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When Boston was home to many lavish theaters

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January 08, 2012|By Mark Feeney

The lobby of the Metropolitan Theatre (now Citi Performing Arts Center). (RON GOODMAN )

Boston was founded by Puritans, a group famously unfriendly to the stage. It’s a safe bet they wouldn’t have cared much for movies, either. So it’s a good thing there weren’t any Puritans around 300 years later to be shocked at the number of Boston movie theaters during their heyday, let alone the theaters’ lavishness or popularity.

Would the city’s founders have felt any better if they knew that for more than half a century there was a movie theater near the corner of Washington Street and Massachusetts Avenue called the Puritan?

Arthur Singer and Ron Goodman’s “Boston’s Downtown Movie Palaces’’ celebrates an era that starts with the first nickelodeons at the turn of the previous century and ends around 1970, when local theater owner Ben Sack dominated the Hub exhibition scene. The book is part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series. The authors will be signing copies this afternoon at 3 at the Paramount Center.

Ah, the Paramount: That monument to Art Deco luxe celebrates its 80th birthday on Feb. 25. Singer and Goodman refer to Washington Street, where the Paramount’s located, as “Boston’s Broadway.’’ Those days are long gone, of course, in this multiplex era.

The one other survivor of that period is the Opera House, which began life as the B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre. Keith, a Bostonian, was known as the Father of Vaudeville. The theater was built in tribute to him, opening in 1928, 14 years after his death. By 1933, it had stopped offering vaudeville acts and exclusively showed movies. Sack bought it in 1965, and the newly renamed Savoy remained a film venue until 1975, when Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston took it over.

The Keith/Savoy/Opera House is typical in having a history of name changes and repurposing. What is now the home of the Huntington Theatre Company opened in 1925 as the Repertory Theatre of Boston, for stage productions, then became the Esquire Theatre, showing films, before closing in 1958.

Boston’s grandest venue, the Citi Performing Arts Center, started in 1925 as the Metropolitan Theatre. With no fewer than 4,400 seats, it was variously referred to as “The Showplace of New England’’ and “Boston’s Movie Cathedral.’’ Later it became the Music Hall (under Sack) and the Wang Center.

The Orpheum opened as the Music Hall, in 1852. After Marcus Loew bought it, in 1910, he changed the name to Loews Orpheum and completely rebuilt it, making it the prototype for his nationwide chain of theaters. It had seats for 3,320 filmgoers. Movies continued to screen there until 1974, when it became a full-time concert hall.

Never a moviemaking center (that’s one thing the Puritans could be thankful for), Boston did play a role in the history of movie exhibition. Many of Keith’s theaters were converted from vaudeville to movie houses. Louis B. Mayer, the second “M’’ of MGM, got to Hollywood by way of owning theaters in Haverhill and Boston. And under the management of the Berlin sisters, Viola and Florence, the Exeter Theatre, became both a Back Bay institution and a programming model for art houses nationwide.

In 1953, footage of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was dispatched to Heathrow, edited in flight, and went straight from Logan to the Exeter to be screened for eager filmgoers. Television had already begun to turn the classic urban movie theater into a white elephant. Satellite transmission was still a decade away, though. So for one day, at least, the queen held court at a Boston movie palace.