Yes, the Lyceum Theatre which is on the 1895 map was torn down for the construction of the Gaiety. Note that the Lyceum was smaller and did not extend as far back as the Gaiety did. I believe that the Lyceum presented burlesque and minstrel troupes and vaudeville. It opened in 1892. There were retail stores on either side of the entrance for the Gaiety/Publix. The boxoffice was on the left side, just in from the street. Then you walked uphill to the foyer doors where the ticket-taker was stationed. As for the tracks in the Park Street Station, that’s another hobby altogether! There is a library in the State Transp. Building (Stuart and Charles streets); or you can contact the Boston Street Railway Assoc., an enthusiast group who have published all sorts of interesting books and maps.
Note on the 1895 map that Avery Street does not go straight through to Tremont Street as it does on the 1928 map. The scene-loading door for the theatre was in the alley at stage-right (east side). The stage door and several floors of dressing rooms were on the west side (stage-left). The dressing rooms were not affected by the mid-1940s renovations and were there until the end in 1983.
These maps are great fun to study. Actually, Bumpstead Court was not a dead-end (note the little arches on the pink square directly behind the Park Theatre’s stage (north end). You could walk underneath this structure which contained the Park’s dressing rooms. I have a very vague memory that this structure was still there circa 1948 or so. Also note the Hotel Brewster just to the south of the Park’s stage. This is where Lotta Crabtree lived at one time and there was supposedly a passageway from the hotel basement to the Park’s basement. The Park’s scene loading door was in the little jog on the south side of the stage (stage-right). I used to patronize the ground floor coffee shop of the Hotel Brewster occasionally. There was a gas explosion there sometime in the early 1960s which resulted in the demolition of the hotel. Note that on the maps you can see that Boylston St. did not line up with Essex St. After the hotel demolition, a new entrance was built for the Orange Line on the property, then the entire street was swung over to the north to line up with Essex. This was when they built the little park on the south side of the intersection.
Parts of the City of Boston were divided into Urban Renewal Areas circa 1960. The theatres on Mass. Ave. were part of the Fenway U.R. Area. These areas were considered “blighted”, so that’s why there was no Back Bay U.R. Area or Beacon Hill U.R. area. The State and the Fine Arts theatres and the adjacent massive castle-like storage warehouse were thought to have no viable future, so the land was given over to new uses. That’s the way they did things in those days; we use to call it “Urban Ruin-all”.
I assume that second-run movies were presented at the Hudson in between stage shows. The 2 Burlesque theatres in Boston had such a film policy, and that’s the reason these Burley theatres can be listed in Cinema Treasures.
The Hudson in Union City was a well-known Burley theatre; I have heard it said that when Mayor LaGuardia shut down all the burlesque theatres in NY circa early-1940s, the NY Burley fans started going over to Union City! I am fairly certain that the Hudson was still operating with Burlesque shows well into the 1950s, and that many of the performers also played the Old Howard and the Casino theaters up in Boston.
It’s wonderful to have these old maps to study! Note that the Bijou Theatre was an “upstairs house” – its auditorium and stage were one flight up and this fact makes it difficult to show the theater’s location on a small map like this one.
The maps are great! The reason that the railroad right-of-way was narrower in 1895 was because the South Station was not opened until 1899, at which time the Boston & Providence RR station in Park Square was closed. The B&P tracks were extended into the new South Station, running alongside the Boston & Albany RR tracks, thus making the rail right-of-way (which was in a cut) wider as it passed the north side of the Columbia Theater.
Elliot Norton reviewed for the Record-American/ Herald. And before that, for decades at the old Boston Post. He was considered a “Show Doctor” and his advice was valued by those “trying out” a new show in Boston. He tried to be positive and helpful, instead of nasty and negative like Frank Rich of the NY Times was.
There was another theater not far from the Puritan; it was on the opposite (east) side of Washington Street about one-half to two-thirds of a mile to the south. It was a brick building with an elevated stage-house to the rear. It could be easily seen from the “el” train between Northampton and Dudley. (Right side of train when going north towards downtown.) There were several “Nabes” in Roxbury. Looking through the various MGM Reports from 1941, there is a Roxbury Theatre at 2170 Washington St. It has 650 seats with one balcony. The competing theatres are listed as : Puritan, Dudley and Rivioli. I’m assuming that this is the theatre in quesiton. I passed it many times on the train between 1968 and 1975 and it was closed the entire time. The marquee and signage had been removed.
