Someone is working on a documentary history of the Orson Welles Cinema. I read about just a few days ago but now cannot find the article. There was a color photo showing the actor Jon Lithgow sitting with the director. Jon Lithgow was quoted as saying something to the effect that his first paid job in the entertainment industry was at the Welles when he was a student. I think that this article was in the Boston Herald.
The only time I sat in the balcony at the Astor was around 1960 or 1961 for “Splenour in the Grass” because the main floor was full (balcony filled up, too). Many Boston movie theaters of that era seemed to have a policy of not allowing anyone to sit in the balcony if there were seats available on the main floor. The interior of the Tremont Theatre circa-1910 was similar to the Colonial on Boylston Street. There were 2 balconies and tiers of boxes on each side of the stage, very much like the Colonial. Very fancy decor, too.
RogerA – regarding “first balcony” and “second balcony”. I have seen a good-quality drawing of the Astor interior when it was the Tremont Theatre, made circa-1910. Looking from the stage outwards. There were definitely two balconies. But when I first went into the Astor around 1949/1950, there was only one balcony. When you say “second balcony” do you mean the rear half of the balcony, seperated by a cross-aisle ? Or do you mean the back remnant above of the original second balcony?
Running until the early 60’s? Do you mean early 50’s?
I used to go to the Fields Corner area in the 1950s and never saw this theater, and especially from 1960 onward.
dickneeds111 is correct-some equipment from the Oriental was removed and installed in the old Strand Theatre in Canton which was then renamed “Oriental”.When that theater closed, most of the equipment was removed to storage.
I well remember the reports of violence at the Union Station" that RogerA discusses. The place had a very unsavory reputation, mostly drug-related.
When the Astor was the Tremont Theatre it was mostly a legit stage house with musicals and plays. Occasionally movies played there, too. The live theater ended around 1930. It was never much of a vaudeville house, though. There were vaude shows there briefly. On the front cover of the recent murder mystery book “Murder at the Tremont Theatre” by Frank Cullen & Donald McNeilly, there is a nice hand-colored postcard illustration of the front of the theater and on the marquee is posted “Klaw & Erlanger Advanced Vaudeville”. This dates from maybe around 1910. But the principle stage product at the theater was mostly plays and musicals, not Vaudeville.
RogerA is correct above when he mentions that the last name for the Astor was the “Union Station” in the early 1970s. Why they called their after-hours “juice bar” by that name, I don’t know. I didn’t realize that movies were shown as part of the entertainment at the Union Station.
One thing interesting about the old b&w photo of the Gorman posted above is that the marquee only displays down the sidewalk to the right and not in the other direction. Odd! I have encountered this oddity at just one other theater here in MA.
Linesides- no, it’s not my baby; it’s run by guys in Calif. There used to be more members making comments from eastern-MA; now there’s only a few. There are 3 theaters listed here for JP- the Egleston, the Madison and the Strand. The latter two were on Centre St. I don’t see anything around Perkins St. Problem is that some of the neighborhood theaters are listed here under just plain “Boston” while others are listed under their neighborhood, such as JP, Roxbury, Dorchester, East Boston, etc. Makes it hard to find all of them, sometimes.
In the mid/late- 1950s a friend from high school in Massachusetts who had joined the US Navy and was stationed in Norfolk told me about the great burlexque shows at the Gaiety in Norfolk. Since middle school days, both of us had been great fans of “Burley” (burlesque) at the Casino Theatre in Boston. In late- December 1957, I traveled from Baltimore to Norfolk aboard a steamboat of the Old Bay Line. I believe that this line was the last of the old USA coastal steamboat operations. The boat was built in the 1920s and had many tiny cabins and a dining room. It ran overnight. The pier was downtown, and a short walk from the pier I spotted the Gaiety Theatre. Of course at 8AM or 9AM it wasn’t open. So I didn’t go inside it.
Linesides- Yes, the little photo is the Ferdinands building. You can also see it in the distance if you rotate the picture above to the right. The Ferdinands Furniture building,which I think was also called “the Blue building”, is to be rehabbed into office space. There was a Roxie Theatre in Roxbury and it’s here in Cinema Treasures, too. It was a new name for the old Shawmut Theatre on Blue Hill Avenue.
Another theater in the Dudley area was the Dudley Theatre, it was on Washington Street near the Roxbury Theatre, on the same side of the street. Then there was the Puritan, which was up north aways, on the opposite side of the street, near Mass. Ave. Plus the Warren Theatre several blocks south of the Dudley Square area. There was no shortage of places to go to the movies in that area around 1950!
Linesides- OK, it took me about 5 minutes of riding around, but I found the UPS truck, with 2 yellow backhoes working in the distance. That location is about where I thought the Rivoli entrance was. If you went to the movies at any of the Jamaica Plain movie theaters, please make comments. Most of them are listed here in Cinema Treasures, also.
