Aragon Ballroom
1100 West Lawrence Avenue
When the Aragon Ballroom opened in 1926, it brought an elegant venue for ballroom dancing to the North Side. The owners, Greek American brothers Andrew and William Karzas, had already had huge success on the South Side with the Trianon Ballroom, at 62nd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.
The Aragon was designed in a Spanish style by architects Boyd T. Hill and Ralph D. Huszagh. The interior was designed by John Eberson, who was famous for his “atmospheric” movie palaces. The building cost two million dollars to construct, which is about 30 million dollars today. It is named after a region in Spain, and featured Moorish details, including the painting surround of a town and twinkling star lights in the dark ceiling. The 8000-person dance floor is made of maple wood with an underlayment of cork, felt, and springs. The floor design allows it to vibrate a little during performances. And all over the Aragon’s outside, polychrome terra cotta trim ornaments feature human faces. (A lovely restoration of these details was completed in 2024).
The Aragon, with its great dance bands, attracted 18.000 people a week from the 1920s through the 1940s. Starting in 1928, the Aragon hosted occasional concerts on Sunday afternoons, sponsored by the Central Uptown Chicago Association. Most of these matinees featured classical music, but the performers also included humorist Will Rogers.
Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Orchestra appeared here from 1951-1959, when they established their television program.
But from the very beginning, it had some problems with sound. The first bandleader who played at the Aragon was Ted Fio Rito, and he later recalled: “The acoustics were atrocious. They didn’t think about the acoustics, so that when we’d hit a chord, you’d hear it three times coming back at you.” The owners claimed they fixed these problems, but similar acoustics issues surfaced decades later when the Aragon became a rock venue.
The Aragon continued hosting ballroom dancing through the early 1960s, when owner Andy Karzas acknowledged that times were changing. “Young people today, the fellows don’t want to learn how to dance,” he told Studs Terkel in 1963. “They think it’s a sissy activity. And young people go through high schools without learning. They do a lot of gyrations in record stores, but they don’t learn beautiful ballroom dancing.”
The Aragon was rebranded as the Cheetah Lounge in October 1966, a rock venue with financial backing from Adlai Stevenson's son Borden Stevenson. It reverted to the Aragon name in 1968, after the Cheetah ran into financial trouble. The club reportedly lost $10,000 when the Turtles canceled a concert because of the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination. As the newly renamed Aragon hosted concerts by the Shadows of Knight, Herman’s Hermits, and Jefferson Airplane.
In the 1970s, Pink Floyd, the Doors, Kraftwerk, Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Van Halen played there. In the 1980s, Metallica. In the 1990s, Nirvana, Soul Asylum, and Green Day. As part of its 2002 World Licks Tour, the Rolling Stones played here. In 2017, it hosted 135 concerts, the most since its heyday.
The 2016 movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice filmed here; it stands in as the place where Thomas (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Martha Wayne (Lauren Cohan) get shot. The scene, set in 1981, involves a family movie night at the Aragon Theatre, where Thomas and Martha took their son Bruce to see The Mark of Zorro. The fictional theatre is located in Gotham City’s Park Row, known to locals as Crime Alley. Mugger Joe Chill murders the parents as they’re leaving the theatre, in front of Bruce Wayne. This inspires Bruce to fight crime as the masked superhero, Batman. For purposes of the filming, The Aragon sign and marquee were temporarily replaced.
John Dickson (1916-2009) immortalized the Aragon with a poem that captures the essence of its allure when ballroom dancing was still hugely popular. Dickson was born in Chicago and grew up in Glencoe. He attended New Trier High School and Furman University in South Carolina. In his adult life, he lived in Evanston. He worked for 43 years as a grain broker on the Chicago Board of Trade, trading a commodity that was essential to Chicago’s growth and development as a modern metropolis, as evoked in Carl Sandburg’s characterization of Chicago as a “stacker of wheat.” The Board of Trade and its wheat-trading pits were also fictionalized in Frank Norris’ The Pit (1903). During his career as a trader, he wrote poetry, publishing his first poem in 1968 in Harper’s. His work eventually appeared on over 40 publications. After 43 years as a trader, Dickson sold his seat and begin writing poetry full-time. His collections include Victoria Hotel (1979), Waving at Trains (1986), and Lake Michigan Scrolls (2002).
Dickson’s “The Aragon Ballroom” depicts the opulence of the theatre - “gold statues of caballeros and their senoritas / and the thick red carpet stretching from the ticket taker / into the illusion paradise of yellow balconies” during the era when it hosted dance orchestras for young couples - “. . . necessarily capable of serious dancing – / either to the organ shuddering through the building / or to a wispy saxophone, snare drum and brushes.”
Dickson’s description and the song titles he includes in the poem suggest the 1940’s; dancing ended at the Aragon in 1964. The beginning of the poem emphasizes the almost mystical or surreal power of the Aragon’s luxurious and imaginative architecture and musical scene. The poet begins, “I could hear the music as I waited to be born . . .And later as I crawled through Persian patterns of the rugs / and later still as I memorized my night paths / behind the stores and through the shadowy streets, / clarinets and trumpets heralded my way.” In real life, Dickson was 10 years old when the Aragon opened in 1926
