CultureChicago
Thousands line up on Broadway for a rare look inside the Uptown Theatre
Open House Chicago opened the shuttered 1925 movie palace for one October weekend, and Saturday alone drew more than four times the crowd the theater had hoped for.
Read the story
For one weekend in October, the line for the Uptown Theatre stretched up Broadway. Open House Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Center's free annual festival, opened the 1925 movie palace at 4816 N. Broadway on October 17 and 18, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with no tickets or reservations required. It was a rare chance to walk through a building that has been closed since 1981.
The turnout outran the theater's own expectations. It had said it might be "lucky enough to hit 1,000 visitors." On Saturday alone, it counted 4,160. An hour before Sunday's opening, the line reportedly reached Winnemac Avenue, more than two full blocks up Broadway, and some visitors waited as long as three hours.
Inside, visitors started in the grand lobby off Broadway before guided groups moved on to the auditorium, built with 4,381 seats. Photography was not allowed during the festival, so the images here come from an earlier visit by Quaint Cuties (@quaintcuties), who shared them in July. They show what the crowd came for: a marble staircase lit by candelabra lamps, sculpted figures, heavy drapery and plaster ornament climbing toward the ceiling.
Rapp and Rapp designed the Uptown for the Balaban & Katz chain, and it opened on August 18, 1925, billed as "An Acre of Seats in a Magic City." Its Spanish Baroque Revival interiors were inspired by the palaces of Europe. By the 1970s it had become a rock venue that hosted the Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen and Prince. It closed after a J. Geils Band concert in December 1981.
More than four decades of disuse show in the peeling paint overhead. JAM Productions bought the theater in 2008, and a $75 million restoration announced in 2018 never got started; development partner Farpoint withdrew in 2021. JAM's Jerry Mickelson now puts the cost at $190 million. "We are assembling a capital stack of funding sources, and we're short," he told CBS Chicago before the tours.
That gap is the context for the weekend's lines. Thousands of people spent a morning on the sidewalk for a theater with nothing on its calendar, which makes its own argument for bringing it back. Until the money comes together, the Uptown stays closed, and the facade on Broadway is the view most of Chicago gets.