As a publicity stunt, it was announced that the top of the tower had a mooring fitting for dirigibles… just in case the crew wanted to stop by for a movie!
I loved the Majestic before it was sold and converted, except for one thing; I’ve never been in a theater with the rows of seats so damned close together! My knees were FIRMLY dug into the back of the seat in front. That theater HAD to have been designed for an audience of MIDGETS!!!
While that wasn’t a real biggie for ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, just imagine the AGONY of sitting through ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA and 1900 !!!
It took me DAYS tor recover from those tortures! <<grin>>
When I was a student at Northland College (mid 1970s) the Bay saved my sanity MANY a time! It was the ONLY source of first run stuff east of Duluth.
Among first runs I saw there… THE EXORCIST THE GODFATHER THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER BATTLE OF BRITAIN (tho that one was really a re-release) GONE WITH THE WIND (ditto, obviously).
For a Chicago city kid stuck in the Nort Woods for the first time, the Bay was like a lifeboat!
Yep, you’ve got that street lineup about right! When I was a kid tho, the pool room or tavern had given way to a small bowling alley.
I wish I’d known the Wimpy’s; NEVER had any love for White Castle! I’m probably the ONLY ex-Chicagoan who DOESNT have any fond rememberances or respect for “sliders”! ;o)
Lately I’ve been playing around with GOOGLE EARTH, and have gone over the detailed, high resolution aerial photography of that area with it. Things have SURE changed! What would be great on that system (if they’ve got the server space) would be if they could add older photography, and allow you to look over the are perhaps a decade at a time to see the changes.
And yes, I caught that cigarette bit in THE DEFIANT ONES! A definite continuity goof if there ever was one! <<grin>>
It’s very odd, and probably a sign that I’m entering Old Fartdom here, but at night I find myself dreaming more and more of Englewood and Chicago in general the way it used to be back then. The REALLY strange thing about the dreams is that Chicago and The Emerald City in THE WIZARD OF OZ are very much alike.
Guess I’ve gotta lay off of the chili before bedtime! ;o)
Thanks for the tip on the book; I’ll have to get a copy of it! As I
get older, it seems like the bad old days down there are getting a
remaking into NOT such bad old days!
The early history of Englewood (long before I came along) is becoming
intriguing to me. Recently, the Tom Hanks movie ROAD TO PERDITION had
a reference to Englewood that I’m SURE is inaccurate; there is a
sequence where Hanks stops at a diner in Englewood (the name is
plastered acrosee the front in huge letters). The diner is out in the
middle of farming country; since the movie is set in the 1920s, I
doubt that’s accurate. More likely, that sort of scene would be about
10 – 15 years earlier.
There’s another picture I saw, but haven’t been able to run down yet,
wherein a man pursued by the police was fleeing Chicago by rail, and
was headed for the village of Englewood. They even had a pretty good
and accurate period representation of the Englewood station platform,
circa 1895 or there abouts. Ironic that a criminal should flee there,
considering what was next to it!
BTW… while it’s somewhat depressing, you can take a virtual tour
of your old neighborhood! The Cook County Assessor’s Office has put
up digital photos of nearly EVERY property in it’s realm, searchable
by address.
I was able to find a picture of the old Lynn Theater there (1044 W.
63rd street), and the picture of the Rex Theater (6846 S. Racine)
came from there. The pictures seem to be circa 2003 and 2004.
I’ve got a photo of the Lynn Theater as it appears circa 2004. It appears that the church that now owns the place has expanded into the businesses that were on either side (no more Pig Pen Barbecue!!!), and it has been remodeled to blend them into the original structure, giving it a total frontage of 75' (as compared to the original 25'). It also appears that the 2nd floor apartment above the old theater has been removed somewhere along the way during remodeling of the building.
When the system picture upload utility is again online, I’ll add it to this entry.
A VERY tiny theater indeed! Last time I saw it, the place was sandwiched between a used car lot and a barbecue pit (the Pig Pen… I used to LOVE thier stuff!). The front of the building looks like it was built on the standard size lot for that area, 25' x 125'! Don’t know if the building goes all the way to the back of the lot; I’d be very surprised if it does. Location is actually in the middle of the block between Carpenter and Aberdeen. A number of church congregations have used the building since it’s closure as a theater. I seriously doubt that the theater was operating after 1953.
I have to disagree with the synopsis. I grew up a few blocks from the REX in the 1960s, and back then it was closed too. Better guess of the closing might be the 1950s.