To Mitchell D.: There is a fold-out map of downtown Boston and the Back Bay inside the 1978 book “Broadway Down East” by Elliot Norton, published by the Boston Public Library. Theatres are noted on it with numbers, a key to which is in the margin of the map. The accent is on stage theatres. Unfortunately, there are errors on this map !Elliot Norton was a famous Boston newspaper drama critic for many years (he died about 3 years ago at the age of 100). His is the only theatre map of Boston that I know of.
On my first visit to Chicago by myself (no parents) in the 1950s, I stumbled off the train on a cold gray winter morning with snowflakes in the air, and went walking around— came around a corner and saw the McVickers, with its majestic facade and its colorful marquee all lit up. What a grand sight! I knew that it was the sucessor to a line of historic theatres. Its facade alone made it an instant landmark in my eyes.
The old Tremont Theatre was opened in 1827. It was not sucessful and was sold for conversion to the first Tremont Temple in 1843. It was destroyed by fire in 1852. The second Tremont Temple burned in 1879; the third Tremont Temple also burned down in 1893. The 4th Tremont Temple opened in 1896 and has luckily had a fire-free life !
Correction: the Olympic IS mentioned in Donald King’s recent book; however, the mention is not in the main text but in Appendex 1 at the back of the book. He lists it as opening “circa-1905”, that it was a motion picture house, possibly Walker’s Museum of 1904; that it may have been the Theatre Joliette of 1907, which was also very near the Bowdoin Square Theatre; and that it was “demolished in the 1930s.”
That’s good to know! I wonder how it got to the BPL – I had feared that it had ended up in a dumpster. Warning to all elderly would-be authors: get your work finished and printed – tomorrow may be too late !
I have been told that the house was known as the “RKO Bijou” in the 1930s up until it was sold in the late-1930s and renamed briefly as the Intown Theatre, before the original name was restored.
The late Donald C. King, author of a recent history of Boston theatres, wrote two other full-length books, both unpublished, a history of theatres in Maine, and a memoir, “Crap Cans and Palaces”, a life spent in the theatre business. In the latter, he describes a visit to the Old Howard around 1941, when he was 20 years old. He writes: “I went early one afternoon and sat in the first balcony, close to the projection room. The house advertised "Always Something Doing…” When the stage show was not on, very old double-feature movies were shown. After the films finished, the house lights came up. I studied the old playhouse and its domed ceiling which seemed covered with painted designs on very dingy canvas. Its chandelier was long gone. I looked up at the deserted second balcony, or gallery. My dad had told me of sitting up there when he was young, along with his buddies. They would drop soft chocolates on the bald heads sitting below them. When an usher arrived to investigate, the gallery guys would point out some drunk as the culprit. The auditorium was on the second floor of a church-like structure. Huge windows penetrated its heavy stone facade with multiple fire escapes (attached), behind which were the theatre’s stairways. Proscenium boxes were on the sides of a raked stage thrusting into the orchestra level.“ He then continues, describing a typical Burley show of the era.
I recently re-read parts of a 1978 paper entitled “The Boston Rialto”. It was written by Douglass Shand Tucci and was intended as a guidebook for walking tours in Boston’s theatre district. The paper was published by the City Conservation League and sold for $2. This paper was the basis for Chapter 9 of the author’s book “Built in Boston – City and Suburb” published by the New York Graphic Society in 1978. In the source notes at the end of the paper, the author mentions that he found City of Boston building permit # 2333 issued on 1 June 1915, a permit for “alterations” at the Orpheum Theatre, estimated to cost $100,000. This was the permit for the work supervised by Thomas Lamb. Even in 1916 dollars, $100K was not a lot of money for construction work. He mentions that other remodeling work was performed in 1900 and 1904/5. The work done in the summer of 1900 converted the building from a concert hall into a vaudeville theatre and was well documented by a long and detailed article in one of the Boston newspapers when the house reopened in early September 1900. The work in 1904 was supervised by architect Arthur Vinal and it’s unclear to me exactly what was accomplished. Following this work, Vinal designed the new Washington Street entrance and staircase in 1905. That entrance lasted until the Aquarius Theatre days in the 1970s. I wonder if some of the work which I attribute to Thomas Lamb in 1915 may have been accomplished by Arthur Vinal in 1904-5.
The late Donald King, author of a recent history of Boston theatres, was an employee of the E.M.Loew theatre circuit from the late-1930s to the early 1950s. He told me that he occasionally went to the Thompson Square Theatre in Charlestown to get supplies and equipment because the circuit utilized space upstairs as a supply and storage room. Among the employees, that space was referred to as “E.M.’s attic.”
