Woods Theatre

DAL on August 10, 2015 at 10:45 am

If being demolished is considered adaptive use in architectural design, then I guest the people who designed the Woods might smile. The building that stands where the Woods was is new construction.

neeb on July 8, 2014 at 9:10 am

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/07/the-end-of-the-chicagos-maje.html

Article about the last night of the Woods. Has a few internal photos.

Tim O'Neill on April 27, 2013 at 2:12 am

http://youtu.be/DzdnTOgi2-4

DaveTracz on February 13, 2012 at 4:16 pm

Yes. The facade of the Oliver Typewriter Building still stands, but the windows are blacked out as it is now the back wall of the restored Oriental’s stage. Restoration wasn’t viable unless the stage could be enlarged to accomodate the big touring Broadway productions.

Broan on July 27, 2011 at 8:31 pm

Here is a 1964 view

TLSLOEWS on May 9, 2011 at 7:47 pm

WOW what a great page.Lots of photos and history,I do not know how I have missed this one till now.

Mark_L on April 26, 2011 at 7:00 pm

Looking closely at the marquee of The Woods, it looks like the theatre was playing THE HAPPY THEIVES with Rita Hayworth and Rex Harrison. IMDB shows a release date of this of December, 1961.

Sure are some BIG cars parked on that street!

teddy666 on March 29, 2011 at 11:31 am

I would love to see the interior of this theater.

Tim O'Neill on March 18, 2011 at 1:21 am

Rich, I think you saw this double feature somewhere else. Believe me……The Woods Theatre NEVER showed an Ingmar Bergman movie in the 1970s. Maybe you saw this double bill at the Esquire or Playboy, but at the Woods………….no way.

CSWalczak on February 4, 2011 at 5:56 pm

A picture of the theater in 1964 taken from under the marquee of the United Artists diagonally opposite: View link It is interesting, after looking at all the photos that have been posted, how many stores and restaurants occupied that corner space.

DavidZornig on August 14, 2010 at 12:18 am

By the way, the film on the Woods marquee in “Mickey One” was “The Cardinal”. Which is the first film on JRS40’s 05/04/07 list of movies.
“Mickey One” itself would later play at the Woods as well when it was first released. Starting 10/27/65, according to the same list above.
Another notable Chicago site in the film was the old Gate Of Horn nightclub on the S/E corner Dearborn & Chicago Ave. Which doubled as a place called Xanadu in the film.
A club where Lenny Bruce had played and I believe was later arrested in.

LouisRugani on July 29, 2010 at 11:28 am

Now Not Showing

When The Last Loop Movie Theater Closed In January, A Cultural Dinosaur Had Finally Breathed Its Last
(Chicago Tribune Magazine, July 2, 1989)

Essay by Paul Gapp, the Tribune`s architecture critic.

In Chicago and across America, downtown movie palaces were the dinosaurs of 20th Century architecture. They burst onto the urban scene in baroque splendor, multiplied, then sank into decay and died. Today, the relatively few that survive are gawked at like so many reconstructed brontosauri.

Still, the short history of their heyday does not diminish their importance as nostalgia-heavy icons and reminders of other losses. As the movie palaces declined and disappeared, so did such things as our old sense of wonder and innocence and our middle-class formality.

Chicagoans saw their first one-reel films around the turn of the century in storefronts, rented halls and even mortuaries that were pressed into temporary service by itinerant projectionists. The magic of moving pictures at first made audiences insensible to their surroundings.

Yet the flickering black-and-white images had finite allure. For more than 20 years they were silent, after all, and theater owners gradually employed piano players, organists and live stage shows to enhance the mute acting of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford.

Out of this need for embellishing the silent film grew the elaborately scaled and spectacularly ornamented movie palace. True, there had been fancy opera houses and legitimate theaters long before 1900, but nothing like the architectural extravaganzas so calculatedly aimed at mass audiences. Splashy theater design was almost as important to the box office as the artistic product on the screen.

In Chicago`s Loop, sound films were still nine years distant when the State-Lake and the Woods Theaters were built in 1917. Silent screens remained the rule when the Roosevelt and the Chicago opened in 1921. The first scratchy sound was just coming into use when the Oriental, United Artists and the Palace (a part of the Bismarck Hotel) were built in 1926.

These thousands of downtown Chicago movie-house seats were practically sold out on many weekend nights in pre-World War II days, and theaters were almost as full the rest of the week. Summertime crowds often came for the air- conditioning as much as anything else, since few other buildings were cooled.

Practically everyone, including people of the most modest means, dressed up for the downtown movie excursions-men in suits and ties, women in dresses and youngsters in their Sunday best. Their decorum as well as their costume was formal by today`s standards, yet it somehow fit the luxuriousness of movie-palace surroundings. The big theater was a place of escape for the common citizen. Everyone could feel like a big shot in so sumptuous a setting, as unbelievable as that may seem to the younger of us today. And during the grim Depression of the 1930s, what better way to forget reality for a few hours?

The decline of the downtown movie houses, beginning in the 1960s, was a sordidly messy business in Chicago and practically every other big city. Kung- fu and other low-budget, low-IQ fare was the rule. In lobbies originally intended to resemble Versailles or the Paris Opera, hot dogs rotated on spits and patrons played at pinball machines or video games. The jokes about sticky floors were all true, and rats as well as plainclothes security personnel roamed the aisles.

Virtually every downtown Chicago movie palace was officially doomed to demolition by the North Loop urban-renewal plan concocted in the 1970s, but economics and real estate developers beat the city to the punch. The theaters closed before the city could tear them down, and in January of this year the last screen went dark when the Woods closed its doors. That left only the restored but financially shaky Chicago Theatre, which in any case is now a venue for stage shows, not cinema.

Today, people dressed in the surreally chic, factory-faded sport clothes of the 1980s pay upwards of $10 to sit in a tiny contemporary movie theater while devouring bulimia-size containers of popcorn and soft drinks and watching screen fare heavy on dismemberment and sexual coupling. Where architectural splendor once compensated for the silence of films, food now fills the vacuum created by the sterility of theaters. The downtown dinosaurs are dead, and those who personally remember the glory days of picture palaces are fading away as well.