Ah… ANOTHER person who remembers the “old” Englewood!
I left Englewood in 1972 to go to college. I’d graduated Chicago Vocational in 1967, and after picking up stray courses here and there at the City College system, I finally decided there was no future for me in Chicago, let alone Englewood, that would do me any good.
The shopping area finally went into the last downward spiral when Sears closed the store at 63rd & Halstead; when they tore that down, it was all over. Wieboldt’s closed up too, and L. Fish followed soon after. That’s when the ENGLEWOOD, the EMPRESS, and all the rest finally closed up, tho the SOUTHTOWN had closed as a venue in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I remember that the last movie I saw at the SOUTHTOWN was James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Liz Taylor in GIANT (it was first run at the time, so there’s a time reference). By that time, the lobby fountain and the ducks were gone, tho from earlier I remember that those ducks were downright VICIOUS (I guess from too many kids like me who tried to pet them), and the ushers nervously tried HARD to keep the kids seperated from those meat eating birds!
Memory may be a bit faulty after all these years… seems to me that west of the China Clipper there was a big Kroger store, and the ubiquitous White Castle. And I especially remember the Rock Island railroad tracks just east of the SOUTHTOWN. Chicago was still a prosperous manufacturing giant then in the middle of the postwar boom. Every few minutes another steam locomotive would go pounding past at full throttle, rushing toward the center of the city with another freight train.
The last time I was at the ENGLEWOOD was on my first date (about 14). Not a real big success, but I remember a great many other trips there… I remember seeing THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE there, as well as MANY others… AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, MR. SARDONICUS, and I especially remeber PSYCHO; the projectionist had a GOOD time with that one. He deliberately ran the audio level low, but suddenly cranked it up wide open at the start of the shower scene! That wierd music hitting you full blast caused the entire audience to dive under the seats in sheer terror!!!
The EMPRESS… there were others I saw there, but the only one that stands out in my memory was the first movie I saw there, THE DEFIANT ONES with Tony Curtis & Sidney Portier.
When I graduated high school, about the only movie theater I dealt with was the BIOGRAPH up on Lincoln Avenue; it was the time of long haired Hippies, and that was the area where we all hung out. The south side became passe; the near north side was where it was all happening.
When my father passed away in 1995, I finally sold out the old house and that was pretty much it for my involvement with Englewood… and none too soon. The neighborhood where I’d grown up had become a gang infested battleground full of crack houses after a long, slow 25 year slide.
Yes, I very well remember the pool in Ogden Park… swam in it many times. A couple of buddies and I almost got arrested there when I was a teenager; we decided to go over the fence & take a swim at 3:00 AM! Amazingly, we somehow managed to NOT get spotted by the patrol; I stayed under water at the deep end until they quit shining the squad car spotlight on the water!
You no doubt remember the bad old days of “blockbusting”… we were only the second Black family to move on the block in 1952. On one side was the Lizdes Family (Lithuanians), and on the other was the Reagans (Irish). A year after we moved in somebody on the other side of Ogden Park decided that Blacks in the neighborhood had gone about far enough and decided to do something about it; on about the 6500 block of Loomis, somebody tossed a dynamite bomb thru the front window of a house that a Black family had just moved into. Inside of 5 years, 95% of the Whites moved out of the neighborhood.
I was through the area about 3 years ago. EVERYTHING is changed, and yes, Thomas Wolf has it pegged exactly. About the only thing that hadn’t changed was my old grade school; Perkins Bass Elementary School (66th & May) looks EXACTLY the way it did when I first went there, except for an addition added in the 1960s.
The whole city has changed, and IMHO, not for the better.
I went to college in northern Wisconsin, DEEP in the north woods! Overnight I changed from a city kid to someone who loved walleye fishing and deer hunting. If I could have stayed there without starving to death (the unemployment rates are unbelievable), I’d have stayed forever. As it is, I had to compromise; I live in Madison, Wisconsin now.
The LINDEN… THAT one is WAY before my time. I don’t remember it at all.
One thing I DO remember about the SOUTHTOWN; just a bit west of it was The China Clipper restaurant, the BEST place (and about the ONLY place) for Chinese in Englewood. As a kid, I LOVED the place because of the advertising painting on an outside wall… a huge mural of a Boeing 337 amphibian, the plane that Pan Am used on the China Clipper route.
Apparently The Clipper had been there during the Vaudeville days; next to the cash register was a photo of Eddie Cantor having a meal there!
