Roxy Theatre
10708 124th Street,
Edmonton,
AB
T5M 0H1
10708 124th Street,
Edmonton,
AB
T5M 0H1
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This opened on October 13th, 1938
Sadly, the Roxy Theatre was destroyed by a fire on the morning of Tuesday, January 13, 2015. Edmontonians and the local arts community have been fundraising and volunteering to get the Theatre Network into a new home.
The Roxy was never owned by Odeon. It was built by an investor (the mayor of Hanna,a small central Alberta town, named Shaker. He built 3 theatres in Edmonton (Varscona, Avenue and Roxy)(Shaker also built Broadway Saskatoon as well and operated Capitol and the drive-in in Hanna). Early on he leased all 3 Edmonton theatres to Odeon.
Odeon gave up the leases on all 3 in the early 1980s. Shaker’s estate sold the theatres to a local investment company. They were leased by Famous Players for a short time. Following that, the landlord began operated all 3 theatres under the banner “Inner City Cinemas” as repertory cinemas; the picture would start at one theatre, move to the next after 3 days, then to the next. An interesting concept.
The landlord sold the Varscona for demolition and rented the Roxy to Magic Lantern Theatres who operated it as the “$2 Roxy” in the mid 1980s, operating as a repertory or “calendar house”. That didn’t prove financially viable and so the landlord donated the building to Theatre Network for conversion into a playhouse in the late 1980s.
Tom Hutchinson