As noted above, the Uptown opened in 1897. It didn’t make it into the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. The Guide lists 2 road-show theater for Gardner, the Music Hall with 1,100 seats, and the Town Hall auditorium with 1,075 seats. Both of these were “upstairs houses” with the auditorium & stage on the second floor. Was it called “Uptown” from the beginning, or did it originally have a different name? The 1897 population of Gardner was 9,000.
The proposed hotel project on the site of the Circle is also mentioned in the business news in today’s Boston Herald. The hotel will have 150 rooms and 24,000 sq ft of retail space. It says that the “60-year-old theater” (actually, closer to 70 y/o) closed two years ago due to slow ticket sales.
The latest version of the “All Classical Cartoon Festival” will be held at Symphony Hall on Sat Oct 23, 10AM – 4PM, featuring all Warner Brothers cartoons on the “giant screen”. The festival is a WGBH event.
Emerson College produced a very nice, informative color folder about the Paramount Center which was given out at the recent open houses. It makes the point that the Paramount “could not be restored due to extensive deterioration.” (That’s for sure.) A minor error is that the seating for the Paramount is listed as 1,500 when there actually were almost 1,800 seats (1,797). It also mentions that the granite facade for the old Arcade Building (a.k.a. Bijou Building) next door has been restored, while the surviving remnants of the building itself “have been taken down and replaced (with a new building)”. The new Paramount Center complex is well worth visiting.
In the balcony foyer of Emerson’s new Paramount there is a huge color rendering of the interior of the Bijou Theatre on opening night in 1882 with G&S' “Iolanthe” on stage. The original print is in the Harvard Theatre Collection and possibly in other libraries as well. The pespective is from the rear of the Bijou balcony looking toward the stage with a full house present.
ginabiehn – for movie titles look at the Met’s ads in the entertainment section of Boston newspapers, such as the Globe and Post for the years you want to write about. The papers are on file on microfilm at the Boston Public Library. For many years after it opened, the Met was a first-run movie theater, so the ticket prices were a bit higher than in the neighborhood houses. (example: in 1955, about 75 cents at night, versus 45 or 50 cents in a “nabe”.)The Met attracted a wide mass audience.
When I visited Saturday, there was no set on the stage, which was completely dark and bare except for the large movie screen-like item hanging upstage. On another matter, when this project got underway, Emerson College began calling the proposed complex the “Paramount Center” but continued referring to the new theater as the “Paramount Theatre”. Now that it’s finished and open, their brochures continue to call the complex the Paramount Center, but the larger live theater is now called the “Paramount Mainstage”.
Also today, the marquee was lit. It’s full of leds which are electronically controlled, so you have the sight of a traditional large movie marquee with the fast-moving cartoon-like colors and words on it.
An Emerson student there today also noticed that the Wilbur and Shubert were on the map incorrectly. But there are other errors as well, such as placing the 19th century Globe too far north on Washington Street. The rake of the auditorium is indeed much steeper than the original, which did not have stadium seating on the main floor. When you were there was the house curtain up and did you notice what looks like a big movie screen hanging upstage? It may be a “cyc” intended for projecting colors during shows, and not a movie screen at all. As for “3 screens” and “Triplex”, let’s get real here; I just don’t buy using those terms for this theater!
It’s rather silly to call this place a “triplex” as above. There are 3 performance spaces: the Paramount Theatre, a “black-box” theater, and a “screening room”, where films are shown. The latter 2 spaces are located in the adjacent building just to the north of the Paramount and are accessed by climbing the stairs from the Paramount’s lobby. There is also elevator service near the staircases. I went to the “open house” today and it was well worth seeing. I learned something new: the stage in the original Paramount was only 11 feet deep. The new stage is quite a bit larger and has a row of counterweight lines at stage-left. There appeared to be a large white movie screen at the rear of the darkened stage but I’m not sure of that. There is no projection booth in the theater, only light and sound desks at the rear of the balcony. There are permanent historical exhibits in both the lower and upper balcony foyers, and I found the remarks quite accurate. However, the huge map of the Boston theater district in the upper foyers has, unfortunately, some errors on it, including placing the Shubert and the Wilbur theaters on the wrong sides of Tremont St. The craftsmanship in the Paramount is first-rate.
