In your posting of July 29 at 9:07 a.m. you describe the playroom at the Paradise in detail. I would like to quote you in next edition of my book. How would you like to be credited? By name or as Geo1?
Thanks, JG. I’d like to incorporate your earlier comments on the carousel into my revised version of my book, THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: MEMORIES OF A CHICAGO CHILDHOOD. How would you like to be cited?
Re. the carousel at the late lamented Paradise Theatre. I am enjoying the photo of the playroom in the Annual devoted to the theatre in question. Can anyone tell me: did the carousel actually rotate or was it fixed in place—just a stationery platform with carved figure? —Lowell
I was there—not once but many times—as a child and as a teenager. I have written about it in my book, THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: MEMORIES OF A CHICAGO CHILDHOOD, 1942 TO 1952. Here is an excerpt:
Notify me when someone replies to my comment? Note: Cinema Treasures is not affiliated with PWhen I was quite young, my mother took me one afternoon to the Paradise Theatre on Pulaski Road, about a mile’s walk from our apartment. The Paradise lived up to its name. Built a year before the advent of talking pictures, the huge structure was embellished everywhere with pseudo?classical paintings and statues of gods, goddesses, cupids, angels, and other quasidivine apparitions. This heavenly host wore little other than a few strands of drapery and strategically placed fig leaves. The ceiling was ablaze with tiny stars. The half?bright house lights were left on between shows so that every detail of the theater could be savored.
The scale of everything was palatial. The labyrinthine lower floors, where the rest rooms were hidden, contained a room marked “Menagerie,†containing wondrous mechanical animals on which to ride. The Menagerie was a day care facility where mothers once left their disinterested toddlers during the shows. Unfortunately, my mother explained, the wartime “labor shortage†had forced the theater to close this attractionâ€"never to reopen. (The wonderfully equipped and competently staffed nursery at Marshall Field’s Loop store had also been closed for the same reason.) For years, the beckoning lions and tigers waited secure behind a locked gratingâ€"frustratingly in view but always just out of touch.
Strolling about outside the Paradise was almost as interesting as being inside. Next door was my favorite?in?the-whole?world popcorn and candy store. Across the street was Carl Stockholm’s dry cleaning plant and store. Carl, a former champion bicyclist, was some sort of local hero, and the symbol of his store, an animated abstract logo of a man furiously peddling a cycle held my fascinated interest. Nearby was a marvelously stocked toy storeâ€"a rare emporium at a time when most toys were sold at department stores and five and dimes. If one walked down the street or across the street and looked back at the Paradise, the blinking lights of its massive marquee deluded one into seeing animated black and white boxes running eternally around its periphery.
When visiting my maternal grandparents in Maywood, I was often sent to the movies, either to the elegant Greek-temple-like 1865-seat Lido or the tiny (500 seat) Yale. Both theaters were on Fifth Avenue, about a mile’s walk from my grandparents’ home. It was at the Lido that I saw Technicolor Lassie and Roy Rogers movies. I once waited for an hour in line at the Lido for a paw-print-signed photo of Lassie!
The Lido was a beautiful theater, much like the Marbro but smaller in scale (1,865 seats vs. the Marbro’s 3,931). It lobby featured a blown up photograph of the local National Guard unit, which was caught up in action in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. Several of the men had died in action there or on the infamous Bataan Death March.
Does anyone have a photo of the Lido and/or the Yale?
Does anyone have a photo of the Alamo and/or the Famous?
JG—My wife and I love the carousel photo. Would you be so kind as to give us specifics of where it is or was located? —Lowell
JG
In your posting of July 29 at 9:07 a.m. you describe the playroom at the Paradise in detail. I would like to quote you in next edition of my book. How would you like to be credited? By name or as Geo1?
Thanks, JG. I’d like to incorporate your earlier comments on the carousel into my revised version of my book, THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: MEMORIES OF A CHICAGO CHILDHOOD. How would you like to be cited?
Re. the carousel at the late lamented Paradise Theatre. I am enjoying the photo of the playroom in the Annual devoted to the theatre in question. Can anyone tell me: did the carousel actually rotate or was it fixed in place—just a stationery platform with carved figure? —Lowell
I was there—not once but many times—as a child and as a teenager. I have written about it in my book, THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: MEMORIES OF A CHICAGO CHILDHOOD, 1942 TO 1952. Here is an excerpt:
Notify me when someone replies to my comment? Note: Cinema Treasures is not affiliated with PWhen I was quite young, my mother took me one afternoon to the Paradise Theatre on Pulaski Road, about a mile’s walk from our apartment. The Paradise lived up to its name. Built a year before the advent of talking pictures, the huge structure was embellished everywhere with pseudo?classical paintings and statues of gods, goddesses, cupids, angels, and other quasidivine apparitions. This heavenly host wore little other than a few strands of drapery and strategically placed fig leaves. The ceiling was ablaze with tiny stars. The half?bright house lights were left on between shows so that every detail of the theater could be savored.
The scale of everything was palatial. The labyrinthine lower floors, where the rest rooms were hidden, contained a room marked “Menagerie,†containing wondrous mechanical animals on which to ride. The Menagerie was a day care facility where mothers once left their disinterested toddlers during the shows. Unfortunately, my mother explained, the wartime “labor shortage†had forced the theater to close this attractionâ€"never to reopen. (The wonderfully equipped and competently staffed nursery at Marshall Field’s Loop store had also been closed for the same reason.) For years, the beckoning lions and tigers waited secure behind a locked gratingâ€"frustratingly in view but always just out of touch.
Strolling about outside the Paradise was almost as interesting as being inside. Next door was my favorite?in?the-whole?world popcorn and candy store. Across the street was Carl Stockholm’s dry cleaning plant and store. Carl, a former champion bicyclist, was some sort of local hero, and the symbol of his store, an animated abstract logo of a man furiously peddling a cycle held my fascinated interest. Nearby was a marvelously stocked toy storeâ€"a rare emporium at a time when most toys were sold at department stores and five and dimes. If one walked down the street or across the street and looked back at the Paradise, the blinking lights of its massive marquee deluded one into seeing animated black and white boxes running eternally around its periphery.
When visiting my maternal grandparents in Maywood, I was often sent to the movies, either to the elegant Greek-temple-like 1865-seat Lido or the tiny (500 seat) Yale. Both theaters were on Fifth Avenue, about a mile’s walk from my grandparents’ home. It was at the Lido that I saw Technicolor Lassie and Roy Rogers movies. I once waited for an hour in line at the Lido for a paw-print-signed photo of Lassie!
The Lido was a beautiful theater, much like the Marbro but smaller in scale (1,865 seats vs. the Marbro’s 3,931). It lobby featured a blown up photograph of the local National Guard unit, which was caught up in action in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. Several of the men had died in action there or on the infamous Bataan Death March.