The History of the Empress

By Rob Bull

Broad smiles across NDG greeted the news that the Empress Tea Room would re-open at the old Cinema V complex on Sherbooke St . The fine old building has been standing forlorn since a fire more than a dozen years ago.

The Tea Room will house the offices of the Empress Cultural Centre. It won't serve tea or coffee except to people visiting the staff who work there or attending the special events - mini-concerts, screenings and other creative occasions - planned for the space.

But there is great satisfaction that the front doors of this unique heritage building with the Egyptian motif are open again. Sheila Griffin, for one, thinks "that's amazing."

She remembers walking as a teenager with a girlfriend through Girouard Park and meeting a couple of boys who invited them across the street to the Empress Tea Room for toasted peanut butter sandwiches and coke.

"The place was a hangout for young people," she said.

Sheila and one of the boys - Ronnie - kept going back to the Tea Room together for the next couple of years until they were married. And afterwards they went to movies regularly at the Empress Theatre. (They used to cost a quarter.)

She liked the style of the building, particularly an upstairs lounge decorated in classic Art-Deco where people could socialize.

The marriage lasted 50 years until Ronnie's death in 2000. In that time the Empress, which opened in 1927 as a vaudeville theatre, switched from being a cinema to a burlesque dinner theatre called the Royal Follies before becoming Cinema V, a prominent repertoire movie house. Head and Hands, the unique NDG service agency for young people, ran out of the office tower for decades. A lot of lives were touched by what went on in the building.

What matters for Christina Sciasia and the other young co-owners of the new Shaika Café across Old Orchard Street from the Centre is the building's immense potential.

NDG and the city's West End already have enough condo developments and gyms for their needs "but there aren't enough public spaces for cultural activities," Sciasia said.

"There are all sorts of creative and intelligent people who live here and they should be able to show what they do in their own neighborhood instead of going downtown or to the East End ."

Two studies conducted in 2004 confirm her observation.

In one, done by Convercité for the Empress Cultural Centre, 91.8 per cent of 270 respondents said the Centre was either important or very important to the neighborhood.

The other by the McGill University School of Business Administration for the McGill Faculty of Music reported that 72 per cent of 227 respondents preferred the Empress as a venue for attending cultural performances over alternative locations downtown and in Montreal 's West End .

The McGill Conservatory, a program of the Faculty of Music, is planning to partner with the Empress and move into the Centre.

Since Shaika Café opened in September 2004, the local artists that Sciasia talks about have kept her serving staff hopping.

"Just opening this space made me wonder where all these creative people came from," she said. "They come from here. Opening the Empress Cultural Centre will give them a place to show what they do and help us and the other businesses on Sherbooke St. by bringing more pedestrian traffic to the neighbourhood."

The plan is to make the Centre a space for learning and the arts that would host theatre, music, dance, films and lectures, a plan enthusiastically endorsed by the Sherbooke Street West Commercial Development Society (SDC).

The Centre's volunteer directors are working to raise public and private funds to reopen the entire Centre.

The movement to save and reopen the building started in 1994 and has taken a great deal of hard work by dedicated people.

But as Necdet Kendir, President of the Sherbrooke Street West SDC and owner of Cartes etc., has often said before and will probably often say again: "In my experience, unless you advocate something, it doesn't get done."

For more information, call us at (514) 481-6277 or send an e-mail to empresscentre@gmail.com .