Dimensioning the Imperial Six's foyer

The Imperial Six's foyer is a tricky thing. I've been putting off building it for quite some time. I think I've been a little intimidated by it.

Suitably fortified with a jug of coffee I decided to dive in and figure out the foyer's dimensions.

The job was something of a trial and error exercise where I consulted photos of the foyer and worked on resolving its elements with dimensions of standard size commercial doors and HO scale figures until I got an arrangement that looked right. You may recall I bungled the entry door size on Coles and wanted to get the Imperial Six looking correct before I started cutting plastic.

I cut a piece of Bristol board into an L-shape that would fit snuggly inside the model's foyer space and drew on the various elements in pencil. This temporary piece allowed me to see how the finished insert would look. I continued to make some adjustments at this stage to get things to look right. I realize the foyer is still 2-D at this point, but I tried to be mindful of the 3-D shapes and spaces that would result as I drew up the insert. It doesn't look too bad, so it's on to picking movies for the sign board :-)

Left and right walls are the same

The Yost Six?

This is another one of those projects I've had in the back of my mind for a long, long time, but haven't made any progress on. A couple of weeks ago I decided to at least make a start by building the shell. I thought if I had the shell staring at me it would silently nag me into finishing it sometime in the new year when I was looking for a construction project to fiddle with.

And while I was making a start I was thinking that this model would be the Yost tribute theatre I've been hoping to make. The Walthers kit I had earmarked for this seemed much too large and staid. The Imperial Six seems very Toronto to me, and Yost and his Saturday Night at the Movies tv show was a very Toronto thing, so I'm thinking the Imperial Six is going to be the Yost memorial model. The Yost Six maybe? The name needs work.

Construction is much the same as used for Coles on Yonge

There's no detail on the back wall as that's going to be the canvas for an Imperial Six related decal much in the same way one was used on the back wall of A&A's for a ghost sign.

Let the nagging begin!

Double Sixes

I made a second, and slightly smaller, Imperial Six mockup. On the first one, the people appearing in the plane of the facade looked a little too large, so on the second I tried to get those figures reduced closer to HO size.

The second mockup isn't a lot smaller, but I think it'll fit in a bit better with its surroundings.

Imperial Six Mockup

Another one on my list of possible buildings for the Alta Vista TC is the old Imperial Six movie theatre. As with the A& A mockup, I was lucky with this one too, and was able to find a fairly good photo of the facade that doesn't have a lot of perspective distortion.

A City of Toronto Archives photo of the Imperial Six in its heyday.

It has a great look and is unlike most other movie houses. More importantly, it says 'Toronto' to me. 

These mockups are just boxes folded up from bristol board with an HO scale image printed from my computer taped to the front. When I look at the Six the people still seem a bit too large - they might be OO in the image - but the building itself doesn't look too bad. I'll have to ponder this one a bit more because I'm still a bit uneasy with the dimensions.