100 years of glory and decay

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

Before the Uptown Theatre opened its doors to the public on Aug. 18, 1925, advertisements in the Chicago Daily Tribune overflowed with hype for the city's newest and biggest movie palace.
'It will hush and thrill you,' one ad promised. 'It throbs with beauty.'
'It is one of the great art buildings of the world,' the Uptown's owners, Balaban & Katz, asserted in another ad. 'You have never seen such dignified luxury, such exquisite elegance as lives in its towering pillars, its mountainous ceilings, glowing colors, stately promenades, lounges, cosmetic rooms and smoking rooms.' The grand opening was touted as 'an event you will remember all your life.'
It wasn't mere hyperbole. This was one of the largest and most elaborately decorated movie theaters ever constructed.
The morning after the Uptown opened at 4816 N. Broadway, a Tribune movie critic reported that the 4,320-seat Uptown was even grander than downtown's 3,861-seat Chicago Theatre, which Balaban & Katz had opened four years earlier.
'It's a splendiferous palace of a place — the Chicago's dressy sister,' wrote Mae Tinée (a jokey pseudonym used at the time by Tribune critics). 'Don't ask me about the architecture because I don't know anything about architecture. But I do know that Sister Uptown … is lavish of space, decoration and comfort, is sumptuously furnished and is beautifully and softly lighted inside.'
The North Side's Uptown neighborhood held a festival to celebrate. Bands played on street corners, trapeze artists twirled overhead, and a daredevil set himself on fire before diving into a pool of water. Over six days, more than 500,000 people flocked to the streets around Broadway and Lawrence Avenue, according to the Tribune. (Another publication pegged the attendance at 750,000.) Those crowds included an estimated 150,000 people who went inside the movie palace that week.
Balaban & Katz, a chain owned by two families from Chicago's West Side, had been building bigger and bigger theaters as Americans spent an increasing amount of their leisure time at the movies. After constructing the Central Park Theatre on the West Side in 1917, B&K had opened the Riviera on the North Side, the Tivoli on the South Side and the Chicago Theatre in the Loop.
Then the company spent $4 million (roughly $73 million in today's money) creating the mammoth Uptown right across the street from the Riviera — motivated, apparently, by the desire to open an even bigger theater.
The Chicago architectural firm Rapp & Rapp designed all of the movie palaces for B&K. As architect George Leslie Rapp explained, the ornate buildings gave everyone a chance to experience what it was like to step inside a European castle.
The Uptown cast a spell on visitors with giant chandeliers, colored glass windows, tapestries and bronze clocks, to name just a few of its countless decorative touches. 'The fanciful heads of Renaissance Cupids, fantastic gargoyles, griffins, the laughing heads of mythological gods and jolly demons grimace in friendly humor,' according to a promotional Balaban & Katz magazine.
'These are not impractical attempts at showing off,' architect George Leslie Rapp said. 'Here is a shrine to democracy where there are no privileged patrons. The wealthy rub elbows with the poor — and are better for this contact.'
A.J. Balaban, one of B&K's owners, said he envisioned the theaters as a 'meeting place of the aristocrat and humble worker.'
The company's movie palaces, including the Uptown, were among the first theaters anywhere equipped with air conditioning — a major attraction during an era when people didn't have AC in their homes. B&K's magazine said the Uptown contained 'complex yet never failing machinery that you never see, shining engines that change the air in the theatre every two minutes, wash the air, cool the air, rewash the air, temper it exactly to your comfort.'
The Uptown's lobbies, filled with sculptures, paintings and fancy furniture, were vast enough to hold thousands of people waiting for the next show. The Uptown's staff of 131 employees included 23 uniformed ushers working with military precision as they guided audience members to seats.
Movies were just one portion of the show. At the Uptown's grand opening, classical musicians performed on an elevator platform that rose out of the basement. The Oriole Orchestra got things jumping with some jazz. Spanish dancers graced the stage. And the popular organist Jesse Crawford played the Uptown's giant Wurlitzer. When it was finally time for the feature film, a silent romance and adventure called 'The Lady Who Lied,' the orchestra provided a live soundtrack.
The Tribune's Mae Tinée didn't care much for the film, complaining that 'it drags interminably,' but as the Chicago Daily News observed: 'The throngs paid more attention to the theater than to the picture.'
In an Aug. 19 ad, Balaban & Katz proclaimed: 'All Chicago stormed the Uptown Theatre yesterday. Its opening was the most gigantic thing since Armistice Day. From North Side, South Side, West Side, and far, far up the North Shore, they came and couldn't believe their eyes. … The new theatre swept the entire city off its feet.'
But just a few years later, the movie business faced major upheaval, as 1927's 'The Jazz Singer' ushered in the era of sound films. Soon, there was no need for an orchestra or organist to play during screenings. The Uptown continued presenting live entertainment for a while — including the Marx Brothers in 1928 and Duke Ellington in 1931 — but that became less common after the Great Depression hurt ticket sales in the early 1930s.
Amid the economic devastation, Balaban & Katz and other theater chains stopped building movie palaces. By the 1950s, as movie attendance plummeted and Americans spent more time watching television, huge theaters like the Uptown seemed like relics.
Looking for new ways to attract audiences, the Uptown added closed-circuit television equipment in 1951, occasionally showing special events such as operas and boxing matches. And the theater installed a 70-foot-wide CinemaScope screen in 1954, turning movies into panoramic spectacles.
But when a Tribune reporter visited the Uptown in 1968, it was looking dingy. 'Dust now covers peeling gold wallpaper in the quiet balconies, and bits of cracked plaster have fallen on once colorful tapestry rugs,' reporter Edith Herman wrote.
The theater's glamour faded further when many of its artworks and furnishings were auctioned off in 1969 and 1970.
Things started to look up in 1975 when Jam Productions began presenting rock concerts there, starting with the Tubes on Oct. 31. Over the next six years, the Uptown hosted the era's most popular musicians, from Bruce Springsteen and Rod Stewart to the Grateful Dead, who played there 17 times.
And yet, the theater continued to fall into disrepair. Its final show, a concert by the J. Geils Band, was on Dec. 19, 1981. It has been closed ever since.
In the early 1980s, some of the building's pipes burst, damaging portions of interior walls. Volunteers pitched in to prevent further deterioration.
After the Uptown passed through several owners, it was purchased in 2008 by a partnership led by Jerry Mickelson of Jam Productions. In 2018, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a $75 million plan to reopen the Uptown, but the project faltered as Mickelson tried to line up investors.
As the Uptown's 100th birthday approached, Mickelson said he's seeking the city's commitment to support renovations with tax increment financing or other funding and incentives.
'The Uptown Theatre must be saved because it's one of the most extraordinary and historically significant movie palaces ever built — not just in Chicago, but anywhere in the United States,' Mickelson said in a July 31 email. 'Saving the Uptown is about more than saving bricks, plaster and history. It's about creating jobs and opportunities at the theatre for our youth. … It's about honoring Chicago's place as a birthplace of movie palaces. And it's about choosing hope over cynicism. Letting it rot would be easy. Bringing it back to life will be bold — and deeply worth it.'