Ten or so years ago,
I inherited a scrapbook from my mother. She had compiled it in the 1930s when
she lived with her parents and sister in the Boston area. The whole family
loved the theatre (not “theater,” mind you…); they went often, and my mother
pasted programs and flyers into her scrapbook faithfully—a perfect historical
record.
In 1936 or so, she
went to the Plymouth Theatre (on Stuart Street in Boston) to see “Boy Meets
Girl,” a new play in three acts by Bella and Samuel Spewack; she pasted the
program into her scrapbook—a program that contained advertisements for Boston
eateries, and there were plenty of them: Ye Old Pub (so close to the Plymouth
Theatre that they had a 2-minute curtain bell installed at the bar); Ye Old
Oyster House (right next door); the Copley Square Hotel bar; the Blue Room at the
Hotel Westminster, the Embassy…
…you went to the theatre, you went out
for a drink and/or a bite to eat afterwards.
That’s just what you did.
One of my mother’s
favorite places to go after a performance was the Hotel Touraine, a residential
hotel on the corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets in the theater district of
Boston—a big brick and limestone building with a café and bar.
The Café Royal had
luncheon plates for 55 cents; dinners cost 75 cents, and were served from 5
until closing. The Touraine also had (according to this flyer) “the most
beautiful cocktail bar in Boston,” although in November of 1936, my mother was
barely seventeen years old, so I doubt she was cruising the tables.
One of her possessions was a coffee server from the Hotel Touraine…I have no idea how she
got it (I can’t, in my wildest moments, believe she actually might have stolen
it). It’s heavy silverplate; it has “Hotel Touraine” and a manufacturing number
stamped on the bottom.
I keep it in my dining room, polish it
faithfully.
As for Boston’s Hotel
Touraine, it closed in 1966 and was converted into an apartment building
