Stuart Theatre
700 Washington Street,
Boston,
MA
02130
700 Washington Street,
Boston,
MA
02130
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The “Stuart Theatre”, in its final days was like a toilet! The place reeked of urine and bodu odor and was raided on many occasions by police for illicit sexual activity!
According to Donald C. King’s new book The Theatres of Boston: A Stage and Screen History, this one started out as an amusement called Hale’s Tours, where “customers sat in mockups of train coach interiors, which shook, rattled and rocked as film scenery rushed by on a motion picture screen. This was a short-lived attraction. The location then became the Unique Theatre, then the Stuart.”
As the Unique Theatre, it opened in January 1907, with 250 seats.
I believe that the Stuart was open 24 hours a day back during the early ‘60’s.
In his 1968 unpublished draft manuscript entitled The Puritan Muse (available in the Fine Arts room of the Boston Public Library), Douglas Shand-Tucci refers to the Stuart as the last surviving nickelodeon in Boston.
I’m now looking at a photo of the Stuart, published in the Third Quarter 1974 issue of the Theatre Historical Society’s magazine Marquee. It sure looks to me like the Stuart was right on the corner, where McDonald’s is now. The Stuart’s marquee advertises a movie called I MET A MURDERER.
I have a booklet called “Boston Theatre District: A Walking Tour”, published by the Boston Preservation Alliance in 1993. It says:
[in 1907] the Unique Theatre, an early nickelodeon, opened at the corner of Washington and Kneeland Streets. It became the Stuart in 1925 and the X-rated Pussycat in 1976, before giving way to McDonald’s in the late 1980’s.
The Stuart Theatre designed by Clarence H Blackall, opened in 1907 as the Unique Theatre with 458 seats. It was later named the Stuart Theatre because of its proximity to Stuart Street.
Are you saying the old theatre is still there somewhere? Or did it get converted to something other than McDonald’s?
Correction. The old Stuart is not now a McDonalds, but is right next to it. The most vivid memory I have of the Stuart was the smell of Lysol which permeated it. As a side note, the storefront which is now a McDonalds was in the 1930’s the Boston office of the “Daily Worker” newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the American Communist Party. How times have changed.
In its final declining years, the Stuart became the ‘Pussycat Cinema’ which I believe was the name of a chain of porno theaters. At the same time, the old E.M. Lowe’s West End Cinema became the ‘West End Pussycat’.
I found a note that I saw the following western double bill here in September, 1972: Frank Perry’s “Doc” paired with William Witney’s “Arizona Raiders” from 1965.
These theatres taught me more about film then any book or class could. I saw so many second features I would have never been exposed to in single feature first run houses. Sometimes on 42nd St or at The Thalia you would get a triple bill.
It’s now a McDonald’s.
It was the kind of grind-run movie theatre (cheap, tacky, dingy, wino-populated) that we used to call a “scratch house.” And yet, snobbery aside, what a film education you could get by going there…so many movies, new and old…in constant turnover. A poor man’s cinematheque. Nothing like it exists any more.