On the KIM tho… I vividly remember something from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old (early 1950s, probably about 1953). There was a large multistory building a few doors down the street, toward 63rd street. The building caught fire one night… VERY spectacular, totally out of control. I guess it lit up the sky & got the attention of my mother & sister; they walked 6 or 8 blocks to see it (we lived at 66th & Aberdeen street), and they took me along. BIG crowd watching the blaze… and suddenly mass retching from the crowd because of a horrible smell that went up. It seems that some of the occupants had tried to escape thge building when it caught fire, and they made a bad mistake; they used the elevator. Power went off, trapping them there… and the fire eventually reached it.
BTW, on another somewhat grotesque note… whoever did comments on the SOUTHTOWN confirmed something I’ve recently gotten interested in.
Across 63rd street from the SOUTHTOWN is a huge post office. I couldn’t place it precisely before, but the post office is built on the site of the old Mudgett “Murder Castle” from before the turn of the 20th century. Somebody here confirmed my suspicion that it’s the exact location.
I’ve since found information that the post office has a LONG reputation for supernatural activity… it’s haunted!
I remember as a kid that I was NEVER comfortable in that place; nothing specific, but uneasy, sort of. I suppose that kids are more sensitive to that sort of thing, and it SURE threw up red flags with me!
I only saw one film at the Biograph, back in the early 1970s… A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVITCH. Don’t remember the last of the film tho; I and the Lady I was with had smoked our brains out on weed before coming in, and we fell asleep! <<grin>>
Back then, the whole area was a hippie hangout; right across the street was the old folk music club, “Somebody Else’s Troubles”.
Gawd… I remember the KIM very well (to quote Bette Davis, “What a dump!”), and the EMPRESS, and the ENGLEWOOD, and I even saw a few films at the SOUTHTOWN before they wrecked it… err… turned it into Carr’s Department Store.! I grew up in Englewood in the 1950s. Oddly tho, I don’t remeber the STRATFORD at all.
As a publicity stunt, it was announced that the top of the tower had a mooring fitting for dirigibles… just in case the crew wanted to stop by for a movie!
Yes, that’s the infamous post office, built on the former site of the Holms Murder Castle.
Just a guess re. the year… based on the cars, I’d say maybe 1945 – 1950.
I loved the Majestic before it was sold and converted, except for one thing; I’ve never been in a theater with the rows of seats so damned close together! My knees were FIRMLY dug into the back of the seat in front. That theater HAD to have been designed for an audience of MIDGETS!!!
While that wasn’t a real biggie for ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, just imagine the AGONY of sitting through ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA and 1900 !!!
It took me DAYS tor recover from those tortures! <<grin>>
When I was a student at Northland College (mid 1970s) the Bay saved my sanity MANY a time! It was the ONLY source of first run stuff east of Duluth.
Among first runs I saw there… THE EXORCIST THE GODFATHER THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER BATTLE OF BRITAIN (tho that one was really a re-release) GONE WITH THE WIND (ditto, obviously).
For a Chicago city kid stuck in the Nort Woods for the first time, the Bay was like a lifeboat!
Hello Chuckie!
Yep, you’ve got that street lineup about right! When I was a kid tho, the pool room or tavern had given way to a small bowling alley.
I wish I’d known the Wimpy’s; NEVER had any love for White Castle! I’m probably the ONLY ex-Chicagoan who DOESNT have any fond rememberances or respect for “sliders”! ;o)
Lately I’ve been playing around with GOOGLE EARTH, and have gone over the detailed, high resolution aerial photography of that area with it. Things have SURE changed! What would be great on that system (if they’ve got the server space) would be if they could add older photography, and allow you to look over the are perhaps a decade at a time to see the changes.
And yes, I caught that cigarette bit in THE DEFIANT ONES! A definite continuity goof if there ever was one! <<grin>>
It’s very odd, and probably a sign that I’m entering Old Fartdom here, but at night I find myself dreaming more and more of Englewood and Chicago in general the way it used to be back then. The REALLY strange thing about the dreams is that Chicago and The Emerald City in THE WIZARD OF OZ are very much alike.
Guess I’ve gotta lay off of the chili before bedtime! ;o)
Quixote
Hello Gerry!
Thanks for the tip on the book; I’ll have to get a copy of it! As I
get older, it seems like the bad old days down there are getting a
remaking into NOT such bad old days!
