Dante Theatre

The Dante opened in the heart of Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood around 1910, and sat 300. It was located on Taylor Street at Halsted Street. The Dante is notable as the place where Chicago mobster Paul Ricca worked as a teenager as an usher, before being hired at the nearby mob-owned Bella Napoli restaurant as a waiter (where he got his future nickname, “The Waiter”).

Both the restaurant and the Dante Theatre, which had closed before 1945, were later demolished (along with a large chunk of the Little Italy neighborhood) to make way for the University of Illinois' Chicago campus (UIC).

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