On the 30th anniversary of its closing, Andy Pierce reminds us what's so magical about the Uptown Theatre

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Today, December 19th, marks the 30th anniversary of the day Chicago's famed Uptown Theatre closed its doors.  By the time I got around to it in the 1960's, the 4,300 seat former movie palace designed by Rapp & Rapp was past its prime.  Apart from the John Frankenheimer masterpiece, The Train, most of the films I saw there were unmemorable - The Ballad of Josie?  The Dave Clark Five in Having a Wild Weekend? - but I was always blown away by the grandeur, beauty, and sheer scale of the place.

 Since its closing, the Uptown has suffered the indignities of being owned by some of the city's most infamous slumlords, leaks, floods, freezes, neglect and decay.  In 2008, it was acquired by Jam Productions, which already books the Riviera across the street.  Last October, representatives from JAM, mayor Rahm Emanuel's office and freshman Chicago alderman Harry Osterman and James Cappleman met to discuss how a revived Uptown could anchor a new vision for an Uptown Entertainment Center.

In 2006, the price tag bandied about for fully restoring the Uptown was $30 to $40 million.  Today, it's more like $70 million.  If hope is to be had, it might be found in the examples of two New York City theaters, the 1929, 2800 seat Beacon, designed by Walter Ahlschalger, which withstood bad times and attempts to "improve" it into a disco to emerge as a beloved and active concert venue, despite being far from the Mid- Manhattan Theatre district.  Even more striking is the comparison to the 3,200 seat Loew's Kings Theater in Brooklyn, designed by the fame Chicago movie palace architects Rapp & Rapp, left to rot ever since it's 1977 closing.  Like the Uptown, those who cherished the theater battled to keep it alive for revival, and their efforts were rewarded in a project, launched last year for a 2014 completion, to restore the Loew's Kings to its former glory as the centerpiece of the renewal of the Flatbush shopping district.  The city of New York has committed $50 million to the project's expected $70 million cost.

This week's edition of Time Out Chicago has an excellent article by Andy Pierce, one of the people most instrumental in Friends of the Uptown. who have been tireless in championing saving the theater.  We're privileged to have Andy provide us his overview of the history, importance and future potential of the Uptown . . .

What makes a theater a movie palace?

At some point, almost any surviving vintage theater is referred to by fans or reporters as a “movie palace.”

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

 The long-closed Uptown Theater, 4816 N. Broadway, is truly an early example of the very large movie palaces of the mid-to-late 1920s. It is also one of the last great movie palaces to not yet be restored, renovated, radically altered or demolished.

Chicago’s remaining open and operating movie palaces -- used for live performances -- are the Riviera, Chicago, Congress and Oriental theaters. The Central Park has survived as a church since 1971 and the restored New Regal (originally Avalon) has been closed intermittently since 2003. [Note: Our Palace Theater was not a movie palace. Rather, it was built for Big-Time Orpheum Vaudeville.] 

Arguably the most profitable themed entertainment of the day, Balaban & Katz “presentation houses,” such as the Uptown, featured continuous performance of three or more shows daily; stage shows with themes, costumes and sets planned in consideration of the feature film; a full orchestra rising and falling on multiple stage lifts, with a conductor at the helm of projector speeds and tempos to keep on schedule and massive theatre organs to accompany the orchestra and provide the aural environments and voices for the early and yet-still-silent stars of the screen. 

In B&K’s deluxe presentation houses such as the Uptown, a system of colored cove lights controlled the accent lighting of the auditorium such that the audience was entirely encapsulated in the mood of the moment on screen; for example yellow for sunrise, red for war, blue for night, purple for love. 

Most of America’s movie palaces carried a Neo-Classical theme cohesively throughout their public spaces and were lavishly decorated not only with plaster relief but also with fanciful polychrome paint schemes, damask, drapes, elaborate chandeliers, antique oil paintings, marble sculpture groups and fountains. Patron comfort and service were augmented in the Uptown for example with amenities such as hat racks beneath seats, a parcel check, luxurious men’s and women’s lounges and a fanciful playroom with storybook themes for children. 

Grand entrance lobbies gave standees a place to wait behind ropes while the previous audience exited through other lobbies and ambulatories. A full, working stage with scenery, a theater pipe organ, and multiple thousands of seats in floor, mezzanine and balcony areas completed the movie palace formula over tens of thousands of square feet of real estate. 

