CHICAGO -- At the heart of a once-bustling neighborhood known as Uptown, a large, shuttered-for-decades theater sits amid pawnshops, beauty parlors, a used bookstore, a nearby old theater and empty storefronts. Then the theater reopens, the Uptown arts and entertainment district is launched, crowds flock to nearby restaurants, bars and other attractions, and the city reaps the economic benefits of a newly hot destination spot.
Many Chicagoans, business leaders and officials would love to see this scenario played out in the North Side neighborhood that houses the Uptown Theatre, which will mark its 90th birthday Tuesday but hasn't hosted a public event since the J. Geils Band played there on Dec. 19, 1981.
Yet the above description actually applies to Oakland, Calif., which saw its Uptown arts and entertainment district jump-started by the 2009 opening of the Fox Theater more than 40 years after that old movie palace had its last screening.
The Fox's revamp fit into a larger strategy spearheaded by then-Mayor Jerry Brown, now California's governor, to boost downtown Oakland's population and economic viability. The reopening of the theater, which holds about 100 live events a year and has the Oakland School for the Arts as a tenant, is widely credited as a catalyst for the neighborhood's change.
"Since the Fox opened we've had about 200 ground-floor storefronts just within the core downtown area open, and many of these businesses are trying to locate around the arts and entertainment district and be as close to the Fox and the [nearby] Paramount Theatre as possible," said Steve Snider, district manager of Oakland's Uptown and Downtown community-benefit districts.
Such districts have become increasingly vital to cities and regions striving for global reach and the dollars of tourists. The success of Oakland's Uptown, which is what the northern part of its downtown is called, has registered in Chicago. San Francisco Bay Area developer Phil Tagami, who oversaw the Fox's $74 million redo, was hired as a consultant on a prospective Uptown Theatre restoration.
Tagami understands the rewards of a newly reopened theater drawing from near and far. "It's an amazing benefit to the city -- hotel rooms, of course restaurants and then a bunch of bar activity after the show," he said.
The band Green Day has played at the Brahmin temple-inspired Fox, and bassist Mike Dirnt opened his second Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe on its ground floor. Other headliners have included Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, My Morning Jacket and, on back-to-back nights in late July, young British popster Charli XCX and vintage grunge rockers Alice in Chains.
During the day a soundtrack of buzz saws and jackhammers signals the repurposing of vintage, vacated buildings for new residential tenants, tech offices, hotels and restaurants, as well as the transformation of formerly gritty intersections into lounge-worthy public spaces.
"This is the most active, hippest part of town," said real estate developer Drew Haydel, whose Lane Partners plans to remake a 1929, 350,000-square-foot building that recently housed Sears on its ground floors but has been unoccupied on the upper floors for more than a decade.
For Haydel's Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, such an investment -- set to include office space to cater to the Bay Area's booming tech scene, along with a high-end food hall -- would not have been in the cards before the Fox opened. "There's no doubt that the Fox Theater is a big part of what contributes to that vibrancy," Haydel said.
Jerry Mickelson, principal and co-founder of longtime Chicago concert promoter Jam Productions, has taken note. "You go there, and it's really amazing, and I would expect the same thing to happen here," he said.
Actually, he has banked on that happening.
In 2008, Mickelson and Jam partner Arny Granat formed a spinoff company, UTA II, to buy the Uptown Theatre out of bankruptcy for a reported $3.2 million.
In 2011, there was much optimism for the neighborhood's prospects after Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office and called for the creation of an Uptown music district, a proposal that echoed a 2000 Urban Land Institute report envisioning the theater as the "crown jewel" in an Uptown Entertainment District.
The Lawrence Avenue/Broadway nexus already boasts such long-standing music venues as the Aragon Ballroom, the Riviera Theatre and the Green Mill jazz club. Throw in the 4,381-seat, ornate Uptown Theatre, which opened in 1925 touting its "acre of seats in a magic city," and the neighborhood might reach its potential as a hot destination point that draws from around and outside the city.
"It can happen now because people are finally seeing the intertwined connection between culture and economic development," Emanuel said in a 2011 Chicago Tribune interview.
Four years later that connection is being forged ... elsewhere.
On a relatively undeveloped stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y., the Kings Theatre, a 1929 movie palace from Uptown Theatre architects Rapp and Rapp, reopened in February with a Diana Ross concert. The Kings had been closed for 37 years, and the price tag on its refurbishment was about $95 million -- $52.5 million provided by New York City, which owns the property, said New York City Economic Development Corp. Senior Vice President Christina DeRose.
