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From the desk of Robert Loerzel
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A New Book on the Uptown Theatre
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Closed since 1981, the Uptown Theatre turns 100 years old in August. To mark the occasion, CityFiles Press is publishing The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace, which I co-authored with James A. Pierce. It’s beautifully illustrated 168-page hardcover in a coffee-table-book format. If you order now at https://www.cityfilespress.com/books/the-uptown/, there’s a preorder price of $40 (plus tax and shipping). The books will ship on August 1.
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Anticipating a question that many people may ask: No, I can’t tell you exactly what is going to happen with the Uptown Theatre. Efforts to reopen the landmark structure continue. Skepticism is understandable, but it could happen.
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Chicago’s Uptown Theatre, one of America’s largest and most lavish movie palaces, has sat vacant for more than 40 years. For decades, few people have been let inside—to experience its grand lobby, its sweeping staircase, or its massive theater auditorium, which once showed Marx Brothers films and played host to Bruce Springsteen concerts.
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The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace gathers the work of a dozen contemporary photographers with vintage blueprints, renderings, programs, and classic photographs to tell the story of one of America’s jewels—a theater built “for all time.”
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Opened a century ago, the Uptown is now in limbo, its beauty hidden behind a plywood barricade. Too costly to tear down and too expensive to restore, the theater faces a precarious future.
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That’s why this book was created. To document what remains and to call for the protection and preservation of one of America’s sacred places. It’s not too late, as this book shows.
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Journalists Robert Loerzel and James A. Pierce have been studying the Uptown for decades. They have assembled a detailed documentation, relying on original records and first-hand accounts to tell the story of dreamers, a changing neighborhood and a nation stepping into a new world.
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The book is receiving praise from some noted Chicago experts. Here are a few of the comments we’ve received ahead of publication:
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“In 2025, the Uptown Theatre can feel like a place out of time, in two senses: belonging to the past and potentially having no viable future. The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace fights against both of those misguided sentiments. Balaban and Katz designed and built the Uptown despite naysayers who called them misguided; but they saw the future of such movie palaces. Today, preservation and restoration efforts may seem Quixotic, but they too look ahead to a future when the opulent beauty and its artistic communities could thrive. This volume’s lavish photographs of the Uptown’s glory days, and its decline, fix in our time what this monumental palace for entertainment—and democracy!—once was. Its richly detailed narratives of the Uptown and its namesake neighborhood’s history explicate the building’s past while also suggesting the future that might await it. Finally, the story of the Uptown’s hundred years is the history of Chicago, and America, as well: silent movies to talkies, vaudeville to Cinemascope, Charlie Chaplin to Bruce Springsteen, extravagant terra cotta to ‘less is more,’ boom times to white flight and blight followed by gentrification. The Uptown Theatre hosted or witnessed it all, and this book tells its story magnificently.”
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— Bill Savage, Northwestern University
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“This wonderfully illustrated book is a valuable contribution both to the growing number of studies of Chicago neighborhoods and to the history of the movie palaces that once graced American cities. The Uptown details not only the Uptown Theatre and its history, but that of the neighborhood from which it took its name. This is a heroic story of twentieth century entrepreneurship, neighborhood building, and of the legion of volunteers who have worked to save the grand theater since its closing in 1981.”
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— Dominic A. Pacyga, author of Chicago: A Biography
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“There was a time when Chicago glistened with stars in its eyes. They shined within fantasy galaxies built to create resplendent heavens of imagination. As the motion pictures declared within them, they were places where dreams were born. Too spectacular to be called mere theaters, they were palaces, breathtaking, hard to believe structures more dazzling than the entertainment on their stages. The Uptown was the largest in the nation. Through decades of volunteer efforts, its sheer grandeur has fought back the march of time, and it remains preserved like a buried ancient city. The captivating images and stories in this book impel us all to support the efforts that will allow the Uptown to hold its place in Chicago’s architectural firmament.”
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— Bill Kurtis, journalist
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“The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace does justice to a theater that thoroughly deserves a second (third?) life. With its descriptive passages and treasure trove of photos, it captures the Uptown in all its glory. If this book can help to spur a renovation of this magnificent theater, it will have served its purpose with flying colors.”
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— Will Clinger, producer and host of Wild Travels on PBS
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“The Uptown is a gorgeously made and supremely detailed love letter to Chicago’s greatest movie palace. While the book takes you back in time to the Roaring Twenties through luscious pictures, it is also a timely reminder of the many eras of history a building can hold and why we need to fight to preserve them.”
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— Will Quam, historian and photographer, Brick of Chicago
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From the desk of Robert Loerzel
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