Keith’s Bijou Theatre: “During the month of June hundreds of visiting social workers, interested in the dangers and possibilities of the moving picture show, will be in Boston attending the various meetings of a half dozen or more charities conferences. The July, 1911, issue of a magazine called New Boston featured a brief article with an encomium for B. King’s “A Historical Survey of the Theatres of Boston”, published in the Third Quarter 1974 issue of Marquee, the journal of the Theatre Historical Society.) (The above information comes from Donald C. Emerson College redeveloped the Bijou Theatre property, along with the adjoining Paramount Theatre, into a new theatre and dormitory complex. Most of what remained of the Bijou Theatre building was demolished in 2008, leaving only its front facade standing. Until a few years ago, the former Bijou Theatre entrance was a storefront containing a pinball and video amusements arcade. Its exits led not to the street but rather to two neighboring theatres, the old BF Keith Theatre (later called the Normandie Theatre and the Laffmovie Theatre) and the newer Keith Memorial Theatre (much later called the Savoy Theatre and the Boston Opera House).Įventually the Bijou Theatre was razed to the orchestra and stage floors, which became the roof of the stores below. The Bijou Theatre continued operating into the 1940’s, but after the horrific Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire of 1942, Boston enacted stricter fire laws that doomed the Bijou Theatre. At one point it was also called the Intown Theatre. Later he converted it to show movies and renamed it the Bijou Dream Theatre. Keith took over the Bijou Theatre in 1886 and began to stage vaudeville shows there. It replaced an earlier theatre in the same building that at various times was called the Lion, the Mechanics Institute, the Melodeon Varieties, the New Melodeon, and the Gaiety.ī.F. It was located on the second floor of an annex to the next-door Adams House hotel. Cohan performed for large audiences in Poli's magnificent theaters throughout the Northeast.The Bijou Theatre opened on Decemas a “Parlor Opera House” featuring Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe”. Players like Houdini, Sophie Tucker and George M. In 1907, the 1,430 seat Bijou Theater, considered to be an outstanding example of theater architecture in its day, opened. It was at the Wonderland that Poli showed the first motion pictures in New Haven using the French cinemagraph.
#Bijou theater movie#
This proved to be the start of one of the largest and most lucrative chains of East Coast vaudeville and movie theaters. In 1893, Poli’s Wonderland Theater was opened in a building originally used as a church and until 1874, was the location of St. opened Poli's Eden Musée which featured wax figures he had created in Italy.
The Polis settled in New Haven in 1892 and S. met and married Rosa Leverone of Genoa, Italy, and together they had five children. Dublex, and parlayed his talents into a grand theatrical empire in his adopted home of New Haven. He came to America in 1881 with little more than the ability to carve lifelike figures from wax, a skill gained through apprenticeship under French sculptor M. Soon after, his family moved to neighboring Piano di Coreglia.
Sylvester Zefferino (S.Z.) Poli was born in Bolognana, Gallicano, Lucca, Tuscany, Italy in 1858.
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