Annie Gerbeau

By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

The city may finally have plans for the legendary Empress Theatre known to generations of Montrealers as Cinema V.

The city brought up the ramshackle property at a public hearing into its 2025 operating budget. Annie Gerbeau, the interim director of the city’s real estate strategy department, said the city is gearing up to sell the NDG building for possible redevelopment.

The Empress was built in 1927, and is the only theatre in Canada designed in the Egyptian Revival style. It opened a year later as The Empress Theatre and, after several name changes, became Cinema V in 1975.

The building on Sherbrooke Street W., across from NDG Park, was all but gutted by fire in 1992, and remained abandoned until the city bought it in 1999. There have been several plans for revival over the years, by Geordie Theatre, the Black Theatre Workshop, and even the McGill Conservatory (which closed its own doors in 2022).

In March of 2020 there was talk of redeveloping the building into a mixed-use facility. That may still be the case, the city says, with the possibility of combining a cultural element with residential. A profitability analysis was launched earlier this year, and now the next step is to put out a call for proposals, and to “proceed with a sale shortly,” Gerbeau said.

The question remains as to the building’s condition. The city had at one time considered demolishing the building, either partially or completely, with the hope of retaining the building’s façade, which calls to mind the fate of the Seville Theatre in downtown Montreal, which was two years younger than the Empress, and suffered a similar fate – abandonment, and eventual “demolition by neglect.” n