The early history of Englewood (long before I came along) is becoming
intriguing to me. Recently, the Tom Hanks movie ROAD TO PERDITION had
a reference to Englewood that I’m SURE is inaccurate; there is a
sequence where Hanks stops at a diner in Englewood (the name is
plastered acrosee the front in huge letters). The diner is out in the
middle of farming country; since the movie is set in the 1920s, I
doubt that’s accurate. More likely, that sort of scene would be about
10 – 15 years earlier.
There’s another picture I saw, but haven’t been able to run down yet,
wherein a man pursued by the police was fleeing Chicago by rail, and
was headed for the village of Englewood. They even had a pretty good
and accurate period representation of the Englewood station platform,
circa 1895 or there abouts. Ironic that a criminal should flee there,
considering what was next to it!
BTW… while it’s somewhat depressing, you can take a virtual tour
of your old neighborhood! The Cook County Assessor’s Office has put
up digital photos of nearly EVERY property in it’s realm, searchable
by address.
View link
I was able to find a picture of the old Lynn Theater there (1044 W.
63rd street), and the picture of the Rex Theater (6846 S. Racine)
came from there. The pictures seem to be circa 2003 and 2004.
Quixote
I’ve got a photo of the Lynn Theater as it appears circa 2004. It appears that the church that now owns the place has expanded into the businesses that were on either side (no more Pig Pen Barbecue!!!), and it has been remodeled to blend them into the original structure, giving it a total frontage of 75' (as compared to the original 25'). It also appears that the 2nd floor apartment above the old theater has been removed somewhere along the way during remodeling of the building.
When the system picture upload utility is again online, I’ll add it to this entry.
One more detail… the theater has an apartment on the second floor… apparently, a SMALL appartment.
The synopsis says the theater seated 300. NO WAY!!! Half that figure would be stuffing the place to the rafters!
Does anybody know what was playing there the day Oswald was captured?
A VERY tiny theater indeed! Last time I saw it, the place was sandwiched between a used car lot and a barbecue pit (the Pig Pen… I used to LOVE thier stuff!). The front of the building looks like it was built on the standard size lot for that area, 25' x 125'! Don’t know if the building goes all the way to the back of the lot; I’d be very surprised if it does. Location is actually in the middle of the block between Carpenter and Aberdeen. A number of church congregations have used the building since it’s closure as a theater. I seriously doubt that the theater was operating after 1953.
I have to disagree with the synopsis. I grew up a few blocks from the REX in the 1960s, and back then it was closed too. Better guess of the closing might be the 1950s.
Hello Gerry!
Ah… ANOTHER person who remembers the “old” Englewood!
I left Englewood in 1972 to go to college. I’d graduated Chicago Vocational in 1967, and after picking up stray courses here and there at the City College system, I finally decided there was no future for me in Chicago, let alone Englewood, that would do me any good.
The shopping area finally went into the last downward spiral when Sears closed the store at 63rd & Halstead; when they tore that down, it was all over. Wieboldt’s closed up too, and L. Fish followed soon after. That’s when the ENGLEWOOD, the EMPRESS, and all the rest finally closed up, tho the SOUTHTOWN had closed as a venue in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I remember that the last movie I saw at the SOUTHTOWN was James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Liz Taylor in GIANT (it was first run at the time, so there’s a time reference). By that time, the lobby fountain and the ducks were gone, tho from earlier I remember that those ducks were downright VICIOUS (I guess from too many kids like me who tried to pet them), and the ushers nervously tried HARD to keep the kids seperated from those meat eating birds!
Memory may be a bit faulty after all these years… seems to me that west of the China Clipper there was a big Kroger store, and the ubiquitous White Castle. And I especially remember the Rock Island railroad tracks just east of the SOUTHTOWN. Chicago was still a prosperous manufacturing giant then in the middle of the postwar boom. Every few minutes another steam locomotive would go pounding past at full throttle, rushing toward the center of the city with another freight train.
The last time I was at the ENGLEWOOD was on my first date (about 14). Not a real big success, but I remember a great many other trips there… I remember seeing THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE there, as well as MANY others… AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, MR. SARDONICUS, and I especially remeber PSYCHO; the projectionist had a GOOD time with that one. He deliberately ran the audio level low, but suddenly cranked it up wide open at the start of the shower scene! That wierd music hitting you full blast caused the entire audience to dive under the seats in sheer terror!!!
The EMPRESS… there were others I saw there, but the only one that stands out in my memory was the first movie I saw there, THE DEFIANT ONES with Tony Curtis & Sidney Portier.