I visited the site of the demolished Modern today. The blue tarp which Ron Newman mentions above had been rolled up to 2nd floor level. The original facade has been re-erected- the only trace of the vanished Modern. The lobby of the new theater is much bigger and deeper than the tiny lobby of the original. I went down the alley to the left and found both doors open. The alley was full of construction stuff; there were open cans of paint right in front of the rear auditorium exit. I got a quick glimpse of what looked like curved, stepped rows, but with no seats installed. The new Modern is finished, except for lots of final detail work. It will apparently have about 180 seats. The original building had rows of windows along its south wall overlooking the alley. The new building also has rows of windows up there. The facade, now cleaned up and re-erected, looks great. They have even re-erected the top part of it, above the white marble section. But everything behind it is brand new.
Yes, there was a Sears (or “Sears, Roebuck” in those days) just to the south of the Capitol Theatre and extending all the way back to the parking lots to the rear (west). The empty lot of the demolished Capitol was taken over and included in the footprint and the entire structure was heavily rebuilt and modified for the Quincy Fair Mall. I didn’t really pay much attention to what was being done there at the time.
I have been told that the alley once led to the 3rd balcony entrance for the old Boston Theatre. Many theaters 100 or more years ago had completely seperate entrances for their top balcony patrons. For example, as recently as the 1980s if you had a ticket in the top balcony at the Royal Opera House in London, you were required to enter from a dark side-street on the right side of the building.
But when Cinema Treasures changes the status from “Closed/Demolished” (which is correct) to “Closed/Renovating” it implies that the Modern Theatre is still there, which is not true. This situation is very similar to the Henry Miller’s Theatre in midtown New York City. At least with the Boston Paramount, the facade, signage, half of each external sidewall and half of the roof are original.
The original Modern Theatre is gone— completely demolished, except for the facade which was dismantled and then re-erected again. The little theater inside the new structure, called the Modern Theatre, has nothing to do with the original theater except for reusing the old name.
The Wurlitzer organ from the Lawler Theatre is now in the Lafayette Theatre, Suffern NY. It was for a long time owned by the late Ben Hall of New York, founder in 1969 of the Theatre Historical Society.
That should be “None of these theaters WAS ever built.” I should point out that my knowledge of where the Boston Fox was to be located is based on hearsay.
The Theatre Historical Society’s Marquee Magazine, 2nd issue of 2010, has a group of articles about William Fox and Fox Theatres written by CT member Barry Goodkin. He relates that on January 6, 1929, William Fox announced that he was planning an office building and a Fox theater at Broadway & 47th Street in New York, plus large Fox theaters (5,000 to 6,000 seats) in Boston, Cleveland, L.A., Pittsburgh, Newark, Baltimore and Chicago. None of these theaters were ever built. The huge Fox Theatre in Boston was to have been built on the east side of Tremont Street, opposite the Majestic Theatre. (I assume it was to be located on either the north corner of LaGrange Street, or the south corner.) It would have been even larger than the Metropolitan/Wang.
The cinema still is not demolished. The demo work was halted because asbestos was found in the underfloor of the cinema portion of the complex. New target date to finish demolition is now November 1st. The Quincy Patriot-Ledger of Sept 22, 2010 carried an article whichs states that demolition work has now resumed. This article says that the building dates to 1940, which sounds about right to me. It was the structure just to the south of the Capitol Theatre. The article also states that the movie cinema was constructed in the building in 1988, which seems too early to me. Anyway, although it’s not yet “demolished”, it soon will be !
The Orpheum in L.A. is listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. As usual, there are no street addresses in this Guide. And there isn’t much info. The Mgr. was Charles Schimpf. Ticket prices ranged from 10 cents to 50 cents, and these low prices indicate that it was not featuring touring plays, musicals, opera, and was, indeed, a vaude house. The seating capacity was listed as 1,500. The proscenium opening was 31 feet square. There were 7 members of the house orchestra.
