving picture shown in the Colloseum by Mr. Scott and his assistants. The clang of the fire bells, the rush and hurry, the horror and grandeur of the actual conflagration are marvellously brought out. The rescue work of the firemen, the rush of the crowds, fighting the flames and dynamiting the dangerous walls, are depicted with a reality that is almost incredible.
Peterburians may have had a personal interest in this film. The city’s own brigade had sent a number of fire fighters, who rushed off by “special train and flat car to assist in the moment of supreme emergency.” The chaos, overcrowding, and congestion of the burning area prevented them from providing help effectively; but in general firemen worked for fourteen days, much of the time in pouring rain, an Examiner retrospect said, and even then the blaze was not entirely extinguished.
The ad for the “continuous program” ended by noting that “ladies are especially invited to the afternoon performances.” Another ad assured parents that they could “safely” send their children along. The theatre boasted that “over 1,000 people” had come through its doors to see the film over the previous week. Audience members, management claimed, were not just being delighted, but surprised, by the quality of the entertainment. One happy customer reportedly remarked when heading out the door: “I really [should] bring my wife to-morrow night. I had no idea one could see such a good entertainment for so small a price.”
The program for the week of April 15 included an odd offering: “The Matrimonial Adventures of Count Gustav de Dion of the Legion of Honour, His Advertisement in the N.Y. Herald and the astonishing results,” plus other items including “The Great English Cricket Match at Lords, England.” The theatre again reached out to persuade women to come out in the afternoons. “The best part of the cocoanut is the inside,” the theatre told newspaper readers. “Drop in and see the refined series of moving pictures.” Or: “Don’t fail to see New Programme: Thrilling Scenes from Life.”
The Colloseum again made sure to point out: “Parents may safely send children to see the Moving Pictures.”
Examiner, April 23, 1907, p.5.
In a short space of time the theatre became well enough known that when a real estate office changed its location it told readers that it was now “one door south of the Colloseum.” When the Colloseum screened the “Story of the South African War,” it got a favourable notice: “If there is any class of amusement where one can get as good value for five cents as at Scott’s Colloseum the Examiner does not know where to find it.”
Daily Evening Review, April 25, p.1. “Refined entertainment for both small and great.”
One customer did not agree with that praise. On Wednesday, April 4, a man named David Hoben, described as “a frequent offender,” appeared in court charged with creating a disturbance at the Colloseum. Hoben admitted to the judge that he could not say for sure whether he was guilty or not. Apparently P.C. Samuel J. Newhall (later, for decades beginning in 1921, the chief of police) had been called to the theatre about nine o’clock the previous evening after Hoben had “let an unearthly yell out of him,” disturbing the others in attendance.
In court Hoben was granted the privilege of questioning the police officer. He asked, “What picture was being shown?”
P.C. Newhall: “A picture of Highland troops.”
To which Hoben remarked, “Well, wasn’t it enough to make you yell?”
What exactly the offender cried out, or why, went unrecorded – perhaps he was a pacifist or of Irish extraction and not fond of the Scots Highlanders? The main film being shown, To South Africa and Back with Tommy Atkins, promised “Thrilling Scenes from Real Life.” “Tommy Atkins” – often just “Tommy” – was an archetypal name for a British soldier, doubtless in this case representing those who had fought in South Africa. The man’s intervention was an example of someone expressing public opinion, perhaps somewhat too boisterously, in a relatively new forum. The theatre was, after all, promising a “refined” atmosphere. In any case the judge fined Hoben the hefty sum of $2, to be paid in ten days.
Examiner, May 16, 1907, p.12.
Controversial or not, the South African War film and accompanying shorts were held over for a second week. Scott apparently had a similar success in May with the film of the famous, and sensational Thaw-White murder trial — fresh out of the newspaper headlines (the murder had occurred in June 1906; the trial opened in February 1907). After its initial appearance from Thursday to Saturday May 14–16, when it “taxed the capacity of the premises,” the film was held over for another three days the following week, “to give everyone a chance to see something really good.” The theatre boasted that “hundreds paid a visit” in late May to see the “extraordinary happenings” of a Miss Dorothy Goldenhair in the forest in “Paddy Bears.”
