Vintage Chicago Tribune: Early AC made Balaban & Katz’s Central Park Theatre the coolest place in town
The Central Park Theatre ushered moviegoers out of dingy nickelodeons and into air-conditioned cinema palaces, only to wind up itself on life support.
“It is the mother ship of Chicago’s movie theaters,” said Blanche Killingsworth, president of the Lawndale Historical Society. Just because its audience vanished half a century ago doesn’t mean it is empty, she notes. It’s filled with memories, including her own of finding respite from Jim Crow laws.
“In Mississippi, Black people couldn’t come into a movie by the entrance, we had to go around by a side door and sit separately,” Killingsworth recalled. “Then I came to Chicago, bought a ticket to the Central Park and could watch a movie wherever I wanted.”
Killingsworth, other West Side activists and preservationists are battling to save the theater from bulldozers. They pin their hopes on the city protecting it with a landmark designation. But time is running out. Real estate developers have their eyes on the sprawling and decaying hulk at 3535 W. Roosevelt Road.
Killingsworth and her allies think it should be restored as the community’s arts and cultural center. She’s fascinated that it was built by workaday people who, just like her family, came to the West Side hoping to escape the poverty of their birthplace. “The theater is a family story,” she noted.
One of those early families was the Balabans, who with a business partner built the Central Park Theatre, among many others. The entrepreneurial bent of some family members was evident early on.
“I was 9 when I laid my first plot,” A.J. Balaban recalled in his autobiography, “Continuous Performance.“
“My brother Barney was about 11. We were leaning against the garbage can in the alley behind our kitchen door, shooing the flies away from our baby sister’s face while she squirmed fretfully in her rickety baby carriage (then servicing its sixth occupant). I said, ‘I’m gonna work to earn money, so Ma won’t have to stay in the store all the time.’”
A.J. and his siblings were the children of Gussie and Israel Balaban, Jewish immigrants from Moldova who ran a grocery store on the West Side. Behind it, the family lived in three rooms, and true to his word, A.J. dropped out of grade school to work various odd jobs.
He loved to sing, so performing at weddings enabled him to bring home a few bucks. As neighbors spoke a mashup of Yiddish and English, his repertoire included “Nathan, Nathan, Tell Me, Vot for Are You Vaitin’, Nathan?”
When he filled in for a performer at a local theater, it was like seeing the Promised Land. The silent films of the era were accompanied by musicians underscoring the on-screen action.
“Everybody wanted to enjoy himself and the evenings passed off all too quickly,” Balaban wrote in his autobiography. “How different it all was to the worries about fruit and vegetables spoiling before they were sold and quarrels about under-weight and over-charge.”
His parents agreed when they saw him singing tunes like “Tipperary,” as a movie about Irish revolutionaries was projected. Their daughter Ida was an accomplished pianist, and they imagined her and A.J. as a brother-and-sister act, their names emblazoned on a marquee.
Scraping up the $100-a-month rent, the Balabans leased the Kedzie Theater at 12th Street and Kedzie Avenue. Business was terrible, so A.J. kept his day job, booking films on his lunch break and opening the theater’s doors at 7 p.m. Then he had an inspiration: He sang while moving through the audience, asking everyone to join in the chorus of “Are You Sincere?”
“By May, we were the envy of our competitors who were looking for locations on our street,” A.J. recalled. “We gotta build a bigger place,” I told Barney, “or someone else will and take our business away.”
Accordingly, they built the 700-seat Circle Theater, just down 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road) from the Kedzie Theater. It was a combination movie and vaudeville house, and A.J. had a knack for persuading big-name acts to perform showbiz sticks. One of them was the Broadway star Sophie Tucker, who sang numbers with notoriously racy lyrics.
“The young ladies in their teens were breathless as they told about her performance,” A.J. recalled. “‘Oh, my face was so red when she sang ‘All Alone’ into a telephone handed to her on the stage from the wings! Don’t you think it was suggestive?’”
Such word-of-mouth advertising sold tickets. But the heat of August would wilt performers and audiences, forcing nickelodeons and vaudeville houses to close for the summer. So the Balabans resolved to create a theater that could operate the whole year.
Having worked for Western Cold Storage Co., Barney realized that the technology that froze meat could cool patrons of the 1,700-seat, luxuriously furnished theater he and A.J. planned farther west on Roosevelt Road. The Central Park Theatre would become, by most accounts, the first air-conditioned theater in the world.
Because of its hefty cost, they partnered with Ida’s husband, Sam Katz, giving the firm its iconic name: Balaban & Katz Theaters.
Their Central Park Theatre was a pastiche of architectural styles: Mediterranean Revival on the outside; French Baroque, Neoclassical and Renaissance Revival on the inside.
Movies being fantasies, the Balabans thought the fantasy should begin when customers entered the theater. For 25 cents, they got glimpses of the European castles and cathedrals that only wealthy folk could travel to see close-up.
“You give them too much for their money,” business associates told A.J. He replied that they took trips to Europe, wintered in Florida, had season tickets for the opera and symphony, and never missed the Ziegfeld Follies. None of which a workaday moviegoer could afford.
“His one weekly night at the movies with his family must fill the place of the Follies, Florida, Europe, opera and symphony.” A.J. noted
His customers also got to see a film and stage show — no matter when they entered. From morning to evening, something was on the stage or the screen at the Central Park Theatre. Hence the title of A.J.’s autobiography, “Continuous Performance.”
With the Central Park as a template, Balaban & Katz built more than 50 theaters in the Chicago area.
In 1968, Benny Goodman, the famed “King of Swing,” recalled making his first paid appearance in the first link of that theater chain, as a 12-year-old clarinetist.
“One of my older brothers learned about the ‘Jazz Nights’ they used to have in the Central Park Theatre over on Roosevelt Road and Central Park Avenue,” Goodman said. “It was quite a thrill when I went there in a Buster Brown collar and those bow ties they used to wear.”
By the time Goodman shared that memory with a Tribune reporter, Lawndale had become a predominantly Black neighborhood. The Central Park featured Black performers like the Mighty Clouds of Joy gospel group and the Jackson Five.
But television knocked a big hole in the movie business. In 1971, the Central Park Theatre was acquired by the House of Prayer, Church of God in Christ. Its pastor, Lincoln Scott, used its stage for benefit performances of Teens with Talent, a program of music lessons intended to keep young people out of the neighborhood gangs.
Earlier, a synagogue similarly offered free lessons, and Goodman said that if he hadn’t been given them, he could’ve become a Lawndale gang member.
But keeping the Central Park Theatre building in barely minimum repair has been a herculean task for Scott and his successor, the Rev. Robert Marshall. They also had to provide a food pantry and run clothing drives for their impoverished neighbors.
While the theater’s marquee and its towering sign are gone, the auditorium is intact. But after the heating plant failed, Marshall couldn’t hold services in the winter. Though incapacitated by a stroke, he remains devoted to preserving the building’s heritage, his daughter Tashona White reports:
“My father says the thing that keeps him going is wanting to see that the theater has been saved.”
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