North Station Cinema I-II-III
276 Friend Street,
Boston,
MA
02114
276 Friend Street,
Boston,
MA
02114
2 people
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Two screens on February 11th and three on May 4th.
The North Station Cinema opened on January 19th, 1971 with an adult film. Grand opening ad posted.
1974 photo added courtesy of the Dirty Old Boston Facebook page. Films on the marquee were released in 1969 & `70, though neither were pornography films. So it appears North Station Cinema 1 was also trying to be a revival house.
I confess to being a bit of a porn hound when I lived in Boston. North Station Cinema ran straight double features in the early 80’s. Mostly New York-produced flicks, as I recall.
With reference to the cinema visit mentioned above, I just looked in my travel log, where I sometimes entered movie and theatre visits, and found that I attended “Cinema 3 near North Station” on Tuesday, December 2, 1980. This implies that there was a “Cinema 1 and 2” nearby.
In the early 1980s, I attended a straight xxx film at a little cinema on either Friend St. or Portland St. It was on the east side of the street, a few doors down from Causeway St. You went in and turned right to face the screen. I think it was a single-screen operation. It was in an existing building.
The theater under the elevated on Causeway Street was E.M. Loew’s West End Cinema. It was originally built as the Lancaster Theatre, and ended its life as the West End Pussycat. It was torn down in 1990.
The North Station on Friend Street was showing gay porn early in the ‘70s, as I witnessed “Bijou” when it was playing there, 1973, with a very vocal accompaniment by Sylvia Sydney, one of Boston’s reigning drag queens. Boston After Dark gave it a very good review, considering.
An economical porn buff could always wait a week for whatever played there at the one screen to appear that following week at the South Station duplex.
There was a theater under the elevated, directly across from the Boston Gardens – was this the aforementioned possible duplex No. Station? I saw a lot of questionable R or very small 'x’ rated movies there, like “Birds of Peru” – an unfortunate film for a doomed Jean Seburg – and “DeSade” with Keir Dullea, post his fame with “2001”, but no too long after that, say 1968 or ‘69. It nonetheless felt like a 'raincoat’ crowd attended. And it was just the one screen at these times.
On reflection,I seem to remember that they had a single screen on Friend Street and two on Portland. I’m not sure, but I think after a time the single screen closed. It’s possible that the one on Friend showed gay films; I only remember that the two on Portland were straight when I was there.
I confess to having seen a couple porn films in the North Station Cinema, circa 1977. At that time I believe they had an entrance on Portland street, where there was a single screen, and another on Friend street where there were two screens. (Or the other way around, I can’t recall.) At this time it showed straight films only, but I believe it changed over to a gay genre a couple years later.
To clarify, the Shawmut Inn opened in 1994, but the building is much older, probably dating back to the late 19th century.
This whole ‘Bulfinch Triangle’ district was quite run-down and isolated for many years, being surrounded on one side by the huge and ugly Government Center Garage and on two others by elevated train tracks and the elevated Central Artery (I-93). The garage is unfortunately still standing, but the elevated rails and highways were torn down last year.
I never attended this or any other adult theatre, but after taking a walk there this morning, I have a vague memory that two other North Station Cinema screens had an entrance halfway around the block on Portland Street. Eventually I’ll try to verify this from old newspapers or phone books.
Thanks Ron for your information on this theatre.
I walked by this address today. It was most recently occupied by Cafe Mosaic, a small restaurant, but is currently vacant. The storefront is part of a building that also contains a small hotel, the Shawmut Inn, which opened in 1994.
The status should be changed to “Closed”.
From the Boston Globe, June 8, 1998:
Last night, Radley Metzger’s “Score” was screened at the prestigious Harvard Film Archive in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. The sexually complex, gender-questioning classic is a mainstay of the continuing Queer Fest, guest-curated by the equally reknowned George Mansour. Twenty-five years ago, Mansour was booking the XXX-rated North Station Cinema, a long-shuttered porn house in the shadow of Boston Garden. Then, his main feature, “Score,” was just a sleazy bit of junk for the raincoat brigade. “I got paid then, I got paid now,” said Mansour — succinct as ever.
I agree that this suggests another screen could be at a different address or even in the same building. As the Bob Damron Address Book lists only Gay establishments, there would be no need to list a North Station Cinema II (that’s if one ever existed), as it probably screened ‘straight’ adult porn.
Comments on the South Station Cinema /theaters/9196/ suggest first that the North Station had possibly Three screens and then another posting states it had One.
Listing this as “North Station Cinema I” suggests that there were other screens, maybe at different addresses?