There was a Los Angeles Theatre listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. No address given. H.C Wyatt was Mgr. Tickets ranged from 25 cents to $1. Seating- Orchestra,532, Balcony,406; gallery-550; total: 1,488. The theater was on the ground floor, had all-electric illumination, and 10 members of the pit band. The proscenium opening was 30 feet wide X 29 feet high; and the stage was 35 feet deep. Two other L.A. theaters were listed in the Guide: the Burbank, with 1,844 seats; and the Orpheum, with 1,500 seats. The 1897 population of L.A. was 97,000.
As Joe Vogel points out above, the Grand Opera House in Madison IN was listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. Unfortunately, there are no street addresses in this Guide. It was run by the Grand Opera House Company, F.E. DeLoste, business mgr. It had 900 seats, was on the ground floor, and had both gas and electric illumination. Ticket prices ranged from 25 cents to 75 cents. The proscenium opening was 37 feet wide X 25 feet high, and the stage was 35 feet deep. There were 2 newspapers in town and 3 hotels for show folk. The 1897 population of Madison was 10,000.
The Boston Sunday Herald of Sept 19 has a book review for a new book called “Banned in Boston: the Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque and the Social Evil” by Neil Miller of Tufts University. The review includes a nighttime facade photo of a very busy Old Howard in the 1950-era, plus a backstage photo of chorous girls. The book tells the story of the old fuddy-duddy, Yankee society of prune-faced prudes and bluenoses who constantly fought against the Old Howard and other “evils”.
I talked recently with someone who attended shows at the Casino all through the 1950s. Like me, he never heard of the theater being called the “Old Howard Casino”. No one in that era called it by that name. The name may have been formally changed, but the marquee was not changed, nor were the newspaper ads. Everyone I knew called it the “Casino Theater” right up to the end in 1962.
As noted above, the Uptown opened in 1897. It didn’t make it into the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. The Guide lists 2 road-show theater for Gardner, the Music Hall with 1,100 seats, and the Town Hall auditorium with 1,075 seats. Both of these were “upstairs houses” with the auditorium & stage on the second floor. Was it called “Uptown” from the beginning, or did it originally have a different name? The 1897 population of Gardner was 9,000.
The proposed hotel project on the site of the Circle is also mentioned in the business news in today’s Boston Herald. The hotel will have 150 rooms and 24,000 sq ft of retail space. It says that the “60-year-old theater” (actually, closer to 70 y/o) closed two years ago due to slow ticket sales.
The latest version of the “All Classical Cartoon Festival” will be held at Symphony Hall on Sat Oct 23, 10AM – 4PM, featuring all Warner Brothers cartoons on the “giant screen”. The festival is a WGBH event.
Emerson College produced a very nice, informative color folder about the Paramount Center which was given out at the recent open houses. It makes the point that the Paramount “could not be restored due to extensive deterioration.” (That’s for sure.) A minor error is that the seating for the Paramount is listed as 1,500 when there actually were almost 1,800 seats (1,797). It also mentions that the granite facade for the old Arcade Building (a.k.a. Bijou Building) next door has been restored, while the surviving remnants of the building itself “have been taken down and replaced (with a new building)”. The new Paramount Center complex is well worth visiting.
In the balcony foyer of Emerson’s new Paramount there is a huge color rendering of the interior of the Bijou Theatre on opening night in 1882 with G&S' “Iolanthe” on stage. The original print is in the Harvard Theatre Collection and possibly in other libraries as well. The pespective is from the rear of the Bijou balcony looking toward the stage with a full house present.
ginabiehn – for movie titles look at the Met’s ads in the entertainment section of Boston newspapers, such as the Globe and Post for the years you want to write about. The papers are on file on microfilm at the Boston Public Library. For many years after it opened, the Met was a first-run movie theater, so the ticket prices were a bit higher than in the neighborhood houses. (example: in 1955, about 75 cents at night, versus 45 or 50 cents in a “nabe”.)The Met attracted a wide mass audience.