In the new book “Theatres” by Craig Morrison, there is a drawing on page 132 of B.F. Keith’s Capitol Theatre, 4700 Bergenline Ave, Union City NJ. 2,129 seats. The drawing was made in 1924 by Anthony Dumas of New York City. The Capitol was on the right side of a long structure. On the left side was another theatre, B.F. Keith’s State Theatre, which had 1,794 seats. On the roof in the center of the building is a small sign “Twin Theater”. What is unique is that these two theatres, under the same management, shared one entrance. You went inside and turned left for the State and right for the Capitol. If there was only one ticket office inside, then this would be an early example of a Twin Cinema. There does not seem to be a Page here in Cinema Treasures for the State Theatre in Union City, only the Capitol Theatre.
Ron- I never read King’s article “Boston’s First Movie Palace” – he told me that he had written it and submitted it to the THSA editor. This would have been circa late-1990s. He also told me about seeing a movie, which he thought was “Treasure Island” at the Tremont Temple, taken there by his Aunt when he was of grade-school age.
They must have had to man-handle the screen up and down, and maybe stack the poster-boards out of sight. Don King’s article was never published and I don’t have a copy. It might be in the editor’s files at THSA. Charles Grandgent’s essay is in the huge book “Fifty Years in Boston” published in 1932 by the Boston Tercentary Committee. That book should be in the BPL and at the Bostonian Society. It was published during the 300th birthday year of the City of Boston.
Tom N is correct- it is a miracle that the building is still standing. If it were not for the fact that the Berklee School of Music is in the immediate area, the old Fenway Theatre would be “toast”. Because the interior was “modernized”, theatre enthusiast groups skip it. For example, the THSA did not visit it during their 1983 Boston tour and will not visit it during their 2006 tour. The LHAT did not visit it during their 1990 tour, although I believe they at least mentioned it in their guidebook. The CTA tour in April 2004 paused briefly to examine the exterior but did not arrange to go inside. I do not feel that the auditorium is not worth seeing just because it has been altered.
It would seem that the movies must have been a very good source of revenue for the church in the 1910s and 1920s. However, with the construction of several large movie theatres downtown and possibly the conflicts with church activities, as well as the need to wire the house for sound films, the film exhibition ended. And despite the fine acoustics in the Converse Hall, almost nothing seems to be presented there, other than church activities.
Yes, the Lyceum Theatre which is on the 1895 map was torn down for the construction of the Gaiety. Note that the Lyceum was smaller and did not extend as far back as the Gaiety did. I believe that the Lyceum presented burlesque and minstrel troupes and vaudeville. It opened in 1892. There were retail stores on either side of the entrance for the Gaiety/Publix. The boxoffice was on the left side, just in from the street. Then you walked uphill to the foyer doors where the ticket-taker was stationed. As for the tracks in the Park Street Station, that’s another hobby altogether! There is a library in the State Transp. Building (Stuart and Charles streets); or you can contact the Boston Street Railway Assoc., an enthusiast group who have published all sorts of interesting books and maps.
Note on the 1895 map that Avery Street does not go straight through to Tremont Street as it does on the 1928 map. The scene-loading door for the theatre was in the alley at stage-right (east side). The stage door and several floors of dressing rooms were on the west side (stage-left). The dressing rooms were not affected by the mid-1940s renovations and were there until the end in 1983.
These maps are great fun to study. Actually, Bumpstead Court was not a dead-end (note the little arches on the pink square directly behind the Park Theatre’s stage (north end). You could walk underneath this structure which contained the Park’s dressing rooms. I have a very vague memory that this structure was still there circa 1948 or so. Also note the Hotel Brewster just to the south of the Park’s stage. This is where Lotta Crabtree lived at one time and there was supposedly a passageway from the hotel basement to the Park’s basement. The Park’s scene loading door was in the little jog on the south side of the stage (stage-right). I used to patronize the ground floor coffee shop of the Hotel Brewster occasionally. There was a gas explosion there sometime in the early 1960s which resulted in the demolition of the hotel. Note that on the maps you can see that Boylston St. did not line up with Essex St. After the hotel demolition, a new entrance was built for the Orange Line on the property, then the entire street was swung over to the north to line up with Essex. This was when they built the little park on the south side of the intersection.
Parts of the City of Boston were divided into Urban Renewal Areas circa 1960. The theatres on Mass. Ave. were part of the Fenway U.R. Area. These areas were considered “blighted”, so that’s why there was no Back Bay U.R. Area or Beacon Hill U.R. area. The State and the Fine Arts theatres and the adjacent massive castle-like storage warehouse were thought to have no viable future, so the land was given over to new uses. That’s the way they did things in those days; we use to call it “Urban Ruin-all”.
