How Winnipeg celebrated New Year’s Eve 1924

Winnipeg

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/01/2025 (593 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On New Year’s Day 1925, Winnipeggers were catching up on the sleep they lost the night before and looking forward to 1925 with optimism.

Winnipeg continued to bask in a period of post-war peace and prosperity. Newspaper editorials and columns by representatives of important industries such as agriculture, construction, and the railways were pleased with how 1924 went and foresaw even better times in 1925.

So, how did Winnipeggers celebrate New Year’s Eve 2024?

For the well-heeled, the city’s two railway hotels, the Fort Garry and Royal Alexandra, were the places to be. Each hosted a gala ball for about 600 people that featured gourmet dinners and two orchestras to help celebrants dance the night away.

But these balls were not the city’s largest events.

The Industrial Bureau hosted a dance that was reported to have attracted nearly 3,000 people throughout the evening and early morning to its exhibition hall on Main Street. The Alhambra Dance Gardens on Fort Street at Graham welcomed nearly 2,000 to its masquerade dance featuring Eddie Elliott’s Blue Melody Orchestra which played until 4 a.m.

Dozens of smaller dinners and dances were held across the city at hotels of all sizes, cafes and restaurants, fraternal halls, union halls, military barracks, and train stations.

More reasonably priced options included the city’s three main rinks, the Wesley, Arena, and Olympic, which offered late-night skating sessions and many theatres featured late showings of their plays, vaudeville shows, and movies.

The Capitol Theatre had the strangest lineup. Its 11:30 p.m. show consisted of wood cutting, fiddle playing, and dance contests intermixed with musical performances by its orchestra. Even the manager sounded dubious about his offering in the final ad for the event: “If you are looking for art or something cultured, stay away from our midnight show…. It may be good, or it may not, but you’ll have a good time and only be out 55 cents.”

For those who were more spiritual, many of the city’s churches held night-watch services that featured an evening of choirs and sermons. Smaller churches were invited to walk their congregations over to Grace Church at Ellice and Notre Dame avenues at 11 p.m. for a grand finale to the evening.

If you decided to be a homebody, how would you know it was midnight? Well, the Free Press had you covered.

On the roof of its Carlton Street building was a whistle that could be heard city-wide and was used to signal major events, such as final election results being posted. It blew continuously from 11:58 p.m. to 12:03 a.m. to mark the new year. At midnight, other industrial and commercial sites with alarms and whistles joined in, as did the bells from dozens of churches.

The tens of thousands of revellers were remarkably well-behaved. Magistrate Richardson was on duty at the police court on New Year’s Day expecting to issue fines for liquor violations and see the usual procession of the drunk and disorderly. Not a single case appeared before him.

It seems 1925 got off to a very good start.