When I visited Saturday, there was no set on the stage, which was completely dark and bare except for the large movie screen-like item hanging upstage. On another matter, when this project got underway, Emerson College began calling the proposed complex the “Paramount Center” but continued referring to the new theater as the “Paramount Theatre”. Now that it’s finished and open, their brochures continue to call the complex the Paramount Center, but the larger live theater is now called the “Paramount Mainstage”.
Also today, the marquee was lit. It’s full of leds which are electronically controlled, so you have the sight of a traditional large movie marquee with the fast-moving cartoon-like colors and words on it.
An Emerson student there today also noticed that the Wilbur and Shubert were on the map incorrectly. But there are other errors as well, such as placing the 19th century Globe too far north on Washington Street. The rake of the auditorium is indeed much steeper than the original, which did not have stadium seating on the main floor. When you were there was the house curtain up and did you notice what looks like a big movie screen hanging upstage? It may be a “cyc” intended for projecting colors during shows, and not a movie screen at all. As for “3 screens” and “Triplex”, let’s get real here; I just don’t buy using those terms for this theater!
It’s rather silly to call this place a “triplex” as above. There are 3 performance spaces: the Paramount Theatre, a “black-box” theater, and a “screening room”, where films are shown. The latter 2 spaces are located in the adjacent building just to the north of the Paramount and are accessed by climbing the stairs from the Paramount’s lobby. There is also elevator service near the staircases. I went to the “open house” today and it was well worth seeing. I learned something new: the stage in the original Paramount was only 11 feet deep. The new stage is quite a bit larger and has a row of counterweight lines at stage-left. There appeared to be a large white movie screen at the rear of the darkened stage but I’m not sure of that. There is no projection booth in the theater, only light and sound desks at the rear of the balcony. There are permanent historical exhibits in both the lower and upper balcony foyers, and I found the remarks quite accurate. However, the huge map of the Boston theater district in the upper foyers has, unfortunately, some errors on it, including placing the Shubert and the Wilbur theaters on the wrong sides of Tremont St. The craftsmanship in the Paramount is first-rate.
I visited the site of the demolished Modern today. The blue tarp which Ron Newman mentions above had been rolled up to 2nd floor level. The original facade has been re-erected- the only trace of the vanished Modern. The lobby of the new theater is much bigger and deeper than the tiny lobby of the original. I went down the alley to the left and found both doors open. The alley was full of construction stuff; there were open cans of paint right in front of the rear auditorium exit. I got a quick glimpse of what looked like curved, stepped rows, but with no seats installed. The new Modern is finished, except for lots of final detail work. It will apparently have about 180 seats. The original building had rows of windows along its south wall overlooking the alley. The new building also has rows of windows up there. The facade, now cleaned up and re-erected, looks great. They have even re-erected the top part of it, above the white marble section. But everything behind it is brand new.
Yes, there was a Sears (or “Sears, Roebuck” in those days) just to the south of the Capitol Theatre and extending all the way back to the parking lots to the rear (west). The empty lot of the demolished Capitol was taken over and included in the footprint and the entire structure was heavily rebuilt and modified for the Quincy Fair Mall. I didn’t really pay much attention to what was being done there at the time.
I have been told that the alley once led to the 3rd balcony entrance for the old Boston Theatre. Many theaters 100 or more years ago had completely seperate entrances for their top balcony patrons. For example, as recently as the 1980s if you had a ticket in the top balcony at the Royal Opera House in London, you were required to enter from a dark side-street on the right side of the building.
They did heavy-duty renovation work there, so that’s why the front, and the south side look “new”.
But when Cinema Treasures changes the status from “Closed/Demolished” (which is correct) to “Closed/Renovating” it implies that the Modern Theatre is still there, which is not true. This situation is very similar to the Henry Miller’s Theatre in midtown New York City. At least with the Boston Paramount, the facade, signage, half of each external sidewall and half of the roof are original.
