Uptown Theatre

spectrum on September 21, 2025 at 9:53 am

Landmarks.org feature on the Chicago Theatre:

https://www.landmarks.org/uptown-theatre/

LouRugani on February 18, 2026 at 8:08 pm

(Excerpted from the CHICAGO READER, March 30, 2007, Section One, P.4 “A Hundred Furnished Rooms, an architectural history of Uptown” by Lynn Becker) - The challenges facing historic Uptown may best be represented, however, in its great namesake monument, the Uptown Theatre, dating from 1925. Constructed at a cost of $4 million in a deliriously eclectic style that a contemporary reporter called “Spanish Mexican Renaissance,” it covers 46,000 square feet (most of a city block), stands eight stories high, and seats 4,300. By the end of its first decade, nearly 20 million people had passed through the 213-foot-long lobby, which is terminated by a curving double stair and lined with twin colonnades rising to a 92-foot-high ceiling. As detailed in The Chicago Movie Palaces of Balaban and Katz by David Balaban, namesake grand-son of the Uptown’s manager, the theater occupied a rare moment of shared democracy, where anyone with a quarter or 50 cents could spend a couple hours steeped in the sort of luxury usually reserved for the ultrarich, attended to by a small army arrayed in at least eight different styles of uniforms, designating every station from floor manager to page boy to footman. So as not to disturb the patrons, ushers had to master a complex set of hand signals to manage the huge crowds.

By the 1960s, of course, we had begun opting for a no-frills, self-service, lowest-price world. Blitzed by free TV, the great movie palaces crashed into dust. The Uptown held on, finally closing for good in 1981. The heat was turned off soon after, and in the dead of winter the water pipes froze and burst, causing massive damage. It’s gone downhill ever since. The theater has passed through multiple owners, including convicted slumlord Lou Wolf, who once owned the Goldblatt’s block, and is currently in receivership. Recently the city picked up the tab for $500,000 in emergency repairs, removing some large, unstable chunks of terra-cotta before they simply fell to the street. Despite the ongoing efforts of activists committed to saving this official Chicago landmark, the Uptown remains boarded up and forlorn. Just before the February election, the 48th Ward alderman Mary Ann Smith told Windy City Times that a “premier developer” had signed a contract to restore the theater but declined to divulge the company’s name.

50sSNIPES on August 2, 2026 at 7:57 pm

On June 17, 1931, a total of 2,000 patrons were watching “The Front Page” and for more than 15 minutes, a body sat in the theater chain amid the crowd. A 63-year-old drug store owner named Christ Kelly was killed just on time a scene involving a gunshot happened. It confused theatergoers if it’s part of the show and didn’t receive as much attention. It was confirmed that the man did kill himself in the auditorium.

LouRugani on October 18, 2026 at 7:50 pm

Huge crowds turned out this weekend as Chicago’s long-shuttered Uptown Theatre welcomed the public for the first time in decades, opened to the public for the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House Chicago event. Lines to get into the theatre snaked along Broadway on both Saturday and Sunday. On that Sunday morning at 9 a.m., an hour before the theater opened for tours, the line stretched north on Broadway all the way to Winnemac Avenue, more than two full city blocks.

On Saturday, a total of 4,160 people turned out for the tour. People waited up to three hours to get in. “We thought we might be lucky enough to hit 1,000 visitors for the opening day of Chicago Architecture Center’s Open House Chicago,” the theatre said in a Facebook post.

Those who braved the line were treated to a brief tour. Author Robert Loerzel, who with James A. Pierce wrote the book “The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace,” was on hand for the open house events. Meanwhile, theatre organ music was heard inside the Uptown for perhaps the first time since the venue’s massive Wurlitzer pipe organ was sold and removed in the 1960s. Organist Daniel Boin, who also plays at the Music Box Theatre and whose uncle Bob Boin spent decades trying to restore and revive the Uptown, played such classics as "Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)."

JAM Productions owner and current Uptown Theatre steward Jerry Mickelsen decided to welcome Open House Chicago crowds for the first time after years of not allowing the public inside, hoping only to do so once the theater was restored. Mickelson called the Uptown “the eighth wonder of the world.”

The Spanish Baroque-inspired interior of the Uptown is replete with gargoyles, griffins, and all manner of other architectural flourishes. The original architects wanted the 46,000 square-foot theater to evoke the palaces of Versailles or St. Petersburg.

The theatre declined with the neighborhood in the midcentury years, but got a new lease on life as a rock concert venue for A-list stars in the 1970s. Following a concert by the J. Geils Band on Dec. 19, 1981, the doors to the Uptown Theatre closed. The heat was turned off, the grand staircase was covered in ice, the basement flooded, and pests, vandalism, and humidity brought further damage in the summer.

Efforts to restore and revive the Uptown go back decades. The Uptown has been used as a movie set and for music videos and dance parties, but has otherwise been mothballed. Mickelsen said last week that he didn’t know what might result from including the Uptown on the Open House tour, but he did have a warning: “The bottom line is we can’t let time take this building from us. This story will either end with a theatre that’s restored, or it’ll end in silence and the theatre goes away. So before that happens - if it happens - I want people to see this. I want them to raise their voices, and say: ‘We need to do something now. We can’t keep waiting.’”.

DavidZornig on October 20, 2026 at 7:49 am

Block Club Chicago link with some photos and a time lapse video from the recent book’s co-author Robert Loerzel.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/10/20/uptown-theatre-owner-hopes-huge-open-house-crowds-will-boost-redevelopment-efforts/