Milda Theater
3140 S. Halsted Street,
Chicago,
IL
60616
3140 S. Halsted Street,
Chicago,
IL
60616
3 people
favorited this theater
The over 900-seat Milda Theatre opened in 1914, in the then-mostly Irish Bridgeport neighborhood on South Halsted Street, between 31st and 32nd Streets.
It closed sometime during the 1950’s, and has since been demolished. An office building sits on or near its former location today.
Contributed by
Bryan Krefft
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Recent comments (view all 9 comments)
Nothing sits on it’s former location. Bah!
Was the Milda on the lot whare the doughnut shop was on the corner of 31st And Halsted?
In 1973 the First Run Comedy Theater staged a series of plays at the Milda.
This is from the Ethnic History of Bridgeport. Last paragraph mentions this theater:
“Antanas Olsauskas (or Olszewski, pronounced Olshevski) was the prime force in developing the Lithuanian "downtown” in Bridgeport. Polish and Lithuanian immigrants came to Chicago with all but no business experience (even though some had come as exiles and were educated).
There was a cultural bias against such pursuits. Thus leaders such as Olsauskas had to overcome not only the difficulties of the business world, but also popular resistance to the very notion. Olsauskas founded the first Lithuanian bank in Chicago in 1896. He was followed by another Bridgeport leader, Jonas Tananevicius (or Tananevicze), who established a second bank in 1898 at 3244 south Morgan street.
Tananevicius also ran an insurance agency, travel bureau, and publishing outfit. Olsauskas operated a clothing store, the Milda cinema, a travel bureau, an auto agency, a contracting firm, a book store, a publishing company, and the newspaper Lietuva (Lithuania). As a contractor, he was responsible for building most of the commercial structures that were built on Halsted street between Thirty-first and Thirty-fifth streets from about the late 1890s to World War I.
The Milda was actually further down the block from the intersection of 31st and Halsted. David’s Restaurant and Governor’s Table were at the corner location for years before being destroyed by a fire sometime in the 1980s. The Dunkin Donuts mini strip mall was built there not long after that, but that’s also gone. A new police station is being built on that location (taking up most of the block).
Here is a 1982 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/cjob4n
I’m writing a book about the history of Bridgeport for Arcadia Publishing that will be published mid 2010.
Please contact me if you have any of the Wallace or any Bridgeport theaters. I have some of the Ramova, Milda and The Eagle, but would like to see any and all pictures that you have and are willing to share of all of the 12-13 theaters of Bridgeport’s past.
On a really sad note, Nancy of Nancy’s Best Little Hair House passed away his past week. The Wallace theater building has been for sale for the last few months too.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Maureen-
Relative the comment of Aug 17, 2008. If the city is having such intensive budget problems that the Mayor had to lease out the parking meters, how is it that so many massive new police stations are being built around the city?
This has nothing to do with theatres, I realize. But I wonder if anyone has insight that I am missing.
I found the Milda Theatre mentioned in Boxoffice as recently as the issue of October 23, 1961, so it was apparently still in operation at that time. Here’s the whole one-line item: “John Semadalis, owenr of the Romova and Milda theatres, returned from a visit to Greece.”
Boxoffice frequently misspelled the name of the Ramova Theatre, but it’s interesting that as far back as the 1930s, the Milda and Ramova were frequently mentioned together, and were apparently for much of their history under the same ownership.