That six-story vertical sign spelling out the city's name is probably the single most photographed object in Chicago. It went up in nineteen twenty-one on a movie palace built to make ordinary people feel like royalty for the price of a ticket. The lobby was modeled on a French king's chapel. The grand staircase copies the one at the Paris opera house. They called it the wonder theater of the world and they were not being modest.
The men who built it, Balaban and Katz, understood something no one else quite had — that the building could be the attraction, not just the film. Uniformed ushers walked you to your seat. A pipe organ the size of a truck rose out of the floor. And they installed something almost no public building in America had yet: air conditioning. On a brutal Chicago August, they'd advertise the cold air itself, and people lined up around the block to sit in the dark and simply be cool for an hour. That association you have — movies and blasting air conditioning going to
gether — partly starts in palaces like this one. They sold the temperature and threw in a film.
But the reason it's on this tour is a rumor. A good one.
The story goes that during the gang wars, when men were being shot in restaurants and barbershops and outside cathedrals, a few places stayed off-limits. Neutral ground. And this theater, the story goes, was the most neutral ground of all — beca
