Bijou Theatre, Theatre and movie house in Washington Street, Boston, United States
Bijou Theatre was a second-floor entertainment venue at 545 Washington Street in Boston that hosted both live stage productions and film screenings. The building no longer stands, having been demolished in 1951, but it was once part of a busy stretch of theaters in the heart of the city.
The theatre opened on December 11, 1882, with a production of Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan and stayed in operation for several decades. It closed in 1943 and was torn down in 1951 after fire safety rules were tightened across the city.
The Bijou Theatre was one of the first venues in Boston to offer both stage shows and film screenings at a time when the two forms of entertainment were still seen as separate worlds. This combination reflected a shift in how city residents spent their evenings as cinema slowly replaced live performance as the most common form of public leisure.
The building no longer exists, so there is nothing to visit on site, but the stretch of Washington Street where it once stood is easy to walk and sits in the heart of Boston's theater district. Those curious about the area's past will find other surviving historic buildings nearby worth exploring.
Thomas Edison personally supervised the installation of the electric lighting in the building, making it the first theater in the United States to use electric light. This happened in the 1880s, when electric lighting in a public hall was still a rare enough event to draw attention on its own.
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