Examiner, May 18, 1907, p.16.
Despite this brisk business, the May 31 ad marked the end of the downtown theatre’s ads, never again to return. Through all this time Scott himself was apparently commuting by train between Toronto and Peterborough. In June he was said to be “in the city” (which suggests that, despite an original booking in the Munro House, he was not a permanent fixture in town).
Examiner, June 11, 1907, p.11. Here two spellings — “Coliseum” and “Collosseum” appear in the same article.
More importantly, he was now reopening his theatre in Jackson Park, though not outdoors. The Coliseum (as it was now styled) was taking over the park structure previously used as a box ball or bowling alley, probably the same space used for the penny arcade in December 1906: painting it and setting down seats. Visitors to the park that summer would be able to see motion pictures both indoors and outdoors. The Coliseum in the park opened on Wednesday, June 12, complete with “refined” illustrated songs “and other features.” The theatre could, unlike the park’s usual open-air screenings, show motion pictures rain or shine both afternoons (two to five) and evenings (seven to ten): admission, five cents, with regular changes of program. As of June 24 the Coliseum was in a seemingly friendly competition with the free outdoor pictures (which, of course, couldn’t start until after the band had finished playing and the sun was down). It continued screening films (which included a June re-run of Life of a Cowboy) until the end of July.
Examiner, July 12, 1907, p.8. Now it is “Coliseum.”
The Colloseum/Coliseum had certainly disappeared by September. When its pianist Harding came back to town as the musical director of the Summers Stock Co., appearing at the Grand Opera House, a report mentioned his stint at “Scott’s Coliseum,” specifying that it was “when that concern was doing business here.” Yet the storefront amusements at 432 George Street appear to have been still in operation in the fall of 1907, because Cathleen McCarthy’s diary has her going “over to the Penny Arcade” on Nov. 1 of that year.
By that point what had briefly been the Colloseum at 432 George Street had apparently reverted back to its previous manifestation – but only briefly. In December newspaper readers were told to “watch for the grand opening of Strattons New ‘Fairyland,’” a fancy goods and gift shop concern, at 432 George, “Formerly the Automatic Vaudeville.” By 1908 that same space had converted back to a cycling concern (“J.W. Young, bicycles, etc.”), and a year after that a plumbing business moved in — followed, as time passed, by a succession of other shops.
Stratton’s — “formerly the Automatic Vaudeville” (with no mention of the Colloseum). Stratton’s was also not long for this location.
The Colloseum (or Coliseum) had lasted only a relatively short time before apparently riding off, without ceremony and no kiss goodbye, into the sunset. Perhaps Scott had never been in for the long term; after all, at the very beginning he had only taken out a short lease on the George St. location. With a business in Toronto, and a lifetime of exploratory cinematography ahead of him, George Scott had other, extremely fascinating if mysterious, things to do.
In any case, despite relatively primitive conditions, Peterborough audiences had begun to devour “the newest thing” in motion pictures. While the Coliseum was running its time out by showing pictures in Jackson Park, it soon had a competitor downtown, Wonderland; and another theatre, the Crystal, would soon follow. Your basic, friendly main-street movie theatre – although “theatre” might be too grand a word, and the word “movie” was not as yet in use – had arrived in 1907, to stay. Such places, with pictures that jumped and danced and more often flickered across a large screen, complete with musical accompaniment, would be a fixture on main street for years to come.
Scott’s initial endeavour in Peterborough, the arcade/theatorium experience, would itself linger on, especially in the temporary tents of country fairs and exhibitions. Much, much later – over a hundred years later – the peculiar mix of arcade and motion pictures would again have its day: in the flashing light and noisy sounds of the lobby, off to the right of the entranceway, of the Galaxy Cinemas.