The original Modern Theatre is gone— completely demolished, except for the facade which was dismantled and then re-erected again. The little theater inside the new structure, called the Modern Theatre, has nothing to do with the original theater except for reusing the old name.
The Wurlitzer organ from the Lawler Theatre is now in the Lafayette Theatre, Suffern NY. It was for a long time owned by the late Ben Hall of New York, founder in 1969 of the Theatre Historical Society.
That should be “None of these theaters WAS ever built.” I should point out that my knowledge of where the Boston Fox was to be located is based on hearsay.
The Theatre Historical Society’s Marquee Magazine, 2nd issue of 2010, has a group of articles about William Fox and Fox Theatres written by CT member Barry Goodkin. He relates that on January 6, 1929, William Fox announced that he was planning an office building and a Fox theater at Broadway & 47th Street in New York, plus large Fox theaters (5,000 to 6,000 seats) in Boston, Cleveland, L.A., Pittsburgh, Newark, Baltimore and Chicago. None of these theaters were ever built. The huge Fox Theatre in Boston was to have been built on the east side of Tremont Street, opposite the Majestic Theatre. (I assume it was to be located on either the north corner of LaGrange Street, or the south corner.) It would have been even larger than the Metropolitan/Wang.
The cinema still is not demolished. The demo work was halted because asbestos was found in the underfloor of the cinema portion of the complex. New target date to finish demolition is now November 1st. The Quincy Patriot-Ledger of Sept 22, 2010 carried an article whichs states that demolition work has now resumed. This article says that the building dates to 1940, which sounds about right to me. It was the structure just to the south of the Capitol Theatre. The article also states that the movie cinema was constructed in the building in 1988, which seems too early to me. Anyway, although it’s not yet “demolished”, it soon will be !
The Orpheum in L.A. is listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. As usual, there are no street addresses in this Guide. And there isn’t much info. The Mgr. was Charles Schimpf. Ticket prices ranged from 10 cents to 50 cents, and these low prices indicate that it was not featuring touring plays, musicals, opera, and was, indeed, a vaude house. The seating capacity was listed as 1,500. The proscenium opening was 31 feet square. There were 7 members of the house orchestra.
There was a Los Angeles Theatre listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. No address given. H.C Wyatt was Mgr. Tickets ranged from 25 cents to $1. Seating- Orchestra,532, Balcony,406; gallery-550; total: 1,488. The theater was on the ground floor, had all-electric illumination, and 10 members of the pit band. The proscenium opening was 30 feet wide X 29 feet high; and the stage was 35 feet deep. Two other L.A. theaters were listed in the Guide: the Burbank, with 1,844 seats; and the Orpheum, with 1,500 seats. The 1897 population of L.A. was 97,000.
As Joe Vogel points out above, the Grand Opera House in Madison IN was listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide. Unfortunately, there are no street addresses in this Guide. It was run by the Grand Opera House Company, F.E. DeLoste, business mgr. It had 900 seats, was on the ground floor, and had both gas and electric illumination. Ticket prices ranged from 25 cents to 75 cents. The proscenium opening was 37 feet wide X 25 feet high, and the stage was 35 feet deep. There were 2 newspapers in town and 3 hotels for show folk. The 1897 population of Madison was 10,000.
The Boston Sunday Herald of Sept 19 has a book review for a new book called “Banned in Boston: the Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque and the Social Evil” by Neil Miller of Tufts University. The review includes a nighttime facade photo of a very busy Old Howard in the 1950-era, plus a backstage photo of chorous girls. The book tells the story of the old fuddy-duddy, Yankee society of prune-faced prudes and bluenoses who constantly fought against the Old Howard and other “evils”.
I talked recently with someone who attended shows at the Casino all through the 1950s. Like me, he never heard of the theater being called the “Old Howard Casino”. No one in that era called it by that name. The name may have been formally changed, but the marquee was not changed, nor were the newspaper ads. Everyone I knew called it the “Casino Theater” right up to the end in 1962.