The theatre for which you speak, The Winter Garden did indeed open in Feb. 1914 It's sister theatre below, on ground level, originally called the Yonge Street opened in Dec. of 1913. Both houses were originally designed for vaudeville and featured eight acts of such along with several film shorts. The Yonge Street ran continuous all day while the Winter Garden ran only one evening show with reserved seats.

With the death of both silent films and vaudeville the Winter Garden was closed by 1930 not to reopen again until after the theatre complexe was completely restored as a performing arts center during the 1980s.

In 1935, a few years after the closing of the Winter Garden the theatre was remodeled and the name shortened to just LOEW'S.

Originally I was looking for the first twin movie theatre in the US, where both auditoriums ran movies on a full time basis as their main bill of fare. I did that as I believe that we all here are associated with the motion picture business. If I was interested in the first twin theatre per say, including live theatres as well...then the first would be much older as the idea of housing two auditoriums in one building goes back to the 1890s in New York when it became popular to add a "roof garden" theatre above an existing theatre so that they could continue summer programing in those pre air conditioning days. The outdoor roofgardens eventually were closed in and became 2nd indoor auditoriums so that they could be used year-round. The first New York theatre built with a permanent indoor upper floor auditorium was the New Amsterdam in 1903 on 42nd Street.

Loew's first double decker theatre was the American in New York City. It was originally built in 1893 by others. Marcus Loew aquired the building and made it the headquarters of his emerging theatre empire. In 1909 he added the 2nd auditorium above the American and called it the Winter Garden. This theatre was the prototype for his new theatre to be built in Toronto. The New York Winter Garden was designed to look like an outdoor garden with trees, vines and trellaces and looked very much like the later Toronto one. When Loew submitted plans to the Toronto authorities for his piggyback theatre, they were reluctant to approve it as they had never seen anything like it and were concerned with how people would safely exit in case of fire. Loew and his architect, Thomas Lamb, brought the officials to New York to see his piggy back theatres there and convinced them that they had nothing to worry about.

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