The
lavish Paradise Theater was an remarkable
but somewhat unsuccessful addition to the
West Side amusement scene which was opened
in 1928 and Designed by renowned theater
architect John Eberson, the 3,500-seat movie
palace was one of the most elaborately decorated
theaters ever built in Chicago,
but its poor acoustic quality hurt its popularity
once "talkies" became the norm. Never able
to earn more than the most marginal of profits
at the theater, its operator, the Balaban
and Katz Company, closed the theater in
1956 and started demolition.
In the early 1920s first plans
for the construction of an enormous movie theater
near the bustling intersection of West Madison Street
and Crawford (now Pulaski) Avenue was developed by
Impresario Louis Guyon. Guyon was a leading West Side
entrepreneur and owned several properties in and around
the Madison-Crawford business district. His Paradise
Ballroom, which catered to middle-class dancers who
preferred a more conservative brand of dance music,
had earned him a reputation as one of the city's finest
showmen, as well as a good deal of money.
Looking
to build upon the success of his ballroom, Guyon planned
to launch two new ventures. First, he opened a large
and lavishly appointed apartment hotel next to his
ballroom. Then, in spite of the financial burdens
placed on him by the hotel project, he laid plans
and, in 1925, began construction of a movie theater
on a site directly across Crawford Avenue from his
ballroom-hotel complex. To create and control the
West Side's largest single concentration of entertainment
venues was his dream.
The
poor financial planning by Guyon, though, soon undermined
the theater project. When gratified to cut his losses,
he sold the uncompleted theater to the Cooney Brothers,
two South Side entrepreneurs, who in turn were forced
by their own money woes to abandon the expensive project.
When the Cooney Brothers bowed out, the Balaban and
Katz Company, operator of the city's largest and fastest
growing circuit of movie theaters, purchased the unfinished
theater.
The
Paradise project fit well into B&K's ambitious
expansion plans. At the same time, the Marks Brothers
circuit was building a new theater on Madison Street,
just around the corner from the future Paradise. Scheduled
to open in 1927, the Marks Brothers theater, later
named the Marbro, threatened to squeeze Balaban and
Katz out of the West Side movie market if not met
seat for seat, show for show. By taking over the Paradise
project from Guyon, Balaban and Katz hoped to put
themselves in a competitive position and to avoid
the loss of possible millions in ticket revenue.
The
two persons Balaban and Katz spared no expense in
their effort to make the Paradise one of the great
showplaces in the city of Chicago. Unlike Guyon and
the Cooney Brothers, the Balaban and Katz Company
had vast sums of capital to invest in the project,
due primarily to the tremendous profitability of its
nine other theaters. Shortly after acquiring the Paradise,
company executives authorized the theater's architect,
John Eberson, to significantly rework his designs
for the Paradise, adding hundreds of new features
and fantastic embellisments. Eberson, whose theater
designs revolutionized the industry during the 1920s,
incorporated a wide array of heavenly imagery and
mythological figures into his plans for the Paradise.
The
theater's marquee, one of the largest ever raised
in the city of Chicago, featured a sunburst design,
studded with electric lights in ten different colors.
The vestibule was equally spectacular, adorned by
marble statuary (not the usual plaster) and murals
depicting zodiac constellations on the ceiling
high above. Nothing, however, compared to the dramatic
splendor of the main auditorium, in which audience
members found themselves surrounded by a simulated
night sky, full of twinkling stars, at the moment
of daybreak. In the corners of the theater, statues
of trumpeting angels signalled the approach of Apollo,
the sun god, riding behind a team of marble-carved
steeds as they raced across the sky above the proscenium
arch.
The
Theater was opened for business on 14 September
1928. The opening day movie was "The Fleet's
In," starring Clara Bow. Both Balaban and Katz
prepared for the event by undertaking one of the
largest advertising campaigns in company history.
Exceptionally large ads celebrating the theater's
extravagant design and
luxurious amenities appeared in Chicago newspapers,
large and small, weeks ahead of the scheduled opening
and continued well into October.
But,the
stunning surroundings and the equally slick marketing
campaign were not enough to guarantee the Paradise's
ultimate success as a movie theater. Only the quality
of entertainment presented at the theater would draw
patrons back once the novelty of the its appearance
wore off. As it turned out, the Paradise-- as a movie
house-- was no match for the Marbro, its main rival
for the patronage of West Side movie-goers. This became
glaringly apparent when silent movies gave way to
"talkies." Audiences found the more compact
Marbro far more acoustically pleasing than the dome-like
Paradise. When the hard economic times of the Depression
caused many Chicagoans to cut back on their trips
to the shows, business at the Paradise slumped to
devastating levels. In 1931, The decision of Balaban
and Katz was to close the money-losing theater until
the national economy improved. Though the Paradise
reopened in 1934, its business never lived up to the
company's expectations.
Balaban
and Katz began to look for ways to unload the hulking
theater that, by the 1950s, seemed increasingly unfit
to meet the needs of a changing motion picture industry
was a little wonder. In 1956, the company agreed to
demolish the theater and sell the vacant parcel of
land to a local developer who planned to open a grocery
store on the site. But the Paradise did not go easily.
So sturdily had Eberson designed the building that
it took the demolition contractor nearly two years
to complete what had been planned as a six-month job.
