“The Auditorium Theatre”

AboutArchitectural and theatrical history of Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and commissioned by lawyer-philanthropist Ferdinand W. Peck as a democratic "people's" opera house. Covers the building's dimensions and flexible seating (capacity reducible from 4,200 to 2,584 by means of hinged, counterweighted ceiling panels), Adler's acoustic design, the Asphalia Geselschaft hydraulic stage machinery imported from Vienna, and the decor, including murals by Albert Fleury and Charles Holloway. Traces the theatre's performance history — praised by John McCormack and Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked on it as Sullivan's assistant), and hosting Bernhardt, Duse, Chaliapin, Caruso, Gershwin, Stokowski, and Toscanini — through its decline after the Chicago Civic Opera's 1929 move to a new building, its varied later uses (USO center, Masonic Lodge banquet hall), Roosevelt University's 1946 purchase, and the early-1960s restoration campaign that prompted the article.

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