Palladium Theatre
261 Main Street,
Worcester,
MA
01608
261 Main Street,
Worcester,
MA
01608
1 person
favorited this theater
The Palladium Theatre was one of downtown Worcester’s several movie palaces when it was part of E.M. Loew’s Theatres.
Today it is a popular venue for concerts featuring rock groups.
Contributed by
Gerald A. DeLuca
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Recent comments (view all 22 comments)
Here is a recent photo.
1986 Photo
Another February 2009 photo of the Palladium Theatre.
View link
Item in Boxoffice magazine, March 19, 1949:
Nate Goldberg, manager of the Plymouth, discovered a Worcester GI played an extra in a scene for “Paisan” and capitalized on it, the story hitting page one of the dailies when the picture played the Plymouth.
[Rossellini’s neorealist “Paisan” hardly seems like typical fare for the Plymouth, but the movie played numerous mainstream theatres of the time.]
I moved to the Worcester area in 1973 and suspect the theatre had been recently closed – but in the winter of 1974/1975 it temporarily reopened for an exclusive engagement of “Earthquake” in Sensurround. I don’t know how/why this theatre got that lucrative gig but the theatre once-again went dark until 1980 when it reopened as the E.M. Loew Center for the Performing Arts.
The owners of the Palladium building have gotten very ticked-off over recent property tax increases. They say their tax has now tripled. They want to demolish the building. This news appeared in the business page of the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, and also in the THS Readerboard theater news line.
The Palladium building is listed on MACRIS, the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information Center, so there’s a 12-month waiting period before any demolition or significant changes to the building can happen. The owners requested a waiver of the delay at a July 26th meeting of the Worcester Historical Commission. The HC denied the waiver, which gives the owner and interested parties 12 months to come up with an alternative plan.
There’s an active group of folks trying to pull together a coalition of interested parties to come up with a plan to renovate and preserve the building. Preservation Worcester, the City of Worcester, people from the Hanover Theater (another local cinema treasure that was recently renovated and reopened) and a national radio personality have all expressed interest in helping keep the building standing, possibly as a mixed-use entertainment venue, office space, business incubator and cultural resource center. rsalters and anyone else, any info/resources you have about the building’s history would be a great help. There’s a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/savethepalladium for more info.
The Plymouth’s Robert Morton organ is pictured in 1929 at bottom of this page: archive
Described in full in this two-page article: archive
Oh, thanks, Tinseltoes. What a great retrospective viewpoint.