When I graduated high school, about the only movie theater I dealt with was the BIOGRAPH up on Lincoln Avenue; it was the time of long haired Hippies, and that was the area where we all hung out. The south side became passe; the near north side was where it was all happening.
When my father passed away in 1995, I finally sold out the old house and that was pretty much it for my involvement with Englewood… and none too soon. The neighborhood where I’d grown up had become a gang infested battleground full of crack houses after a long, slow 25 year slide.
Yes, I very well remember the pool in Ogden Park… swam in it many times. A couple of buddies and I almost got arrested there when I was a teenager; we decided to go over the fence & take a swim at 3:00 AM! Amazingly, we somehow managed to NOT get spotted by the patrol; I stayed under water at the deep end until they quit shining the squad car spotlight on the water!
You no doubt remember the bad old days of “blockbusting”… we were only the second Black family to move on the block in 1952. On one side was the Lizdes Family (Lithuanians), and on the other was the Reagans (Irish). A year after we moved in somebody on the other side of Ogden Park decided that Blacks in the neighborhood had gone about far enough and decided to do something about it; on about the 6500 block of Loomis, somebody tossed a dynamite bomb thru the front window of a house that a Black family had just moved into. Inside of 5 years, 95% of the Whites moved out of the neighborhood.
I was through the area about 3 years ago. EVERYTHING is changed, and yes, Thomas Wolf has it pegged exactly. About the only thing that hadn’t changed was my old grade school; Perkins Bass Elementary School (66th & May) looks EXACTLY the way it did when I first went there, except for an addition added in the 1960s.
The whole city has changed, and IMHO, not for the better.
I went to college in northern Wisconsin, DEEP in the north woods! Overnight I changed from a city kid to someone who loved walleye fishing and deer hunting. If I could have stayed there without starving to death (the unemployment rates are unbelievable), I’d have stayed forever. As it is, I had to compromise; I live in Madison, Wisconsin now.
Quixote
Hi Gerry!
The LINDEN… THAT one is WAY before my time. I don’t remember it at all.
One thing I DO remember about the SOUTHTOWN; just a bit west of it was The China Clipper restaurant, the BEST place (and about the ONLY place) for Chinese in Englewood. As a kid, I LOVED the place because of the advertising painting on an outside wall… a huge mural of a Boeing 337 amphibian, the plane that Pan Am used on the China Clipper route.
Apparently The Clipper had been there during the Vaudeville days; next to the cash register was a photo of Eddie Cantor having a meal there!
On the KIM tho… I vividly remember something from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old (early 1950s, probably about 1953). There was a large multistory building a few doors down the street, toward 63rd street. The building caught fire one night… VERY spectacular, totally out of control. I guess it lit up the sky & got the attention of my mother & sister; they walked 6 or 8 blocks to see it (we lived at 66th & Aberdeen street), and they took me along. BIG crowd watching the blaze… and suddenly mass retching from the crowd because of a horrible smell that went up. It seems that some of the occupants had tried to escape thge building when it caught fire, and they made a bad mistake; they used the elevator. Power went off, trapping them there… and the fire eventually reached it.
BTW, on another somewhat grotesque note… whoever did comments on the SOUTHTOWN confirmed something I’ve recently gotten interested in.
Across 63rd street from the SOUTHTOWN is a huge post office. I couldn’t place it precisely before, but the post office is built on the site of the old Mudgett “Murder Castle” from before the turn of the 20th century. Somebody here confirmed my suspicion that it’s the exact location.
I’ve since found information that the post office has a LONG reputation for supernatural activity… it’s haunted!
I remember as a kid that I was NEVER comfortable in that place; nothing specific, but uneasy, sort of. I suppose that kids are more sensitive to that sort of thing, and it SURE threw up red flags with me!
Quixote
I only saw one film at the Biograph, back in the early 1970s… A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVITCH. Don’t remember the last of the film tho; I and the Lady I was with had smoked our brains out on weed before coming in, and we fell asleep! <<grin>>
Back then, the whole area was a hippie hangout; right across the street was the old folk music club, “Somebody Else’s Troubles”.
Gawd… I remember the KIM very well (to quote Bette Davis, “What a dump!”), and the EMPRESS, and the ENGLEWOOD, and I even saw a few films at the SOUTHTOWN before they wrecked it… err… turned it into Carr’s Department Store.! I grew up in Englewood in the 1950s. Oddly tho, I don’t remeber the STRATFORD at all.