Modern Beach Lofts

History of Modern Beach Lofts

The Scarboro Theatre opened in late 1936, then numbered 960 Kingston Road. Its architect, Herbert Duerr, also designed the Hollywood Theatre on Yonge Street and the Creed's fur storage building now known as Creed Lofts. It had a plain yellow-brick front with a stone cornice in the Art Deco manner, almost 700 seats with no balcony, and water-cooled air conditioning.

It belonged to the B&F chain until 20th Century Theatres took over in 1948, the year it added a candy bar. A cigarette started a fire in the women's lounge in 1949. The Scarboro mostly showed second-run and B pictures, and in 1957 the local Home and School Association refused its ads, calling its films “detrimental to our young people”. It closed in 1967 and became Scarboro Billiards, then the Mr. Slate sports bar.

Streetcar Developments converted it in 2007, the first loft conversion in the Upper Beaches. Charles Gane of Core Architects added the upper floors in the Streamline Moderne style, with curves, horizontal bands and terraces, so they look of a piece with the 1930s base. Digging the parking garage meant breaking up the theatre's sloped, eight-inch concrete floor by hand with jackhammers, because the tight site wouldn't take heavy machines. The 26 lofts, on five floors, run from about 640 to 1,680 square feet, with 10-foot ceilings, polished concrete floors and exposed ducts.

Stories you'll hear

The Scarboro is said to have given away a volume of an encyclopedia with each ticket on some nights, as supermarkets later did. Theatres certainly gave away dishes to fill seats, but no record of the encyclopedia nights survives.