In the good old, bad old days, guys met dolls downtown on Randolph Street. Bookies met dollars, coming and going. Ethel Barrymore arrived in a limo. Lesser stars left in a huff. Milton Berle played seven stage shows a day at the Oriental Theatre. And sometimes there was a movie.
Randolph between State and LaSalle Streets was Chicago’s showtime strip, stacked with booking agents and musicians in hairy coats milling on street corners. You could tell the bookies from everyone else because they smoked better stogies.
“It was so crowded,” says Danny Newman, Chicago’s 80-year-old master of theater subscription sales, “that you hardly could walk on the street.”
On one New Year’s Eve, he and his actress-wife, the late Dina Halpern, hurried to State and Randolph after she took her curtain bows. It was the place to go.
“About a million people were there,” Newman says, “and all of them celebrating.”
Chicago lost all that. The Ziegfeld Follies, alleged glorifier of female beauty, played regularly here in its day. But no folly was greater than Chicago’s in our day. In the Loop, shopping and entertainment had thrived hand in hand. But as they fell off, the city stumbled for years amid the urban shock waves. Dollars that had been spent downtown decamped to suburbia and its malls — and to North Michigan Avenue.
Randolph and its movie houses turned gamey and eventually shut down. The causes were complex, but the end came with the 1990 wipeout of the entire block known as Block 37, across from Marshall Field’s between Randolph and Washington Streets. On the street of show biz, there practically was no biz.
But lo! there’s nightlife after death. Even with Block 37 still on hold, Chicago is reinventing Randolph Street faster than you might think — but select and sanitized this time, neighborly but no longer quite the same everybody street.
Consider the Palace Theatre at LaSalle and Randolph. The last time anyone used this 1920s palazzo of vaudeville and movies, it wasn’t a theater anymore. The gilt and the marble were intact, but the main floor had lost its seats, its purpose and its dignity.
The Palace was reduced to stand-in status as a sometime ballroom, meeting place and boxing arena. Who needed one more comatose movie theater, after all — even one concocted and costumed by architects Rapp and Rapp? They were the dream merchants supreme who also designed the Chicago and Oriental Theatres, two similar extravaganzas now restored and operating with new uses.
And now the Palace is back, too, and still a dreamboat. It will reopen Nov. 12, with a $22 million upgrading, as a 2,300-seat home for musicals, dance and concerts.
The stage has been widened, and the first production is “Aida.” Not the Verdi grand opera, to be sure. This is the Elton John-Tim Rice version, hyped and hip. (Previews begin on the 12th, and the show’s official opening is Dec. 9.)
All told, $230 million or more in public and private spending is going into the downtown Randolph Street Theatre District. Nearly $60 million of it is coming from City Hall, almost all in tax-increment subsidies and street improvements, with the emphasis on live theater.
The new Randolph is high stakes for the Daley administration, which is ballyhooing downtown stages as vital props of a neighborly new North Loop with visitor appeal. The city will recoup its investment in two or three years in tax revenue alone, according to projections by the city planning department.
“Randolph can’t miss,” says architect Daniel P. Coffey, the presiding hand in restoring the Chicago, Oriental and Palace theaters.
In this uncertain world, to be sure, Randolph can miss. That’s the calculated risk involved. State Street’s Chicago Theatre, restored in 1986, still seeks a fulfilling role for itself.
The turning point for Randolph, nonetheless, occurred last fall with revival of the Oriental. The Oriental has changed hands since then and went dark this summer amid fears it may have lost some creativity in booking. It reopened Sept. 22, however, with the kicky dance musical, “Fosse,” and a $65 top ticket.
With “Aida” just down the street, Randolph will be lit up as it has not been in a long time. The Palace will sport a towering sign like the Chicago and Oriental. So will the new Goodman Theatre Center now going up in a bustle of construction at Dearborn and Randolph.
It’s a huge change for the Goodman, which has been sequestered for 74 years at the Art Institute of Chicago. The new facilities will debut in the fall of 2000 with two stages as well as dining and shopping behind a stylish front wall of glass 60 feet high.
Late in 2001, the 1,500-seat theater for music and dance is tentatively set to open in a Grant Park with an entrance on Randolph. About $15 million still has to be raised for this $27 million civic project.
Add to that a 17-story residence hall and Film Center with two small art-cinema houses for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This complex is being built at State and Randolph, where movie crowds once filled the street. Like the Goodman, the Film Center is relocating into the urban thick of things.
Some 400 students will live in the loftstyle dorms, signaling an end to the long years when the Loop pulled in its sidewalks at night. A 24-hour downtown remains the city’s goal, says Planning Commissioner Christopher R. Hill, and it may be no pipe dream.
At Wells Street the old Bismarck Hotel has recast itself as the Hotel Allegro, aided by city tax-increment funding. Across the street, a late-’20s skyscraper at 188 W. Randolph is being remade into condos.
Randolph also has spread over the onetime railyards east of Michigan Avenue, with oversized office skyscrapers and condos blocking each other’s views of lake and park. As Chicago recycles, so does Randolph. The street even is due for a Borders bookstore on the first floor of the new School of the Art Institute dorms.
For the dorm complex, architect Laurence Booth has designed an inventive version of an early Chicago skyscraper, blending tradition and fresh ideas. Coated in a white paneling of glass-reinforced concrete, the building will be a companion piece to the landmark Reliance Building a block away at State and Washington. The Reliance, newly preserved, has been recast as the Hotel Burnham.
But what of Block 37, State Street’s $100 million hole in the ground? It borders Randolph on the north, and plans for it have come and gone in waves of frustration and controversy. Now the city has moved around it with the theaters. The block remains essential, and there are promises of an impending shopping/hotel project. Some disagreement has surfaced on what it should contain.
Organized State Street welcomes the new Randolph, says Ted Ratcliff, general manager of the Palmer House Hilton. But it also wants new movie houses on Block 37, or some other use that would strengthen nighttime and weekend business, he says.
The unfolding new district needs more shopping, more dining. The Chicago Theatre needs fuller use. The projected Music and Dance Theatre may be too isolated in Grant Park.
But the focus on live theater downtown has been a good thing, says Marj Halperin, executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres. Attendance at neighborhood stages has picked up, she says.
“It helps to have the mayor talking about theaters,” says Halperin.
