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The story could be one of those melodramas popular in the Uptown’s heyday. The theater, at 4814 N. Broadway, was built in 1925 as part of the Balaban and Katz chain, designed by Rapp and Rapp to accommodate vaudeville and film. At 46,000 square feet, it’s the largest freestanding theater building in North America, with the fourth-largest seating capacity–4,381. It has eight lobbies, a full orchestra pit, a 72,000-pound fire curtain, and a 100-foot domed ceiling. A fantasy palace in what’s been dubbed Spanish Baroque style, it was meant to awe a largely immigrant audience, and for three decades it did, attracting as many as 12,000 viewers a day. Then television arrived, women went to work, and movie palaces gave way to multiplex cubicles. In 1962 the theater sold off its Wurlitzer organ and most of its artwork, and by 1981–after brief reincarnations as a Spanish-language movie theater and a concert venue–it was boarded up. It was purchased in 1984 by Lou Wolf, who let it go a decade later for pennies on the dollar in a tax sale to another speculator. In 1996 it was sold again–reportedly for about $500,000–to a group that apparently included its current owner, Cercore Properties. Carlson says the landmark building has suffered under all of these owners, but the worst damage was done in the 1980s, when it wasn’t heated: pipes froze and burst, and there was “six feet of water in the basement.”
Mark Zipperer, who had worked for Arthur Andersen and managed the Joffrey Ballet, replaced Morrison on a contract basis but quit six months later, complaining that the UTCA board was uninsured and unsupportive and that he was owed $10,000. After that, Carlson took over. She says $250,000 of the Goodman money was put in escrow toward the theater’s purchase. The Uptown is priced at $2.5 million, but comes with heavy baggage: a pile of building-code violations and a potential restoration bill of $30 million. And, after Goodman’s intoxicating initial gift, fund-raising has proved difficult: a capital campaign was launched a week before 9/11; a plan to raffle off Morrison’s Jaguar has failed to generate enough sales to cover costs and is now on hold; and attendance at last week’s event–held in Streeterville the day after war protesters massed in the neighborhood–was disappointing.
Columbia College vice president Woodie White announced last week that after 13 years he’s leaving the school to head up the midwest region office of the United Negro College Fund. White says he was promoted from executive director of Columbia’s Dance Center to his development job when “they realized that most of the corporate and foundation money that was coming into the college was coming through me.” He’s racked up a raft of achievements at Columbia, including his role as founding producer of DanceAfrica Chicago, now headed by Guild Complex founder Michael Warr….Psst–wanna buy a bookstore in Glencoe? Books on Vernon, which has housed the Writers’ Theatre since it was a gleam in Michael Halberstam’s eye, is up for sale. The theater will move into new quarters in the neighborhood next fall but plans to continue a studio schedule in the store’s back room. The bookstore owners say keeping the theater in the space will be a requirement of any sale….The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs will not be looking for another roommate when the Museum of Broadcast Communications vacates its 15,000-square-foot space in the Cultural Center come December. “It’ll be used by Cultural Affairs for public purposes,” says spokesperson Kim Costello, though “nobody’s sure” yet what those purposes are….The venerable Skokie movie theater closed its doors last week. Operator Max Granger, who bought the business (but not the building) five years ago, says he’s been struggling since the Village 18 multiplex came to town: “Crown Theatres took away all my business.”
