Crowds snake down block to visit shuttered Uptown Theatre for Open House Chicago
Huge crowds turned out this weekend as Chicago's long-shuttered Uptown Theatre welcomed the public for the first time in decades.
The movie palace and later concert venue at 4816 N. Broadway has been closed since December 1981. For the first time ever this weekend, it was opened to the public for the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Open House Chicago event.
Lines to get into the theater snaked along Broadway on both Saturday and Sunday.
On Sunday morning, a Chicago subreddit user reported that at 9 a.m., an hour before the theater was opened for tours, the line stretched north on Broadway all the way to Winnemac Avenue, more than two full city blocks.
The theater reported that on Saturday, a total of 4,160 people turned out for the tour. But people also waited up to three hours to get in.
"We thought we might be lucky enough to hit 1,000 visitors for the opening day of Chicago Architecture Center's Open House Chicago," the theater said in a Facebook post.
Those who braved the line were treated to a brief tour.
Author Robert Loerzel, who along with James A. Pierce wrote the book, "The Uptown: Chicago's Endangered Movie Palace," was on hand for the open house events.
Meanwhile, theater organ music was heard inside the Uptown for perhaps the first time since the venue's massive Wurlitzer theater pipe organ was sold and removed back in the 1960s. Organist Daniel Boin, who also plays at the Music Box Theatre and whose uncle, Bob Boin, spent decades trying to restore and revive the Uptown, played such classics as "Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)."
JAM Productions owner and current Uptown Theatre steward Jerry Mickelson decided to welcome Open House Chicago crowds for the first time after years of not allowing the public inside, hoping only to do so once the theater was restored. Mickelson called the Uptown "the eighth wonder of the world."
The Spanish Baroque-inspired interior of the Uptown is replete with gargoyles, griffins, and all manner of other architectural flourishes. The original architects wanted the 46,000 square-foot theater to evoke the palaces of Versailles or St. Petersburg.
The Uptown opened with much fanfare in 1925, showing movies as well as vaudeville shows and concerts. The theater declined with the neighborhood in the midcentury years, but got a new lease on life as a rock concert venue for A-list stars in the 1970s.
Following a concert by the J. Geils Band on Dec. 19, 1981, the doors to the Uptown Theatre slammed shut. The heat was turned off, the grand staircase was covered in ice, the basement flooded, and pests, vandalism, and humidity brought further damage in the summer.
Efforts to restore and revive the Uptown go back decades, but none so far has gotten off the ground. The Uptown has been used as a movie set and for music videos and dance parties, but has otherwise been mothballed.
Mickelson said last week that he didn't know what might result from including the Uptown on the Open House tour, but he did have a warning.
"The bottom line is we can't let time take this building from us. This story will either end with a theater that's restored, or it'll end in silence, and the theater goes away," Mickelson said. "So before that happens, if it happens, I want people to see this. I want them to raise their voices, and say: 'We need to do something now. We can't keep waiting.'"
