The Princess Theatre stands at 10337 Whyte Avenue in Old Strathcona, Edmonton, and since the Gem Theatre was demolished in 2006 it has been the city's oldest surviving theatre. It began as the McKernan Block, after John W. McKernan, the south-side showman who financed it, owned it and ran it until his death in 1919, and the Edmonton architects Wilson and Herrald designed it to mix shops and rooms with the theatre: a full basement, small apartments on the second floor and a full third floor.
It opened on 8 March 1915 with 660 seats and the largest live stage in any cinema west of Winnipeg, having cost $75,000 and ten months to build. It was the first building west of Winnipeg faced with marble, and the Edmonton Journal admired its frescoes, brass mirrors and gold leaf, its fireproof projection room, an electric ticket machine, a refrigerated drinking fountain and forced-air ventilation that made it the most comfortable house in town. Opening night was a benefit concert with newsreels of actual war scenes, and the first feature, the next night, starred Mary Pickford. The upstairs rooms were let too; one went to a beat policeman, Hugh Morrow, whose granddaughter Susan would manage the theatre from 1981 to 1994.
The building has led several lives. It closed as a theatre in 1958 and spent a dozen years as retail space, then reopened on Christmas Day 1971 as the Klondike, decked out to look like the 1890s and showing mainly mainstream pornographic films for its first years. In 1978 the Old Strathcona Foundation took the lease and restored the old name, and the Princess ran as a repertory house until 1996 and a first-run cinema after that. It is a Provincial Historic Resource.
Over the decades it has also gathered ghosts, and the best known is a bride. Witnesses describe the pale figure of a young woman in a white wedding dress hovering above the projection room, drifting through the central lobby or waiting in the shadows of the grand staircase. The story, as Alberta's historic places staff tell it, is that she was a jilted young bride who hanged herself in the building when it served as a rooming house in the 1920s. The upstairs rooms, let to tenants from the very first years, give the tale its setting.
The Princess closed in October 2020 under COVID-19 restrictions, and the building was put up for sale in 2022.
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