Windsor Theatre 4092 Main Street
J F Langer built a series of new theatres in Vancouver. This was one of them, The Windsor, on the corner of West 25th (King Edward today) and Main Street. It was 50 feet wide and could seat 641. Joseph Francis Langer was born in Prussia (now Poland) in 1872, and his family moved before he was six to South Africa, where his father owned a gold mine in the Transvaal. The blog ‘Vancouver As It Was’ has done all the heavy lifting on his history, and we’ve borrowed a few highlights here.
Joseph learned a trade as a bricklayer, worked briefly in London and then returned to South Africa, where he became a builder. He married in 1893, and there were nine children, with the youngest born in Vancouver in 1912. In 1908 he was building in San Francisco, and arrived here a year later. By 1912 he was building some sizeable apartment projects, just as the economy was tanking. Although he claimed to have no resources when he left for England in 1914, he apparently still had some investments, and was able to start up as a builder in England, where he was very successful, despite a shortage of workers, with the war in full swing. He became a developer of planned suburbs, and in less than a decade “his net worth, by his own admission, was in the vicinity of $2 million”.
He ‘retired’ to Vancouver in 1923, aged 51, but was soon clearly bored. Two years after he arrived (moving to Woodland Drive, a Vancouver ‘suburb’ he had helped build), he was married to a close family friend (as soon as her divorce came through), in Washington State. (Seven months later his divorce from his first wife was confirmed).
J F had moved to Shaughnessy Heights, where he had both a maroon Rolls Royce and a Daimler, with a chauffeur in matching livery. In 1924 he developed six almost identical movie theatres, of which this was one, recorded on the permit as costing $70,000. W M Dodd was the architect for the chain of suburban movie theatres, but Langer’s next, much larger project was in 1927, The Orpheum on Granville Street, designed by B Marcus Priteca, a specialist in large theatre designs, and costing Langer $1.25 million. He leased it to the Orpheum Circuit, and in 1929 sold his theatre interests to Famous Players Canadian Corporation and invested in a gold mine. The timing was awful; while the stock exchange crash and subsequent depression did movie theatres no good, it also collapsed the price of gold. Down, but by no means broke, he returned to England. His wife separated in 1931, and sued for $400 a month a year later. J F Langer was found dead, below an open window at his son’s home, aged 76, in 1948.
The Windsor, like several other suburban Famous Players theatres, only survived until 1955, as television started to keep families entertained at home. The site was redeveloped as a Shell gas station, which closed in the early 2000s, and ten years ago ‘On Main’ was completed, with 38 strata units over retail, addressed to West 24th (as this is a short block), designed by Raymond Letkeman Architects.
Image source: City of Vancouver Archives Bu N332
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