I assume that second-run movies were presented at the Hudson in between stage shows. The 2 Burlesque theatres in Boston had such a film policy, and that’s the reason these Burley theatres can be listed in Cinema Treasures.
The Hudson in Union City was a well-known Burley theatre; I have heard it said that when Mayor LaGuardia shut down all the burlesque theatres in NY circa early-1940s, the NY Burley fans started going over to Union City! I am fairly certain that the Hudson was still operating with Burlesque shows well into the 1950s, and that many of the performers also played the Old Howard and the Casino theaters up in Boston.
It’s wonderful to have these old maps to study! Note that the Bijou Theatre was an “upstairs house” – its auditorium and stage were one flight up and this fact makes it difficult to show the theater’s location on a small map like this one.
The maps are great! The reason that the railroad right-of-way was narrower in 1895 was because the South Station was not opened until 1899, at which time the Boston & Providence RR station in Park Square was closed. The B&P tracks were extended into the new South Station, running alongside the Boston & Albany RR tracks, thus making the rail right-of-way (which was in a cut) wider as it passed the north side of the Columbia Theater.
Elliot Norton reviewed for the Record-American/ Herald. And before that, for decades at the old Boston Post. He was considered a “Show Doctor” and his advice was valued by those “trying out” a new show in Boston. He tried to be positive and helpful, instead of nasty and negative like Frank Rich of the NY Times was.
There was another theater not far from the Puritan; it was on the opposite (east) side of Washington Street about one-half to two-thirds of a mile to the south. It was a brick building with an elevated stage-house to the rear. It could be easily seen from the “el” train between Northampton and Dudley. (Right side of train when going north towards downtown.) There were several “Nabes” in Roxbury. Looking through the various MGM Reports from 1941, there is a Roxbury Theatre at 2170 Washington St. It has 650 seats with one balcony. The competing theatres are listed as : Puritan, Dudley and Rivioli. I’m assuming that this is the theatre in quesiton. I passed it many times on the train between 1968 and 1975 and it was closed the entire time. The marquee and signage had been removed.
To Mitchell D.: There is a fold-out map of downtown Boston and the Back Bay inside the 1978 book “Broadway Down East” by Elliot Norton, published by the Boston Public Library. Theatres are noted on it with numbers, a key to which is in the margin of the map. The accent is on stage theatres. Unfortunately, there are errors on this map !Elliot Norton was a famous Boston newspaper drama critic for many years (he died about 3 years ago at the age of 100). His is the only theatre map of Boston that I know of.
On my first visit to Chicago by myself (no parents) in the 1950s, I stumbled off the train on a cold gray winter morning with snowflakes in the air, and went walking around— came around a corner and saw the McVickers, with its majestic facade and its colorful marquee all lit up. What a grand sight! I knew that it was the sucessor to a line of historic theatres. Its facade alone made it an instant landmark in my eyes.
The old Tremont Theatre was opened in 1827. It was not sucessful and was sold for conversion to the first Tremont Temple in 1843. It was destroyed by fire in 1852. The second Tremont Temple burned in 1879; the third Tremont Temple also burned down in 1893. The 4th Tremont Temple opened in 1896 and has luckily had a fire-free life !
Correction: the Olympic IS mentioned in Donald King’s recent book; however, the mention is not in the main text but in Appendex 1 at the back of the book. He lists it as opening “circa-1905”, that it was a motion picture house, possibly Walker’s Museum of 1904; that it may have been the Theatre Joliette of 1907, which was also very near the Bowdoin Square Theatre; and that it was “demolished in the 1930s.”
That’s good to know! I wonder how it got to the BPL – I had feared that it had ended up in a dumpster. Warning to all elderly would-be authors: get your work finished and printed – tomorrow may be too late !
I have been told that the house was known as the “RKO Bijou” in the 1930s up until it was sold in the late-1930s and renamed briefly as the Intown Theatre, before the original name was restored.
The late Donald C. King, author of a recent history of Boston theatres, wrote two other full-length books, both unpublished, a history of theatres in Maine, and a memoir, “Crap Cans and Palaces”, a life spent in the theatre business. In the latter, he describes a visit to the Old Howard around 1941, when he was 20 years old. He writes: “I went early one afternoon and sat in the first balcony, close to the projection room. The house advertised "Always Something Doing…” When the stage show was not on, very old double-feature movies were shown. After the films finished, the house lights came up. I studied the old playhouse and its domed ceiling which seemed covered with painted designs on very dingy canvas. Its chandelier was long gone. I looked up at the deserted second balcony, or gallery. My dad had told me of sitting up there when he was young, along with his buddies. They would drop soft chocolates on the bald heads sitting below them. When an usher arrived to investigate, the gallery guys would point out some drunk as the culprit. The auditorium was on the second floor of a church-like structure. Huge windows penetrated its heavy stone facade with multiple fire escapes (attached), behind which were the theatre’s stairways. Proscenium boxes were on the sides of a raked stage thrusting into the orchestra level.“ He then continues, describing a typical Burley show of the era.
