1141 West Wilson Avenue
Built 1913
Architect: unknown
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The DeLuxe Theater, located at 1141 West Wilson Avenue in Chicago's then-fashionable Uptown district, opened in February 1913. The theater was backed financially by Frank Cuneo, a wealthy banana broker, and offered motion pictures as its primary form of entertainment. Ten cents was the price of admission. For its day, the DeLuxe was considered an elaborate movie theater. The theater featured a lobby walls lined with marble, 600 upholstered seats in the auditorium, and a large pipe organ played by Fred Sosman, organist at Chicago's highly regarded Auditorium Theater. The elegant decor prompted one visiting movie theater manager to remark that "if the house fails at pictures, it could be readily changed into a church." The lobby walls were lined with marble and the auditorium's 600 seats were upholstered for the comfort of patrons. For many years, the DeLuxe was one of the largest and most popular movie theaters in Uptown. The opening of larger and even more elegant theaters in the immediate vicinity in subsequent years diminished the DeLuxe's prominence.
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Suggested Reading
· George D. Bushnell, "Chicago's Magnificent
Movie Palaces," Chicago History 6 (Summer 1977),
99-106.
· Ben Hall, Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the
Golden Age of the Movie Palace (DaCapo Press, 1988).
· Lary May,
Screening
Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture
Industry (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983).
· Michael Putnam,
Silent
Screens: The Decline and Transformation of the American Movie
Theater (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000).
· Robert Sklar,
Movie-Made
America: A Cultural History of American Movies
(Vintage, 1994).
· Maggie Valentine,
The
Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the
Movie Theater (Yale Univ. Press, 1996).
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Sources: Variety, 21 Feb 1913, 28.
Page authored: 2 February 2000
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