Everett Square Theatre - Boston, MA

The Everett Square Theatre opened in 1915 in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Boston architect Harry M. Ramsay designed it for the Littlefield Trust, the theater’s original owner. The 798 seat theater cost $65,000 ($1.5 million in 2014 when adjusted for inflation) to build and was part of the M&P Theatre circuit.

While the original building permits refer to the theater as a “moving picture house,” it also hosted vaudeville and live music during its early years. Famed vaudeville comedian Milton Berle played the theater on May 25, 1925, and signed his name backstage after he finished performing. In 1933, Everett Square, where the theater was located, was renamed Logan Square, and the following year the theater was renamed the Fairmount Theatre. On May 17, 1936, two men were caught breaking into the theater and were convicted based on their lock picking tools’ marks left in the door. The police used a new tool called mulage, a plastic substance that makes impressions, to collect the evidence that convicted them.  By the mid-1940s, the theater had discontinued the live performances and only showed motion pictures.

It reopened as the Nu Pixie Cinema on December 26, 1969. As the theater had less than a 1,000 seat maxi-cinema but more than a 200 seat mini-cinema, the new owner described it as a “pixie” cinema and named it such. It was renamed Premiere Performances in the early 1980s, which brought live shows back to the theater. In the mid-1980s it was used as an auction house before being abandoned. 

The building was purchased in 1986 by a group of Hyde Park business owners who intended to restore and reopen it. They formed a group called Showtime Restoration Volunteers (SRV) and mounted two efforts to raise funds for restoration, but both attempts were unsuccessful. During this time, SRV cleaned up much of the theater’s interior by removing the old seats and the debris from the crumbling ceiling. Hyde Park Main Streets and Historic Boston Inc. became interested in the theater in 2008. With the help of those organizations, the owners were able to get a $30,000 grant to replicate the original sign and restore the theater’s foyer. A full restoration is estimated to cost between $5 and $10 million.