Chicago Theatre

About Chicago Theatre

The Chicago Theatre, also known as the Balaban and Katz Chicago Theatre, is a famous theater landmark located on North State Street in the Loop community area in the city of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The theater is host to stage plays, magic shows, comedy performances, speeches, and concerts. Although it now emphasizes live performances of popular music, it once served as a motion picture theatre. For several decades, it was the city's premier movie theater.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 6, 1979, and it was listed as a Chicago Landmark on January 28, 1983. The marquee is a Chicago cultural and physical landmark that commonly appears in film, television, artwork, and photography.

Abe and Barney Balaban, together with Sam and Morris Katz (founders of the Balaban and Katz theater chain), sought to build the Chicago Theatre as one of a series of opulent motion picture houses. The theater would become the flagship for the 28 theaters in the city and over 100 others in the general Midwestern United States. The building was constructed in 1921 at a cost of US$4 million by architects Cornelius W. Rapp and George L. Rapp, who also designed the Oriental Theatre and Uptown Theatre in Chicago. The Chicago Theatre was one of the first theaters in the nation to be built in the classical revival-French Baroque style (actually Neo-Baroque) and is the oldest surviving example of this style in Chicago.[10]