“‘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…’
“With 4,381 seats, it was the world’s largest cinema at the time—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.’
“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.’
“Uptown’s building boom showed no signs of slowing down. In 1924, the Sheridan Trust and Savings Bank had moved into an eight-story building clad with white terra cotta, towering over the southeast corner of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue. It was one of Chicago’s largest office structures outside the Loop,5 and it had the city’s second-largest bank vault. (Four more floors would be added to the top of the building in 1928.) Across the street, Loren Miller’s department store had taken over the bank’s former building and was expanding to fill an entire block.
“With the opening of the Balaban & Katz Corporation’s massive new theater at 4816 North Broadway, local residents and merchants could take pride in the fact that their neighborhood had a movie palace even larger than the Chicago Theatre, the Uptown Theatre’s downtown sister. The surrounding business district celebrated the theater’s opening with parades and pageantry.
“Uptown—which had only recently acquired that name—was trumpeting its importance to the world at large. Uptown has probably never been as crowded as it was during that week of August 1925, when an estimated 750,000 people turned out for six days of festivities. People danced in the streets, while a daredevil known as Flory repeatedly set himself on fire, jumping from a building at Broadway and Sunnyside Avenue into a small tank of water.”