Linesides- I have rotated the Streetview photo above around and around, but I don’t see a UPS truck. Wasn’t the Rivoli across the street somewhere along where the trees are and all the cars are parked with their back ends against the sidewalk?
I worked on Vernon St near Dudley terminal 1968-70 and it was very rough then. The movie theaters were all gone by that time. The area was OK until about 2PM or 3PM or so. Many people where I worked carried weapons. I did not have a gun, although I knew how to use one. I did have a “pig-sticker” knife which I bought in a gun shop in Alabama. I was glad when our office moved to the Forest Hills section of J.P. in Sept. 1970. I think Dudley Square is more stable today (I hope).
Thanks to whoever “unlocked” the Streetview photo above and moved it down to the correct location. The Adams entrance was either the area occupied by the East Coast Martial Arts, or the adjacent Low Overhead Discount store. Not sure exactly.
The photos mentioned in the first comment above are on the MGM Theater reports and are not reproduced on this page. The color photo above is not Ferdinand’s building, which is to the south of this spot.
The Quincy Patriot-Ledger had a feature article on Sat. March 31, 2012 titled “Small Theaters' Fade-Out? – Digital technology puts neighborhood cinemas at risk of vanishing.” It quotes someone from Patriot Cinemas as saying that they will keep 35mm projection at Loring Hall for as long as they can. “We do very well there”, he says. The article has a color photo, apparently taken at a recent matinee showing of “Albert Nobbs”. The photo shows part of the auditorium looking front to back. I counted 57 people there, 6 of whom are sitting in the balcony.
Janice- that’s good news. There’s nothing like getting info “from the horse’s mouth” (local people). Where is the Dyer Memorial Library? (I know it’s not the same as the Whitman Public Library). Please see if you can untangle the various names— Whitman Theater, Empire Theater, Warren Theater. Were these all names for the same building??? In other words, are we talking about one theater with 3 different names, or 3 different theaters in Whitman? What was the street address, if not 35 Temple St.? And what happened to the “Tragedy” wall hanging? Hope you can get some answers!
Yes, it is a hobby. Just look over this site and you will come to that conclusion. I did not live in the area, although I worked in the Dudley Sq. area in the late-1960s. I have been interested in theater buildings since I was 10 or 11 years old. The visitors to this website probably range in age from teens/college-age all the way to 70s and 80s. If you have memories of the Rivoli and other theaters in Roxbury and Dorchester, you can post them on this site.
Yes, it was an E.M. Loew’s theater and it was a full-size house. Later it presented art-house product for awhile. And it was not the same as the “North Station 1-2” or “1-2-3” storefront cinemas (on XXX product). And it was later the West End Pussycat cinema. dickneeds111 mentions above the Art 1&2 cinema across from the Majestic/Saxon on Tremont St. That’s one Boston cinema which I don’t believe is listed here in Cinema Treasures. It was mostly a Gay cinema and occupied former bank space in the Hotel Touraine building.
Cesareo Pelaez, who played Marco the Magi in the Le Grand David company, died March 24 after a long illness. He was 79 and appeared in shows on stage in Cuba as a youth. He founded the Le Grand David magic shows in the 1970s and purchased the Cabot Street Cinema, and later, the nearby Larcom Theatre in Beverly. He is survived by his godson, David Bull, the “David” in the troupe’s name. Obit from the Boston Herald, 3-28-2012.
The Haymarket Theatre is listed under Chicago in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. It was managed by Kohl & Castle. Tickets ranged from 5 cents to 30 cents. The seating: Orchestra 718, Balcony 506, Family Circle 472, Gallery 500; total: 2,196 seats. The house was on the ground floor and had both gas and electric illumination. The proscenium opening was 38 feet wide X 33 feet high, and the stage was 50 feet deep.
Linesides- by all means, write about what you know of the Rivoli, and also any other neighborhood theaters in Roxbury/Boston. There are Pages like this one for most of them here in Cinema Treasures.
The Frisbie & Sawyer Opera House is listed under Holley NY in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. It lists 550 seats. Frisbie & Sawyer Company, managers, business mgrs, and press agents. Electric illumination. Ticket prices 25 cents to 50 cents. Auditorium on the second floor. The proscenium opening was 20 feet wide X 16 feet high, and the stage was 20 feet deep. There was a weekly newspaper, the Holley Standard. The Downs House was the hotel for show folk. Railroad was the New York Central. The 1897 population of Holley was 2,000.
The owners of the building recently offered to donate the huge “Paris” sign out front to a local preservation office to sell as a fund-raiser. Most collectors of theater memorabilia would not have room for it!