"It was this opportunity to create a new economic driver for the neighborhood," DeRose said. A new Gap Factory Store now sits across the street, and a boutique hotel and gym are on their way.
The Uptown Theatre in Chicago remains boarded-up, a mass of dead energy at the neighborhood's epicenter. Outside and inside, the theater looks pretty much the same as when Emanuel was first elected, which is to say that it's beautiful and in desperate need of some pricey bodywork.
Mickelson said the cost to maintain the structure has been about $500,000 a year -- and even so, his company has been in Cook County Circuit Court with some regularity so the city can monitor its condition. Between 1975 and 1981, Jam Productions presented Uptown concerts by such artists as the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and Bob Marley and the Wailers, but the partners had little clue how long it might take to get the place reopened.
"When we bought it, the economy tanked," Mickelson said while guiding a walk-through of the building last month. "But I didn't put a timetable on it. I just knew it needed to be saved."
Covering 46,000 square feet, the Uptown Theatre was built to be the largest, most lavish theater yet from Balaban & Katz, the company that was already operating such Rapp and Rapp-designed movie palaces as the Loop's Chicago Theatre, the South Side's Tivoli, the West Side's Central Park and the North Side's Riviera.
The gracefully raked auditorium, with its red-glowing dome ringed by griffin and king figures, boasts a higher capacity than just about any movie palace outside Radio City Music Hall. And the marble-floored front lobby -- with its eye-catching gargoyles, frescoes, torchiers, and 24-carat gold and silver-leaf designs -- and other public spaces are so generously proportioned that the theater touted being able to turn over its entire capacity in just 16 minutes.
"We think that once this Uptown Theatre is done, that people not only from all over the city but certainly the surrounding suburbs would come to it," said Alderman James Cappleman, whose 46th Ward includes the venue. "And people coming from other parts of the country and other parts of the world would want to visit it because it's so grand. A theater like this will never be built like this again, ever."
Choose Chicago, the city's tourism arm, has been working on a plan to attract visitors to Uptown, with Jason Lesniewicz, the organization's cultural tourism and neighborhoods manager, envisioning a reopened Uptown as "a major draw" in a city known for its architecture.
The local architecture firm Booth Hansen issued a feasibility study in 2009 estimating that the building, which experienced flooding and other damage over the years, would require about $55 million to become operational again and close to $71 million to be restored completely. The price now is widely assumed to be higher.
Meanwhile, Uptown, the Chicago neighborhood, lives on without its namesake theater.
Uptown still hasn't solved all of its crime and gang problems, but bars and restaurants are increasing and popular, some upscale food and coffee places have opened along Wilson Avenue, developers have been unveiling new residential projects, and the $203 million Wilson Red Line station reconstruction is generating economic activity.
On the entertainment front, the 6-month-old Uptown Underground is drawing crowds to its burlesque/cabaret acts. Also, a bouldering gym called First Ascent is set to open in late fall on the second floor of the North Broadway building that housed a Borders bookstore until 2011.
The city has chipped in a $50,000 grant to underwrite the Uptown Saturday Nights culture crawls now running the second Saturday of each month. Those events include family programming, neighborhood tours and free music performances. The Chicago Department of Transportation is planning a Broadway/Lawrence streetscape with a new plaza to sit outside the Riviera, and work has begun to turn a three-block stretch of Argyle Street into a "shared street."
Sara Dinges, president and CEO of the community economic development organization Uptown United, said that over the past four years, about $700 million has been invested in or committed to the neighborhood. "So a lot is going on," she said.
No neighborhood transition is going to make everybody happy. Rents rise, retailers get displaced and the vibe shifts.
"It's not the city it used to be," complained Oakland resident Lyn Bonthius as she awaited her husband across from the Fox on a recent afternoon.
But when her husband, woodcarving artist Rik Harris, arrived, he praised the Fox as "fantastic" and the new restaurants as "super."
"It's a good thing to make the city pop a little bit," he said.
Now the question is whether -- and when -- the Uptown Theatre will give its Uptown a similar pop.
"If we can do it in Oakland, for the love of God, you could do it in Chicago," Tagami said. "Hello. I mean, really?"
SundayMonday on 08/16/2015