Chicago Theatre
Image by Joel Mann
175 N State St, Rapp and Rapp, 1921. Renovation by Daniel P. Coffey and Associates, 1986. The originally 5,000-seat Chicago Theatre was surpassed in size, but on its completion was billed as the grandest movie palace in the world. Its interiors were designed in a French Baroque manner (and decorated for the 1933 World’s Fair with antiques, settees, and other domestic interior furnishings), later ‘upgraded’ to a streamline modern aesthetic (as much as the vaulted ceilings and grand curving staircases would allow) before the theatre lost out in appeal to newer suburban multiplexes and was eventually closed in the 1980s. Apparently it was only saved when the city staffer assigned to photocopy and circulate site plans for a proposed office tower at 175 N State noted the address and informed the Tribune’s theatre critic. The renovation was painstaking and expensive, bringing the adjacent (and now-related) Page Brothers building up to code from its wood-frame structure, though the theatre is now hailed as one of the city’s treasures.
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