The Auditorium Building at 125

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The Auditorium Building – now the home of Roosevelt University and the Auditorium Theatre – is one of the great architectural treasures of the world. Designed and built by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, it provided a venue for culture that was available to all Chicagoans regardless of income. A hotel and business complex surrounding the theatre helped support the cost of the arts. After the building’s revenues declined in the early 20th Century, Roosevelt purchased the Auditorium in 1946 and has been restoring it ever since. On the occasion of the 125th birthday of this iconic building, we offer the following historical tidbits.

Auditorium Theatre Fact 1

Before it officially opened, the Auditorium Theatre hosted the 1888 Republican Convention, which nominated Benjamin Harrison as a presidential candidate. A second political convention in 1912 nominated Theodore Roosevelt as the presidential candidate for the independent National Progressive Party. In 1920 Franklin D. Roosevelt, nominee for vice president, opened the Democratic Party’s national campaign in the theatre.

The Auditorium Building contained 17 million bricks, 50 million pieces of marble tile, 25 miles of gas and water pipes, and 12,000 electric lights. It was one of the first buildings anywhere to be wired for electricity, and the theatre was the first to rely entirely on incandescent light bulbs — 3,500 of them.

The building was the first to have central air conditioning, which relied on 15 tons of ice each day sprayed by water and dispersed with fans.

The Michigan Avenue lobby originally included a pharmacy, women’s restaurant with a private entrance and a corridor leading to the oak-paneled men’s bar and café.

The acoustically perfect theatre initially housed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chicago Civic Opera. It was called “the greatest room for music and opera in the world, bar none” by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

 

Legend persists that the musical diva Sarah Bernhardt, when performing in the Auditorium Theatre, kept room 720 as her private suite and installed a coffin there in which to sleep. Room 720 is now a history and philosophy seminar room.

Among the other featured acts in the theatre were silent movies with live music, the U.S. Marine Band, a circus complete with elephants, and the 1898 Chicago Peace Jubilee featuring Booker T. Washington and President William McKinley.

There was even a baseball game played on the stage in 1891, pitting the Farraguts against the LaSalles in a benefit for the Newsboys and Bootblacks Association. Indoor baseball was a brief fad in Chicago and evolved into slow-pitch outdoor softball.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an apprentice draftsman on the project. Seventy years later he returned to examine the columns he had designed in the seventh floor recital hall now known as Ganz Hall.

In 1921 the Chicago Opera Company’s performance of Madame Butterfly was the first live radio broadcast in Chicago’s history.

Like many 19th Century buildings, the Auditorium featured gendered spaces – for women a separate lobby entrance, a “ladies parlor” on the second floor (now the Sullivan Room), and a theatre reception area, and for men a bar and café in the lobby and a smoking room (now the Spertus Lounge) on the second floor.

The U.S. Signal Corps occupied the top three floors of the Tower through World War II. The tower observatory admitted the public to gaze over Lake Michigan and the city skyline.

In 1942 the building was taken over by the city as a military USO Center. A bowling alley was built on the theatre stage and the 10th floor restaurant and 7th floor recital hall became dormitories for enlisted men and officers. There were even facilities for families of servicemen soon to be shipped overseas.

The Auditorium Building fell on hard times in the early 20th Century as the hotel lost business to competitors with all “en suite” bathrooms and the Chicago Symphony and Civic Opera built their own venues. In 1927 promoters proposed building a miniature golf course in the theatre lobby, with the ninth hole in the orchestra pit and hotdogs and lemonade offered on the theatre stage. Despite this and other ventures, the building went bankrupt in 1941.

After Roosevelt College began in a building at 231 Wells Street in 1945, rapidly rising enrollments forced the College to look for larger quarters. It was difficult to find a seller for a racially integrated institution but they found that most of the owners of the Auditorium Building would sell.

Attorney Abraham Teitelbaum, who owned 52 feet of the north end of the building that included parts of the smoke stack, boilers and switchboards, would not sell to Roosevelt. Teitelbaum, also a lawyer for gangster Al Capone, constructed a chicken wire fence marking off his clients’ property.

Protesting students held a “Chicken Wire” party in 1946 in the Auditorium lobby that was covered by Life magazine; Teitelbaum soon after agreed to sell and Roosevelt College owned the building in its entirety for a cost of $400,000 and the settlement of back taxes.

The theatre was shuttered from 1946 until its reopening in 1967, which featured a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the New York City Ballet. It has since been a venue for dance, theatre and music.

Through the 1970s the theatre was Chicago’s premier rock venue; the Grateful Dead played there 10 times from 1971 through 1977.

After the building went bankrupt, scavengers removed light fixtures, fireplaces, stained glass and even doorknobs. Roosevelt’s painters and carpenters spent decades repairing and restoring the mosaic tiles, stained glass, wood and iron work, stencils and murals throughout the building. Donors and friends of the University hunted down and restored original pieces of the building. Alumnus Seymour Persky found a fireplace in Maine that was originally located in the second floor ladies lounge.

Several movies have used the Auditorium Building as a set. The Untouchables (1987, starring Kevin Costner, Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro) transformed the lobby, staircase and entrance into gangster Al Capone’s Lexington Hotel. In 2006 the entrance, lobby and 10th floor were sets for The Lake House, with Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and Christopher Plummer. Public Enemies (2009) featured Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and the Auditorium Theatre lobby as the “Steuben Nightclub.”

The Auditorium Building was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975, and a Chicago Landmark in 1976.

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