Evergreen Theater

I was an usher there for about 3 weeks in the summer of 1970. The pay was .85/hour. Saw “Paint Your Wagon” & “Airport” numerous times. Once I had to stand next to a guy in a “Snoopy” costume to keep the kids from pawing him too much. He was there for the Charlie Brown cartoon feature “Snoppy Come Home”. A sad note: The theatre manager was shot to death in a robbery in the theatre in 1970-72.

I think the theatre opened up in about 1964, as the first twin screen theatre in Chicago. I started working there as an usher in 1968. We had 15 ushers, 10 “candy girls”, and 2 managers, Mr. H. and Mr. M. The larger southern theatre (screen 1) seated about 1450 people, and the smaller northern screen (screen 2) seated just over 1000. One of the biggest movies we had was the original Airport. We sold out the 7 pm and 10 pm shows for 2 weeks straight! The starting usher pay was small (less than $1/hour), but we received free movie passes, which our families treasured more than we did. It was sad to see the old place cut up into smaller screens, and then demolished altogether. We used to call it the “M and R”, named after the owners' names. It was my first real job, and a passage for many of us young people into adulthood. And it made a good first date for a lot of us! Does anyone else remember it like I do?
bobstack

I’m just laying out the facts. White people stopped going to the mall, even though it’s right next door to them. I didn’t stop going, because I’m not a racist. I liked having another theatre to go to. I could catch a 6PM show and get home at a decent time. When they closed (after some gang incident was in the newspaper), it gave me one less place to see a movie. It’s just sad. I was wrong about one thing. There are other theatres on the South Side, so it’s not the worse area of the city in terms of movie theatres. This theatre closing made it worse for me, because I had to travel farther on the bus. I didn’t know about these other theatres because they never advertise in the Sun-Times or the Tribune.

This was built as a single screen, and it was pretty nice. There was an area in the middle with a skylight, lot of glass and natural light. Of course it was ruined when they cut it up and expanded by adding theaters. Then, when the shopping center customers changed (the residents of the area didn’t change; they just stopped going to the mall when new customers from farther away in Chicago showed up en masse) the theatre closed. It’s too bad. Now there isn’t a theater for miles around. It’s probably the worst area of Chicago in terms of movie theatre availability, other than the far South Side, that is.