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Uptown Theatre 4816 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL

Image - Spectacular plaster wall decoration in a filigree style

Robert Loerzel writes - “It outdoes your dreams,” the advertisements declared. “IT WILL HUSH AND THRILL YOU. It throbs with beauty—lovely enough to hold the heart of a woman all her life. You will love it.”

These ads were promoting the grand opening of the Uptown Theatre on August 18, 1925. “Magnificence beyond all your dreams—rising in mountainous splendor and might—an enchanted palace—a house of magic beauty. … Great and beautiful as a magic city—AN ACRE OF SEATS under a romantic and color-lit twilight from myriads of unseen lamps. … One of the great art-buildings of the world—and in it, room for everybody! … It opens Tuesday! … an event you will remember all your life…”1

With 4,381 seats, it was the world’s largest cinema at the time2—and to this day, it stands as one of the grandest movie palaces ever constructed.

“A Palace of Dreams is right!” the Chicago Herald and Examiner’s Polly Wood wrote after attending the opening festivities. “You can completely believe the advertisements.”3

A reporter for Variety was also blown away by the Uptown Theatre’s magnificence, writing: “Eclipsing in size, splendor and impressiveness anything that has been built in the last few years of hectic theatre construction, this new house is not only beyond doubt the most gorgeous movie palace in the world, but is so far above its neighborhood that the North Side will be years before it is worthy of it.”4

Clearly, Variety’s writer—a correspondent in Chicago’s Loop for the New York–based entertainment newspaper—wasn’t that impressed by the neighborhood surrounding the theater. Of course, this outlying neighborhood would never rival the Loop as Chicago’s densest cluster of skyscrapers, commerce, and culture.

But in truth, Uptown, which had been a patch of rustic countryside on Chicago’s outskirts only 25 years earlier, was now more like a city within the city.

Contributed by Greg Lynch -