632 West 63rd Street
Built 1931, demolished 1991
Architect: C.W. and George Rapp
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The Southtown Theater was one of the largest movie houses ever built on the city's South Side. Completed in 1931, it could accommodate audiences of 3,200 people. It was located at 632 W. 63rd Street, about two blocks east of Halsted Avenue. At the time of its opening, the theater was one of thirty-five theaters in Chicago and other Midwestern cities comprising the Balaban & Katz movie theater circuit.
Designed in the Art Deco style of the early 1930s, the building included a sleek, seven-story tower that served as the theater's high-profile vertical marquee. Interestingly, a derigible hook was also affixed to the top of the tower, supposedly to allow the crews of passing blimps to dock and catch a show. In stark contrast to the ornate movie palaces of the 20s, the derigible hook was one of the Southtown's few architectural adornments, a fanciful gesture aimed at both attracting publicity for the theater and to sustaining the public's hope that new technologies would bring a swift end to the Depression.
During the 1960s, the theater was converted into a department store (Carr's).
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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, 10 Nov 1931, 24.
Page authored: 12 January 1997
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