I recently re-read parts of a 1978 paper entitled “The Boston Rialto”. It was written by Douglass Shand Tucci and was intended as a guidebook for walking tours in Boston’s theatre district. The paper was published by the City Conservation League and sold for $2. This paper was the basis for Chapter 9 of the author’s book “Built in Boston – City and Suburb” published by the New York Graphic Society in 1978. In the source notes at the end of the paper, the author mentions that he found City of Boston building permit # 2333 issued on 1 June 1915, a permit for “alterations” at the Orpheum Theatre, estimated to cost $100,000. This was the permit for the work supervised by Thomas Lamb. Even in 1916 dollars, $100K was not a lot of money for construction work. He mentions that other remodeling work was performed in 1900 and 1904/5. The work done in the summer of 1900 converted the building from a concert hall into a vaudeville theatre and was well documented by a long and detailed article in one of the Boston newspapers when the house reopened in early September 1900. The work in 1904 was supervised by architect Arthur Vinal and it’s unclear to me exactly what was accomplished. Following this work, Vinal designed the new Washington Street entrance and staircase in 1905. That entrance lasted until the Aquarius Theatre days in the 1970s. I wonder if some of the work which I attribute to Thomas Lamb in 1915 may have been accomplished by Arthur Vinal in 1904-5.
The late Donald King, author of a recent history of Boston theatres, was an employee of the E.M.Loew theatre circuit from the late-1930s to the early 1950s. He told me that he occasionally went to the Thompson Square Theatre in Charlestown to get supplies and equipment because the circuit utilized space upstairs as a supply and storage room. Among the employees, that space was referred to as “E.M.’s attic.”
In the new book “Theatres” by Craig Morrison, there is a drawing on page 132 of B.F. Keith’s Capitol Theatre, 4700 Bergenline Ave, Union City NJ. 2,129 seats. The drawing was made in 1924 by Anthony Dumas of New York City. The Capitol was on the right side of a long structure. On the left side was another theatre, B.F. Keith’s State Theatre, which had 1,794 seats. On the roof in the center of the building is a small sign “Twin Theater”. What is unique is that these two theatres, under the same management, shared one entrance. You went inside and turned left for the State and right for the Capitol. If there was only one ticket office inside, then this would be an early example of a Twin Cinema. There does not seem to be a Page here in Cinema Treasures for the State Theatre in Union City, only the Capitol Theatre.
Ron- I never read King’s article “Boston’s First Movie Palace” – he told me that he had written it and submitted it to the THSA editor. This would have been circa late-1990s. He also told me about seeing a movie, which he thought was “Treasure Island” at the Tremont Temple, taken there by his Aunt when he was of grade-school age.
Ron Newman- there are some comments about Charles Grandgent and his essay, on the page for the Comique Theatre in Boston.
They must have had to man-handle the screen up and down, and maybe stack the poster-boards out of sight. Don King’s article was never published and I don’t have a copy. It might be in the editor’s files at THSA. Charles Grandgent’s essay is in the huge book “Fifty Years in Boston” published in 1932 by the Boston Tercentary Committee. That book should be in the BPL and at the Bostonian Society. It was published during the 300th birthday year of the City of Boston.
Tom N is correct- it is a miracle that the building is still standing. If it were not for the fact that the Berklee School of Music is in the immediate area, the old Fenway Theatre would be “toast”. Because the interior was “modernized”, theatre enthusiast groups skip it. For example, the THSA did not visit it during their 1983 Boston tour and will not visit it during their 2006 tour. The LHAT did not visit it during their 1990 tour, although I believe they at least mentioned it in their guidebook. The CTA tour in April 2004 paused briefly to examine the exterior but did not arrange to go inside. I do not feel that the auditorium is not worth seeing just because it has been altered.
It would seem that the movies must have been a very good source of revenue for the church in the 1910s and 1920s. However, with the construction of several large movie theatres downtown and possibly the conflicts with church activities, as well as the need to wire the house for sound films, the film exhibition ended. And despite the fine acoustics in the Converse Hall, almost nothing seems to be presented there, other than church activities.