Uptown Theater
4816 North Broadway (Uptown Sq/Historic Theater District)
The Uptown is one of the largest cinemas ever constructed. When it opened with grand opening events on August 17 and 18, 1925, the marquee said: “AN ACRE OF SEATS IN A MAGIC CITY … ONE OF THE GREAT ART BUILDINGS OF THE WORLD.”
With 4,320 seats, it was the world’s second-largest movie theater when it opened in 1925. A few bigger theaters were built in the years after that, including Radio City Music Hall in 1932. But the Uptown is still the theater building in Chicago with the most seats.
The Balaban & Katz theater chain built this movie palace, which was designed with a Spanish architectural theme by the Rapp & Rapp architectural firm, led by brothers Cornelius and George Rapp. When it opened in 1925, the neighborhood was only starting to be called “Uptown.” The theater itself, with its huge signs saying “UPTOWN,” helped to establish the neighborhood’s identity.
The Uptown opened during the silent movie era. An orchestra and a massive organ played music during the films, and the Uptown also presented live comedy and song-and-dance routines in between the movies. During the Uptown’s early years, the performers included Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Paul Whiteman, Tom Mix, Jackie Coogan, and the Three Stooges. The Marx Brothers were here for a week in 1928, performing scenes from their Broadway hit The Cocoanuts a year before they made it into a movie. Groucho got big laughs whenever he made a joke about “the crime situation” in Chicago. But movie theaters were cutting costs, and the live entertainment faded away. Balaban & Katz tried to revive it at the end of 1949, when a triple bill of Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, and Henny Youngman performed at the Uptown, but the experiment was a flop.
In addition to showing movies, the Uptown began hosting closed-circuit TV events starting in the late 1950s. Every seat was filled in 1964 for the boxing match when heavyweight champion Sonny Listen was defeated by Cassius Clay, who soon changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
Live entertainment came back to the Uptown in a big way when Jam Productions began presenting rock concerts in the theater, starting with the Tubes in October 1975.
The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia spoke fondly of the Uptown Theatre in 1981. “It’s nice that it’s loose enough and relaxed enough so that, you know, people can go in there and have a good time,” he said. “It’s a drag when the audience gets tyrannized, you know? … It completely wrecks the whole point of it.”
The building was falling into disrepair by the time of the final concert by the J. Geils Band on December 19, 1981, and it fell into even more neglect after it closed its doors, going through a succession of owners, including the reputed slumlord Lou Wolf. A partnership led by Jerry Mickelson of Jam Productions bought the Uptown in 2008. Mickelson and his partners are still working on putting together financing and a deal to reopen the Uptown. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 20, 1986.
