Adult Movie Theatres in Worcester

What is still open

Nothing, and we want to be exact about how nothing. Three searches worded three ways returned ten results each and not one of them was in Worcester. The nearest were in Raynham, Hartford, Manchester, Providence and Everett, between thirty-five and fifty miles out. Then we drew a box around Worcester itself and searched inside it, and the page came back empty with a suggestion to try a larger search area.

Amazing Intimate Essentials at Northborough, about ten miles north-east, and Conquest Video at Fitchburg, about twenty-five miles north, are the closest things to this trade in Worcester County. Both are shops. Neither is in the city.

The nearest rooms we can verify are a long way out in three directions: Hartford to the south-west, Providence to the south-east, and the Boston side to the east, which our Boston page covers.

Salem, Portland, Franklin, Myrtle

From the early 1970s there was a circuit of four streets near Main Street that Worcester men walked. It went by several names and mostly it was called the Block.

On it were two adult bookshops that did more than sell books. The United Book Store kept gay pornography on the magazine racks and had coin-operated peep show booths at the back, and the booths were somewhere men could go to meet each other. Round the back of the Block, the Myrtle Street Book Store had the magazine rack too, and that alone was enough to make it a place people went.

A rack of magazines made a destination. Not a bar, not a club, not anywhere with a sign on it. Men worked out where the gay titles were kept and that became the meeting place, because in Worcester in 1972 that was the only building in the city that admitted such a thing existed.

This comes from a local LGBTQ history walking tour, which is one source and does not give dates for either shop or say when the booths went. We have not found anything else on them. If there is a Worcester reader who remembers the United Book Store, that is a gap worth closing and we would like to hear from you.

Hold on to one of those street names. The Paris Cinema stood at 66 Franklin Street.

Ninety-one years at 66 Franklin Street

It opened on 11 December 1926 as the Capitol, designed by Roger Garland, two thousand five hundred seats. It was an atmospheric house, which means the ceiling was a blue dome with clouds projected across it and the side walls were built to look like a Spanish villa. There was a Wurlitzer in it, Opus 1492, which survives and is now in a museum in Rochester.

It shut for renovation in December 1966 and came back on 4 March 1967 as the Paris Cinema. The following year they walled the balcony off from the floor below and ran two cinemas in one building, which the city called its first theatre within a theatre.

Then the two halves parted company. Downstairs ran exploitation pictures. Upstairs, in what had been the balcony of a 1926 picture palace, ran pornography, and they renamed it the Adult Penthouse.

On 29 June 1974 the governor of Massachusetts, Francis Sargent, signed an obscenity bill, and according to the people who have traced this building that is what stopped the Paris showing adult films. It closed in 1977.

And then the best thing that ever happened to it. In the autumn of 1980 a group of film enthusiasts calling themselves Cinema 320 took the lease and started showing the pictures the chains would not touch. They were told to get out by 1 April 1982. The last film they ran was Casablanca.

Two months later, in June 1982, it reopened as an adult theatre.

It ran like that for nineteen more years. In July 2001 a wall collapsed in the upper theatres and it shut for a while. Through the early 2000s it opened and closed and opened again around a series of police raids over what was happening in the seats. In January 2006 it closed for the last time, after twenty-nine people were arrested there in a single weekend. The owner sold the building that July for a million and change.

The two numbers

In 2016 the new owners went to the city asking to be let out of Worcester’s one-year demolition delay, and they brought two figures with them.

Forty-two to one. That is the ratio between keeping a 1926 atmospheric cinema standing and removing it, and once it is written down like that nobody has to argue about architecture. The Historical Commission voted four to one to grant the waiver.

The wreckers started on 18 July 2017. The plan on the table was a three-season beer garden with a stage and three hundred and twenty seats. The Paris sign had already gone, donated to Preservation Worcester in 2012 and sold off at a fundraiser that autumn.

We have not been able to confirm from here what is standing on the lot today, only what was approved and that the demolition went ahead. Franklin Street has had more than one beer garden since.

Ninety-one years, and this is the shape of it. Two and a half thousand seats under a painted sky, then a wall through the middle, then dirty films upstairs and a governor’s signature that stopped them, then dark, then Casablanca, then dirty films again for nineteen years, then twenty-nine arrests in a weekend, then eleven years empty, then three hundred and twenty seats outdoors with no roof at all.

Nearly every city on this site lost its rooms to a rule or to home video. Worcester lost its last one to arithmetic, and the arithmetic was not close.