Tradewinds Cinemas I & II
1452 Irving Park Road,
Hanover Park,
IL
60133
1452 Irving Park Road,
Hanover Park,
IL
60133
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This opened on July 6th, 1973. Its grand opening ad can be found in the photo section for this theatre.
Yes, GGC guy, seems like GCC was good about not building in enough storage space . We used the booth often to store cups,Pissed the Projectionists off,but we had no other choice.
I loved that theater! Saw a whole host of awful B movies during the mid-seventies (of which I’m a huge fan now). Every theater shows the same set of movies now. Choice and variety in theaters died with the VCR and DVD.
So was this a General Cinema then at one time? When did Classic Cinemas take over?
I was a General Cinema manager from 1971 to 1975 and supervised the construction of this theater around 1973. It was the tiniest cinema that I had ever seen. When this one was designed, they didn’t even add any storage space for the cups, raw popcorn, popcorn oil, candy, etc. We ended up dividing the manager’s office in half and calling one the office and the other the storage room. It surprises me that it lasted as long as it did.
I’m not sure when that feature will be online, but you could always post a link.
YES! Good job taking those photos. I hope they’ll be postable soon.
I have photos taken prior to the demoltion that I would like to post. When will this feature be online?
Demoltion of the Tradewinds shopping center, including the theater, is currently underway.
During the late 80s, I dated a woman from Streamwood and we used to patronize all of the theatres in the area: The Barrington Square, The Tradewinds, The Woodfield. Now all are gone. The Streamwood, The Rolling Meadows and The One Schaumburg Place didn’t exist at the time, but now they’ve come and gone too!
If you live in the area this is good news that shopping center is a dump now. I would be really happy if they would take the townhomes behing the shopping center and make that the parking lot or lumber yard.
I drove by the Tradewinds shopping center last week. The entire center will be torn down and a new Menards mega store will be built in its place. So it looks like this theater’s days are numbered.
I’ve went here a lot too. I was a nice little place with a cheap movie price. The area is sad tho. The Dominics is gone, the Halmark closed, and some other stores. The only things left are a Krispy Kreme, a McDonalds, a Citgo gas station, a dollar store, the library, and a few other little stores. The bad thing was the bathrooms being upstairs. The showtimes during the day were usually empty, and many times my family were the only one in the theater. Don’t know about the other theater, but the movie I was seeing would usually be empty, with only me or a board employee watching the movie. Wonder if a theater will ever open up in it’s place. I wonder.
I saw a lot of films there growing up in Hanover Park. In the ‘70s you could see Saturday afternoon Godzilla movies by saving bottle tops. During the week and at night they showed movies that were more current by not realy new, usually weeks before they went to video. The place got more and more run down like the area around it. Now the it and many of the other store around it have closed.
I saw the “ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW” there…
They ran it on saturday nights at midnight.