Pilgrim Theatre
658 Washington Street,
Boston,
MA
02116
658 Washington Street,
Boston,
MA
02116
8 people
favorited this theater
Showing 76 - 100 of 110 comments
lol
OK, OK, we get your point, you don’t have to keep saying it.
The classiest thaetre in Boston!
A great theatre that never should have been demolished!
lol Actually thats a kind word for it!
Make that ‘decrepit’ from my comment yesterday…
I was told by someone who snuck a look during the final months when the Pilgrim was still open for business that the balcony had become decripit from neglect and unsafe for physical occupation.
Also playing was “Hot Pants Hoilday” and “Juranal Park”
Titles such as “Behind You All the Way”‘ and “Streetgirl named Desire” were commom here!
The Pilgrim Theatre was a premiere Boston X rated theatre!
Does anyone know what really happenned in the death that occurred in the balcony in the 70’s?
Was the Pilgrim ever a first run house?
Does anyone have any pictures of the interior of The Pilgrim?
The “Pilgrim Theatre” was one of the last porn palcaes in Boston! It was a shame to see this once beautiful theatre so scarred and defaced! Its also a shame that the City of Boston never tried to save many of the relics on Wsahington Street! Thankfully the Paramount that is basically non-descript compared to The Pilgrim and Gary is being saved!
The article mentions that there were ten movie theatres on downtown Washington Street between the Old South Meeting House and “Michael Breen Square” (which I’ve never heard of). Besides the three sex-film houses, the others were, from north to south:
Loew’s Orpheum, a first-run house
Savoy, a Sack first-run house
Paramount, a General Cinema first-run house
Boston Cinerama, which needs no further explanation
Publix, probably showing second- or third-run double features
Center, whose booking policy I’m not sure of
Stuart, probably showing second- or third-run double-features
Ah, more innocent times.
Here is a 1968 Harvard Crimson article about the sex film venues on Washington Street. The writer discusses the Pilgrim, the Mayflower, and the State.
According to Donald C. King’s new book The Theatres of Boston: A Stage and Screen History, Gordon’s Olympia opened on May 6, 1912, offering vaudeville and films. It had 2500 seats.
Among the films featured at the Olympia during its first two years were Queen Elizabeth; The Money Kings, or Wall Street Outwitted; The Prisoner of Zenda; and A Tale of Two Cities.
After being remodeled with new seats, the Olympia became the Pilgrim on January 5, 1949. On December 11, 1952, the Pilgrim used RCA’s black-and-white TV projection system to present the opera Carmen live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
The Pilgrim was the first theatre in Boston to present 3-D movies, offering a series of five short subjects in 1953.
In 1965, the Pilgrim began showing sex films. Later it became Boston’s last burlesque theatre, best known for the day in 1974 that stripper Fanne Foxe appeared on stage with Congressman Wilbur Mills.
I’m not sure when live burlesque ended here, but by the end of its life, the Pilgrim was strictly an X-rated movie house, the last in Boston. Its Chinatown neighbors considered it a detriment to the area, and seemed mostly happy to have it torn down in 1996. A new residential tower, Park Essex, is still under construction on its site.
In this 1947 photo (described here), you can’t really see the theatre, but you can certainly see its huge vertical sign that read OLYMPIA.
The foreground of the photo shows a row of furniture stores. I think this block has been entirely demolished and replaced by expansion of the Tufts-New England Medical Center.
From the Bostonian Society Library, here’s a 1958 photo of the Pilgrim Theatre, as well as the accompanying description.
The Pilgrim’s marquee advertises INDISCREET, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. A sign painted high on the theatre’s side wall says AMERICAN THEATRES CORPORATION.
Further down the street is the marquee of the Center Theatre, but it’s too small and dark to read. Across the street you can barely see part of the Publix Theatre’s vertical sign.
The closure of the balcony was caused by the untimely death of a Monsignor from Quincy some time in the ‘70s, I do believe. Can’t imagine what state he was in when the body was discovered.
The Pilgrim Theater, in happier days (1961). From the Maureen O'Hara fan club site.
This web site shows the high-rise residential tower that is being built where the Pilgrim Theatre was:
http://www.ParkEssex.com
In the Boston Globe and Herald archives, I find several references to this incident:
“No. 658 Washington St. in the Combat Zone, now a parking lot, was once the site of the Pilgrim Theater. On a December night in 1974, a tipsy US Representative Wilbur Mills, an Arkansas Democrat, pursued on stage the notorious Annabella Batistella — a.k.a. burlesque dancer Fanne Foxe. She had already stripped; it would take only a few weeks for Mills to be stripped of his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee.”
>>Its auditorium was in the very rear of its block, preceded by a group of vestibules containing stairways, restrooms, and one of the first theatre escalators that ran through a former carpet store, which fronted on Washington Street. The theatre held 2500 people in an orchestra, two balconies, and fourteen brass-railed boxes…
That’s just the way I remember it from the mid-1980’s!