Someone is working on a documentary history of the Orson Welles Cinema. I read about just a few days ago but now cannot find the article. There was a color photo showing the actor Jon Lithgow sitting with the director. Jon Lithgow was quoted as saying something to the effect that his first paid job in the entertainment industry was at the Welles when he was a student. I think that this article was in the Boston Herald.
The only time I sat in the balcony at the Astor was around 1960 or 1961 for “Splenour in the Grass” because the main floor was full (balcony filled up, too). Many Boston movie theaters of that era seemed to have a policy of not allowing anyone to sit in the balcony if there were seats available on the main floor. The interior of the Tremont Theatre circa-1910 was similar to the Colonial on Boylston Street. There were 2 balconies and tiers of boxes on each side of the stage, very much like the Colonial. Very fancy decor, too.
RogerA – regarding “first balcony” and “second balcony”. I have seen a good-quality drawing of the Astor interior when it was the Tremont Theatre, made circa-1910. Looking from the stage outwards. There were definitely two balconies. But when I first went into the Astor around 1949/1950, there was only one balcony. When you say “second balcony” do you mean the rear half of the balcony, seperated by a cross-aisle ? Or do you mean the back remnant above of the original second balcony?
Running until the early 60’s? Do you mean early 50’s? I used to go to the Fields Corner area in the 1950s and never saw this theater, and especially from 1960 onward.
dickneeds111 is correct-some equipment from the Oriental was removed and installed in the old Strand Theatre in Canton which was then renamed “Oriental”.When that theater closed, most of the equipment was removed to storage.
I well remember the reports of violence at the Union Station" that RogerA discusses. The place had a very unsavory reputation, mostly drug-related. When the Astor was the Tremont Theatre it was mostly a legit stage house with musicals and plays. Occasionally movies played there, too. The live theater ended around 1930. It was never much of a vaudeville house, though. There were vaude shows there briefly. On the front cover of the recent murder mystery book “Murder at the Tremont Theatre” by Frank Cullen & Donald McNeilly, there is a nice hand-colored postcard illustration of the front of the theater and on the marquee is posted “Klaw & Erlanger Advanced Vaudeville”. This dates from maybe around 1910. But the principle stage product at the theater was mostly plays and musicals, not Vaudeville.
RogerA is correct above when he mentions that the last name for the Astor was the “Union Station” in the early 1970s. Why they called their after-hours “juice bar” by that name, I don’t know. I didn’t realize that movies were shown as part of the entertainment at the Union Station.
One thing interesting about the old b&w photo of the Gorman posted above is that the marquee only displays down the sidewalk to the right and not in the other direction. Odd! I have encountered this oddity at just one other theater here in MA.
Linesides- no, it’s not my baby; it’s run by guys in Calif. There used to be more members making comments from eastern-MA; now there’s only a few. There are 3 theaters listed here for JP- the Egleston, the Madison and the Strand. The latter two were on Centre St. I don’t see anything around Perkins St. Problem is that some of the neighborhood theaters are listed here under just plain “Boston” while others are listed under their neighborhood, such as JP, Roxbury, Dorchester, East Boston, etc. Makes it hard to find all of them, sometimes.
Many of the burlesque theaters in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s screened second-run movies in between stage shows and the Gaiety may have also.
In the mid/late- 1950s a friend from high school in Massachusetts who had joined the US Navy and was stationed in Norfolk told me about the great burlexque shows at the Gaiety in Norfolk. Since middle school days, both of us had been great fans of “Burley” (burlesque) at the Casino Theatre in Boston. In late- December 1957, I traveled from Baltimore to Norfolk aboard a steamboat of the Old Bay Line. I believe that this line was the last of the old USA coastal steamboat operations. The boat was built in the 1920s and had many tiny cabins and a dining room. It ran overnight. The pier was downtown, and a short walk from the pier I spotted the Gaiety Theatre. Of course at 8AM or 9AM it wasn’t open. So I didn’t go inside it.
Linesides- Yes, the little photo is the Ferdinands building. You can also see it in the distance if you rotate the picture above to the right. The Ferdinands Furniture building,which I think was also called “the Blue building”, is to be rehabbed into office space. There was a Roxie Theatre in Roxbury and it’s here in Cinema Treasures, too. It was a new name for the old Shawmut Theatre on Blue Hill Avenue. Another theater in the Dudley area was the Dudley Theatre, it was on Washington Street near the Roxbury Theatre, on the same side of the street. Then there was the Puritan, which was up north aways, on the opposite side of the street, near Mass. Ave. Plus the Warren Theatre several blocks south of the Dudley Square area. There was no shortage of places to go to the movies in that area around 1950!