By Popular Demand
Closed 30 Years, the Uptown is Ready for Revival 

Baptized in oil, labor and love, friends of Chicago’s historic Uptown Theater, 4816 N. Broadway, are recognizing a peculiar anniversary for one of the world’s largest and most lavish surviving movie palaces today, Monday, Dec. 19, with a letter-writing campaign. Please see the Uptown Theatre, Chicago, Facebook page for details: 

photograph:  Theatre Historical Society of America

While the Uptown has been closed for 30 of its 86 years, demolition by neglect was held at bay largely through the work of volunteers who kept the theater graffiti free as high as they could reach, who stoked her shopworn boiler and who kept the landmark interior as dry as possible, using patches upon patches of hydraulic cement to seal cracks in steel roof drains that had been pushed open by ice. Uptown’s 12 different roof surfaces drain through this system of pipes. The failure of this system in the arctic winters of the early 1980s allowed water to damage to some interior areas of ornate plaster ceilings and walls.

A final roll of Kodachrome captures a lost Chicago landmark

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On December 30th, Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, processed its final roll of Kodachrome film.  It was the last lab in the world to process the distinctive film stock whose vivid colors defined, for most of its 75 year life, the look of America's captured family memories.

About two weeks later, our correspondent Andy Pierce received his own package from Dwyane's - the prints of his last roll of undeveloped Kodachrome film.  Andy had actually forgotten what was on it, and so he was pleasantly surprised to find out they were of the now lost Hotel LaSalle Garage, now the site of the distinctively-trussed residential tower whose name takes the address of the garage: 215 West Washington.  Andy has graciously given us permission to share some of his striking, evocative photos of this distinctive work of Chicago architecture.

In the summer of 1918, the editor of the trade journal Hotel Monthly found himself "driven up what had every appearance of a mountain road, which rose in a spiral to the top of a five-story building."

The road is cement paved, ten feet wide, the spiral about 70 feet in diameter, and rising twelve feet to the floor; the grade one in twenty, or five per cent.  About every 200 feet the road emerges onto the garage floor, where it is widened and level for the space between entrance and exit to the enclosed spiral.  The driver tooted his horn to signal before entering or leaving each floor, the same as he would if turning a sharp corner on a mountain road.  It took only about a minute to negotiate the hill between the ground and the fifth floor.  An elevator large enough to take the biggest touring car is available for bringing the cars down.  This elevator shaft rises inside the spiral roadway.

The detail of the above description is almost comic.  Hadn't this guy ever seen

a parking garage before?

The answer, of course, is no, probably not.  This was the dawn of the automobile age, which more than any other factor, utterly transformed the American landscape and the urban experience.  The spiral he saw was probably the first of its kind.

When the LaSalle Hotel, designed by Holabird and Roche, opened in 1909, horses and stables still held their own in the streets of the city.  The 22-story-high, 1,000 room hotel was a true steel-framed skyscraper, but the Beaux Arts influence of the 1893 World's Fair still held sway.  The swank LaSalle was built to host presidents - both Taft Coolidge stayed here - and above and below 11 floors of Chicago School-like brick curtain wall enclosing the tight honeycomb of guest rooms, French Second Empire was chosen as the most appropriate design mode.  A massive Mansard roof capped the building's crown.

When, less than a decade later, it came time to accommodate not only guests but their automobiles as well, Holabird and Roche were called upon again, this time to design a parking garage about a block and a half from the hotel.  The garage tracked its guest the same way as the hotel, using the recently developed "room rack" system of ledger cards, one for each compartment, but since the inhabitants of the garage were not people but their machines, the facades of the garage echoed, not the hotel's overstuffed ostentation, but the clean lines of a classic Loop office building..  As described by the AIA Guide to Chicago:

 . .  . there is  nothing conventional  about the way the fifteen narrow bays  with their sash windows alternate with  the vigorous uninterrupted piers.    The wonderful rhythm is enhanced by the use of black Roman bricks as striping in the red facade and by crisply detailed spandrel panels.  A stringcourse above the shops and a well-proportioned cornice contain the design.

The AIA called it an "uncelebrated gem."  The city called it road kill.  Preservationists lobbied energetically to save it.  The staff of the Landmarks Commission prepared a report documenting its value.  Then the usual developers dance began.  Delay followed delay, as the owner resisted and allowed the building to continue to rot, so by the time the Planning Department brought down its heavy hand in November of 2004 to smash the Commission's efforts, all the parties that had actively abetted the garage's deterioration could shed crocodile tears, "Boo hoo, boo hoo.  Maybe it was worth saving, but golly gee, it's falling apart and now we have no choice but to gird our loins and let it die."  Rinse and repeat. (See: the Farwell Building and Van Osdel's 1894 YMCA Hotel.)

When Andy Pierce took the Kodachrome shots you see here, the building was already something of a spectre.  Somehow I doubt "1950's rec room" was the original style.

. . . although the locksmith's shack with the "Wanted" posters was actually a rather charming addition.

You could see that the place was already living on borrowed time.

 

. . . which became even more clear after it had been emptied out just before demolition.

 

 

With their faded Kodachrome palette, Andy's shots seem to capture the aura of the 21 grams - the supposed  weight of the soul - lingering in the air, invisible but insistent, for those last few heartbeats before the thing dissolves before your eyes and vanishes forever.