Boulton Center for the Performing Arts
37 W. Main Street,
Bay Shore,
NY
11706
37 W. Main Street,
Bay Shore,
NY
11706
2 people
favorited this theater
Originally the Regent Theatre, it was first modernized in 1934 by John Eberson when the seating capacity was given as 678. Once operated by the Prudential Theatres chain.
The theatre has now been renovated again, and has 290 stadium seats. Certainly not originally as spectacular as the Bay Shore Theatre (Ward & Glynne’s) vaudeville house. The Bay Shore Theatre was closed already in the 1980’s. The Regent Theatre puttered on into the 1990’s as a porn house.
The new Boulton Center marquee is quite attractive.
Contributed by
Bway Chris
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Recent comments (view all 27 comments)
Regarding the recent posts…great to hear Bay Shore pulling itself up by its bootstraps again…Funny storys about the Regent….Made my first all day trek to “another town” on my bicycle, riding all the way from East Islip at 12 yrs. to see “Blood On Satan’s Claw”… Took me all day to get there, then realized…
a.) It was an R rated film and as such I would not get in ( I did, no questions asked!) and
b.) It would take me well into the night to get back…Had some explaining to do, but it was an adventure and the movie scared the crap outa me…
I watched that theatre crumble almost in timelapse as I would take a bus to school and pass it every day…First run films….2nd run double bills…Softcore films…Porno chic(Devil in Miss Jones)…hardcore porn…closed….
BTW… the record store you might be thinking about may have been The Cucumber Castle…
We would pass that place every time we drove to Robert Moses, my brother and I would beg my folks to stop and let us go in….never happened….years later older cousins let us in on the fact that it was a head shop….
The Regent Theater is listed as open in the 1926 edition of Film Daily Yearbook with a seating capacity of 700.
In April, 1934, New York State Exhibitor reported that Prudential’s Regent Theatre in Bayshore was temporarily closed for “modernization” by John Eberson’s architectural firm.
The Regent can be seen briefly in the movie “Last Summer”. Directed by Frank Perry, the film was about four teens spending the summer on Fire Island. Starring Bruce Davidson, Barbra Hershey, Richard Thomas before John Boy Walton and Cathy Burns who received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. There’s a scene where the four are running out of the theater to catch the ferry.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064573/
Somewhere between being the Regent and Boulton Center it was the Hollyrock. There was a cafe infront and a screen showing movies. Bizarre – a little like the current Studio One in NYC that has stage plays in a setting like that.
Here is the Regent in 1986.
Wow, the theater really looked crapy by that point.
Since joining this site I have come to despise pole to pole utility lines. So many pictures of aesthetically pleasing theaters are ruined by those wretched wires cutting through the foreground.
Oh yes, David. The bane of every photographer interested in documenting street-level architecture! I have hundreds of photos ruined by those lines. Same can sometimes be said of trees in full bloom, when you’re out there between April and October! Thankfully, Manhattan is at least one area where above ground lines are virtually non-existant.
But some times the results are interesting. Look at the picture of the Oasis. I thought the current use was as a church because of the way the poles are situated.