Pilgrim Theatre
658 Washington Street,
Boston,
MA
02116
658 Washington Street,
Boston,
MA
02116
8 people
favorited this theater
Showing 26 - 50 of 110 comments
The most notorious incident involving Fanne Foxe at the Pilgrim happened at a Saturday evening performance when she enticed her admirer, Congressman Wilbur Mills, to come up onto the stage and dance with her. He was a short, late-middle-age, dorky-looking doofus in a business suit who had had too much to drink. During their performance, he somehow managed to stumble off the apron of the stage into the orchestra pit. This caused a scandal back in his home state of Arkansas. I have a vague memory that he and Ms. Foxe also waded together one night in a decorative fountain somewhere in downtown Washington. Fanne Foxe’s dressing room backstage at the Pilgrim where Bill O'Reilly interviewed her was probably located down in the basement.
In his recent memoir A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, Bill O'Reilly wrote of his student days in Boston at B.U. and contributing articles to several weekly papers. One of his breaks came when he wrote a piece for Free Press on the noted stripper Fanne Foxe. O'Reilly had interviewed her backstage at the Pilgrim Theatre. He wrote:
“On a cool November night, I ventured into Boston’s notorious Combat Zone, a vice-ridden area just north of Boston Common. There, I met Ms. Bombshell backstage at the Pilgrim Theatre, where she was preparing to take off her clothes for three thousand dollars, a hefty one-night sum in 1974.
“The woman was very nice to me and my photographer, Conn O'Neill, two young Irish guys just trying to get through school. In fact, the Foxette actually changed into her costume right before our eyes, displaying an admirable female form. Am I getting paid for this? I thought. The answer was no. But it was okay.”
At this point, on page 114 of the book, O'Reilly quotes what he had written in the article about Ms. Foxe, about Fanne sauntering about the Pilgrim stage and throwing candy to the patrons. The published article was met with some praise, including from film critic Rex Reed. In later years O'Reilly told Reed that he had been directly responsible for his entering the field of mass communications. Reed’s reply was to laugh and say he would pay him not to make that public.
For Christmas week of 1921, the Pilgrim presented the movie “Tol'able David”, plus a show on stage which included “Not Yet, Marie”, a “miniature musical comedy” plus vaudeville acts. The theatre is listed in its Boston Globe ad as “Gordon’s Olympia Washington Street”, and not the usual “Washington Street Olympia”. Their motto was “The Theatre You Go To First”. The ad has a Christmas greeting from Nathan Gordon, plus the note that on Sundays there is a concert running from 3PM to 1030PM. (This was a way to present vaudeville and circumvent “blue laws” by calling it a “concert”.)
Wow, The Pilgrim Theater. Good times. My friends and I used to go there on Monday afternoons. It took nearly ten minutes for our eyes to adjust so that we could move into the theater to choose our “seat”. Even still it was so dark in there that you couldn’t tell which moving spector was your comrade. So, if one of us was to depart before the next, then you would walk to the very back of the theater and call out “swoolie”. This meant that you shouldn’t waste any time trying to find your friend in the dark. This is all before you could just send a text on your mobile. Then, we would go to Filene’s.
I think we all went together for one last whorah the week before it was to close. It was the end of some really great times. I was in my very early 20’s. I still walk past that stretch of Washington Street often and it doesn’t look at all like what I can recall in my memory. It looks more now like 8th Avenue near to 59th Street with its tall doorman towers. Things change kids…
The Pilgrim Theatre was the main office for American Theatres Corp.
as in some of the post above if you were looking at the theatre from the front, the store on the left(under the marquee) between the theatre and the former ‘Down Town" lounge was the original entry to the offices,(you could also access the offices from inside the theatre) after converted to a “junk store” that had knifes, pot pipes, and other bizare things for sale in the front, as you walked to the dirty book store part in the back the floor had a sloping angle as this was the screening room that the ATC brass viewed previews and you could see the projection ports on the wall. I regret I was in Fla. when they tore the place down because at the entrance way to the offices out side was black granite tile with American Theatres Corporation embedded in silver deco letters would have made a nice souveneir!
The marquee of the Pilgrim is prominently featured in the new hit documentary feature “Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story” which won Best Documentary at the AFI Fest in LA yesterday. Does anybody remember attending one of Castle’s famous gimmick events there? “The Tingler” (1959) was the one with the famous butt-buzzing wired seats.
During its days as a porno house, that steep balcony had a certain facilitating benefit.
It’s the steepest balcony I have ever been in. There is no way you would want to watch a movie from it, but, for a kid, going up there held a similar thrill to climbing to the top of a tall tree. It would have been a good place to watch the June Taylor Dancers!
I went into the theater several times in the 1950s and 60s but never sat in the balconies. When the Pilgrim was being demolished in mid-1996, I stood down at the corner of Washington & Beach streets and looked at the building from a distance. I was astonished at how high the top row of the second balcony was above the street level, and how steep that balcony was. The theatre was indeed in good shape in the 1950-60’s period, but “beautiful” would be in the eye of the beholder, I guess !
In the 1950’s and early 1960’s the Pilgrim was still in good shape and very beautiful. What I most remember were the large, steeply sloping balconies. Sitting in the second balcony, a dizzying experience, you could not lean back and cross your legs without blocking your view of the movie screen!
