The Seville Theatre opened on February 17, 1929, at 256 Meridian Street in East Boston. Designed by the Boston firm of Krokyn, Browne & Rosenstein, the roughly 1,700-seat theater was the first atmospheric theater built in the Boston area. Its Spanish village auditorium surrounded the audience with building facades, loges, statuary, and a dark blue ceiling designed to resemble a night sky. The theater was also equipped with a Wurlitzer organ.
The Seville became one of several neighborhood movie theaters serving East Boston. A 1941 MGM theater survey listed 1,710 seats, with 893 on the main floor and 817 in the balcony. At the time, the theater had been showing MGM films for more than ten years. The Seville continued operating as a neighborhood movie house through the following decades and was still advertised regularly into the mid-1960s. By the 1970s, it was showing Italian-language films on Sundays.
The theater closed by the 1980s and was later used for storage and limited commercial purposes. Despite the change in use, much of the auditorium survived behind the building’s plain exterior. In 2008, a redevelopment proposal called for demolishing the theater and replacing it with a six-story mixed-use building containing 65 condominiums and retail space. The proposal stalled, and the Seville remained standing for several more years.
I went inside the Seville once before it was demolished, and the auditorium was still recognizable despite years of neglect. The theater was finally demolished in October 2014. East Boston once had its own atmospheric movie palace, and unlike several of Boston’s other neighborhood theaters, almost nothing was saved.
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