Linesides- OK, it took me about 5 minutes of riding around, but I found the UPS truck, with 2 yellow backhoes working in the distance. That location is about where I thought the Rivoli entrance was. If you went to the movies at any of the Jamaica Plain movie theaters, please make comments. Most of them are listed here in Cinema Treasures, also.
Linesides- I have rotated the Streetview photo above around and around, but I don’t see a UPS truck. Wasn’t the Rivoli across the street somewhere along where the trees are and all the cars are parked with their back ends against the sidewalk?
I worked on Vernon St near Dudley terminal 1968-70 and it was very rough then. The movie theaters were all gone by that time. The area was OK until about 2PM or 3PM or so. Many people where I worked carried weapons. I did not have a gun, although I knew how to use one. I did have a “pig-sticker” knife which I bought in a gun shop in Alabama. I was glad when our office moved to the Forest Hills section of J.P. in Sept. 1970. I think Dudley Square is more stable today (I hope).
Thanks to whoever “unlocked” the Streetview photo above and moved it down to the correct location. The Adams entrance was either the area occupied by the East Coast Martial Arts, or the adjacent Low Overhead Discount store. Not sure exactly.
The photos mentioned in the first comment above are on the MGM Theater reports and are not reproduced on this page. The color photo above is not Ferdinand’s building, which is to the south of this spot.
The Quincy Patriot-Ledger had a feature article on Sat. March 31, 2012 titled “Small Theaters' Fade-Out? – Digital technology puts neighborhood cinemas at risk of vanishing.” It quotes someone from Patriot Cinemas as saying that they will keep 35mm projection at Loring Hall for as long as they can. “We do very well there”, he says. The article has a color photo, apparently taken at a recent matinee showing of “Albert Nobbs”. The photo shows part of the auditorium looking front to back. I counted 57 people there, 6 of whom are sitting in the balcony.
Janice- that’s good news. There’s nothing like getting info “from the horse’s mouth” (local people). Where is the Dyer Memorial Library? (I know it’s not the same as the Whitman Public Library). Please see if you can untangle the various names— Whitman Theater, Empire Theater, Warren Theater. Were these all names for the same building??? In other words, are we talking about one theater with 3 different names, or 3 different theaters in Whitman? What was the street address, if not 35 Temple St.? And what happened to the “Tragedy” wall hanging? Hope you can get some answers!
Yes, it is a hobby. Just look over this site and you will come to that conclusion. I did not live in the area, although I worked in the Dudley Sq. area in the late-1960s. I have been interested in theater buildings since I was 10 or 11 years old. The visitors to this website probably range in age from teens/college-age all the way to 70s and 80s. If you have memories of the Rivoli and other theaters in Roxbury and Dorchester, you can post them on this site.
Yes, it was an E.M. Loew’s theater and it was a full-size house. Later it presented art-house product for awhile. And it was not the same as the “North Station 1-2” or “1-2-3” storefront cinemas (on XXX product). And it was later the West End Pussycat cinema. dickneeds111 mentions above the Art 1&2 cinema across from the Majestic/Saxon on Tremont St. That’s one Boston cinema which I don’t believe is listed here in Cinema Treasures. It was mostly a Gay cinema and occupied former bank space in the Hotel Touraine building.
Cesareo Pelaez, who played Marco the Magi in the Le Grand David company, died March 24 after a long illness. He was 79 and appeared in shows on stage in Cuba as a youth. He founded the Le Grand David magic shows in the 1970s and purchased the Cabot Street Cinema, and later, the nearby Larcom Theatre in Beverly. He is survived by his godson, David Bull, the “David” in the troupe’s name. Obit from the Boston Herald, 3-28-2012.
The Haymarket Theatre is listed under Chicago in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. It was managed by Kohl & Castle. Tickets ranged from 5 cents to 30 cents. The seating: Orchestra 718, Balcony 506, Family Circle 472, Gallery 500; total: 2,196 seats. The house was on the ground floor and had both gas and electric illumination. The proscenium opening was 38 feet wide X 33 feet high, and the stage was 50 feet deep.
Linesides- by all means, write about what you know of the Rivoli, and also any other neighborhood theaters in Roxbury/Boston. There are Pages like this one for most of them here in Cinema Treasures.
The Frisbie & Sawyer Opera House is listed under Holley NY in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. It lists 550 seats. Frisbie & Sawyer Company, managers, business mgrs, and press agents. Electric illumination. Ticket prices 25 cents to 50 cents. Auditorium on the second floor. The proscenium opening was 20 feet wide X 16 feet high, and the stage was 20 feet deep. There was a weekly newspaper, the Holley Standard. The Downs House was the hotel for show folk. Railroad was the New York Central. The 1897 population of Holley was 2,000.
The owners of the building recently offered to donate the huge “Paris” sign out front to a local preservation office to sell as a fund-raiser. Most collectors of theater memorabilia would not have room for it!