That was a lovely post, Alistair Schneider; your wistful reminiscenses brought a little lump to my throat. I think you have summed up the appeal of this Cinema Treasures website: for most of us, we appreciate that “older theaters [have} so much life in them, whether they were first run or ‘For Adults Only.’”
The Pilgrim had a large cinemascope screen, one tof the largest in Boston!
I would love to have them all back.
Lets bring back theatres like the Pilgrim!
we made a lot of good friends there.
i bet you did! lol the wife?
wife and I loved the place a lot
there was nothing like it!
Boston will never be like it was in the days of the Pilgrim Theatre ans a few others like the State theater the good old days.
Wow, it was really nice to read all of this. Just found this site, but The Pilgrim has long been a special place to me. Firstly, it was enormous and I believe I read somewhere that it was also referred to as “The Matterhorn” for the steep grade of its balconies! Just the distance from the under the marquee, through the front doors, across the lobby and to the theater doors, was a walk! I was a teen in the 80’s and I would often walk by it but never had the courage to go in until right before it was demolished in ‘95 or 6. I DID buy a fake ID from a guy in some ramshackle hut built between The Pilgrim and another adult business! It was kind of jammed in between the buildings right out on Washington Street for the cops to see. I guess they were busy with bigger fish or they were still letting the Combat Zone fester at that time.
In its final months, they began selling off some of the hand painted advertisements for the “adults only” exploitation films they showed in the mid to late ‘60’s, before the arrival of hardcore. I bought a few of these, as well as a painted poster with a glossy photo of one of the dancers from their burlesque revival in the early 70’s. But the best thing that happened was when I asked if there were any more of these posters around and the manager gave my friend and I a flash light and sent us upstairs to a room above the marquee! It was crammed with billboards and old posters. When we were through there we decided to explore and began heading up and up into the theater. Every time I thought we were at the top there was another staircase. A network of dark Burgundy wallpapered hallways lead to sets of french doors that let out onto the balconies. Never figured out how to get to the opera boxes, but I did find the old projection booth (the Pilgrim, just like most porn theaters, had converted to video projection during the 80’s, and you can imagine the quality of a VHS tape shown on a giant screen!). The hallways were also covered in ancient graffiti, mostly sexual stream of consciousness-like rants! The manager wasn’t too happy with us, until we started buying stuff, then he calmed right down.
On another trip I also found a sub level bathroom at the bottom of a cavernous staircase. Because of that sign on the marquee promising three XXX features, I wasn’t totally sure if the Pilgrim was a single screen theater or not. I thought I was on to finding another screen until I heard the sounds of sloshing water. When I turned the corner there was an ancient tiled bathroom, two men to a stall (all the doors had been removed) going at it, and everyone standing in about an inch of water on the floor! It was like a location out of “Se7en”. I happen to be “straight” (a ridiculous term!) and the Pilgrim only ever showed straight porn. I hadn’t realized, until then, that any porn theater was prime turf for gay cruising, which now seems obvious. I had an older gay friend who had frequented the theater in its wild days and told me a few stories about groping around in total darkness in the stairways under the opera boxes.
For me, though, The Pilgrim was special because it was a beautiful tarnished gem of a theater that had fallen under the stigma, and disrepair, of its days as a porno palace. The lure of seeing something “dirty” was certainly part of my interest in it as a teenager but I also seem to have a love for the buildings no one cares about. Supposedly, The Boston Preservation Society was given a choice over which theater they would like to save; The Pilgrim or The Paramount, and it wasn’t too surprising that they went for the younger deco theater over the urine drenched Pilgrim. But the Pilgrim was special and had some real history. When it opened, it was advertised as “The theater with the moving stairs”, as it was the first, and maybe only, Boston theater with escalators.
What’s kind of amazing is that it outlasted all of its brothers and sisters on 42nd Street. I watched as it was demolished and those rugs and chairs saw the light of day for the first time in 80 years. I would visit it everyday on my way home to Jamaica Plain as that familiar smell of sweet musty bricks filled the street. One night, I was standing at the fence they had erected around it, and an older, possibly homeless, prostitute passed by, saw me looking at what was left, and said “no more whore house, honey, no more…” and walked on.
I live in LosAngeles now, a lot of the places I cared for in Boston are gone, but I’m glad I got to experience them. Lower Washington street is now almost as unrecognizable as 42nd is in New York City. This happens everywhere, all the time, but it’s somehow more poignant with older theaters because they had so much life in them, whether they were first run or “For Adults Only”.
Here are some demolition dates for the Pilgrim. I went there on May 10, 1996 and found that demo was almost complete on the entrance and lobby. On June 17, 1996, the entire theatre was gone except for the stage house, which came down a little later.
this was a nice place for a long time we went there a lot from the 70s on, tobad it is gone I will miss it a lot. had a lot of good times there. we came home with some real nice people from there.
I rember going there with my father about 1948 or so. years later my wife and I went there. not the same as it was back in 1948.
The new Archstone Boston Common apartment building now stands on the former site of the Pilgrim Theatre. The apartment building is already being occupied, though construction is not quite finished. The building was originally to be called Liberty Place, then Park Essex, but now it’s Archstone Boston Common — even though it’s a block away from the Common.
The best PORNO Theatre ever around!