Pinehurst Drive-In

The Pinehurst Drive-In was an outdoor movie theatre on about twelve acres at the corner of Boston Road and Cook Street in Pinehurst, between the road and the Shawsheen River. It held about 500 cars in front of a single screen and had a playground. The land had been Pinehurst Park, the trolley park of 1901 with its dance pavilion.

Elizabeth K. McHugh, whose family had owned the park since 1913, sold the land to the Pinehurst Amusement Center, Inc. of Boston by a deed of July 31, 1951. The new lot, Lot 1 on Fred A. Joyce's Land Court plan of that month, ran 526 feet along Cook Street and back to the river, leaving out the McHugh corner at Cook Street and two small lots on Boston Road. The theatre was built that summer and fall: on August 1, 1951 the company gave a $40,000 mortgage to Aldrich S. Forward, and in October Standard Electrical Service of Providence attached the property for $10,000 in an action of contract. The selectmen reported that year that "with the cooperation of the Pinehurst Amusement Company" they had relocated Cook Street "at a great saving to the Town." In May 1952 the company deeded the town a right of way over a thirty-foot strip of its land as the way to the new playground that John A. Akeson had given on the river, now Akeson Field. The 1957 directory lists the Pinehurst Drive In on Boston Road among the theatres of the Lowell area, with Aldrich S. Forward of Winchester as its operator.

The company was short of money through the 1950s. Its land carried mortgages to Kane Discount of Boston (1952), the First National Bank of Boston (1954), the McHughs (1956), William B. Sleigh Jr. and others (1957) and the Atlantic Corporation (1958), and federal tax liens, an attachment by the Hub Building Wrecking Company (1954) and attachments by the film distributors Columbia Pictures (1958) and United Artists (1958). In November 1960 Louis Richmond of Brookline, who had bought the 1957 Sleigh mortgage, foreclosed it and took the title.

In later years the drive-in was run by the E. M. Loew's theatre chain. In 1962 the town laid a 42-inch pipe in the brook behind the theatre. Its screen burned about 1973 and was replaced, and Billerica high school seniors of the 1970s and early 1980s remembered nights at the Pinehurst Drive-In in their yearbooks. It closed in 1982 and was torn down. In June 1983 the land passed to the Pinehurst Business Trust, which built the two long office and research buildings of 780 Boston Road in 1984; the trust's Land Court plan of January 1986 (Plan 3717-G) shows them standing on the old drive-in lot.

References

1. Cinema Treasures: Pinehurst Drive-In, Boston Road and Cook Street, approximately 786 Boston Road; an E. M. Loew's theatre; demolished, now an office park; link to a 1971 aerial photograph
2. Drive-ins.com: Pinehurst Drive-In, Billerica, 500 cars, one screen, playground; screen burned and replaced about 1973; closed and torn down 1982; now an office park
3. Burlington Retro (April 2023): Pinehurst Drive-In advertisement, Billerica, 1973
4. Town report 1951, selectmen: Cook Street relocated "with the cooperation of the Pinehurst Amusement Company ... at a great saving to the Town"
5. Town warrant 1952, Article 57: gift of a right of way over a thirty-foot strip of land of the Pinehurst Amusement Center, Inc. to the town playground on the Shawsheen River, deed dated May 21, 1952
6. Town report 1962, highway department: "installed 42 inch pipe in brook at rear of Pinehurst Drive-In Theatre"

Title References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted; Probate # is a Middlesex probate case, Ctf a Land Court certificate of title.