Located at

Six Corners Six Corners is a shopping district in the Portage Park neighborhood of Chicago's Northwest Side. History The area's name is from the intersection of three streets—Irving Park Road, Cicero Avenue and Milwaukee Avenue. Its history as an urban c ...

in the Portage Park neighborhood of Chicago's Northwest Side, the Portage Theater is one of the oldest movie houses in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. The Portage Theater opened on December 11, 1920 as the Portage Park Theatre (the former name is still visible on the building's facade). Built for the Ascher Brothers circuit with 1,938 seats, the Portage was the first theater built specifically for film (and not

vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...

) in the area. The Portage Theater's interior features a megaphone-shaped

auditorium An auditorium is a room built to enable an audience to hear and watch performances. For movie theatres, the number of auditoria (or auditoriums) is expressed as the number of screens. Auditoria can be found in entertainment venues, community ...

based on a formal Beaux-Arts

opera house An opera house is a theatre building used for performances of opera. It usually includes a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and building sets. While some venues are constructed specifically fo ...

design. When the theater was taken over by

Balaban and Katz Balaban and Katz Theater Corporation, or B&K, was a theatre corporation which owned a chain of motion picture theaters in Chicago and surrounding areas. It was founded by Barney Balaban (later long-time President of Paramount Pictures), his six ...

in 1940, its marquee, entrance lobby and

foyer A lobby is a room in a building used for entry from the outside. Sometimes referred to as a foyer, reception area or an entrance hall, it is often a large room or complex of rooms (in a theatre, opera house, concert hall, showroom, cinema, etc. ...

were redecorated in a sleek, streamlined

art deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

style to complement other prominent

designs at

such as

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...

department store and the Klee Brothers building. The Portage remained a popular fixture of the neighborhood, becoming a second-run movie house in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the theater underwent a dramatic change when a wall was constructed down the middle of the existing

, resulting in two oddly-shaped cinemas. The Portage was shuttered in 2001 after operating sporadically for the previous couple years. The theater was restored and renovated, and reopened after a five-year hiatus in the spring of 2006 as a single-screen, 1300-plus seat theater showing both silent and sound classic motion pictures as well as hosting other live events. Today the historic Portage Theater is the home of the Silent Film Society of Chicago and hosts the Chicago Silent Film Festival as well as portions of the Chicago Polish Film Festival. In addition, the interior of the theater was utilized extensively in late May 2008 for filming of scenes for the film Public Enemies which is based on the life of 1930s bank robber

John Dillinger John Herbert Dillinger (June 22, 1903 – July 22, 1934) was an American gangster during the Great Depression. He led the Dillinger Gang, which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations. Dillinger was imprisoned several times an ...

. The interior of the Portage was reportedly used as a stand-in for the

Biograph Theater The Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, was originally a movie theater but now presents live productions. It gained early notoriety as the location where bank robber John Dillinger was ...

on Lincoln Avenue, where Dillinger viewed his last movie before being fatally wounded by FBI agents upon exiting the theater.

References

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External links

* http://www.theportagetheater.com//
"Celluloid, Graft & Puppies: The (Abbreviated) Portage Theater Story"
Detailed history of the theater and its building o
Gapers Block
Art Deco architecture in Illinois Cinemas and movie theaters in Chicago Concert halls in Illinois Chicago Landmarks Music venues in Chicago Polish-American culture in Chicago Theatres completed in 1920 Theatres in Chicago