Six stories of red letters spelling out the name of the city, hung off the front of a building on State Street. That sign is the shorthand for Chicago in roughly every film, news broadcast, and postcard ever made. Behind it is the Chicago Theatre, which opened in nineteen twenty-one with three thousand eight hundred seats and called itself the Wonder Theatre of the World.
It was built by two brothers named Balaban and their brother-in-law Sam Katz. Barney and A.J. Balaban had grown up over their parents' grocery on the West Side and started out running a single nickelodeon. Within twenty years they controlled the most lavish chain of movie palaces in America.
Inside, the lobby is five stories tall, the grand staircase copied from the Paris Opera, chandeliers you could park a car under. The whole thing cost around four million dollars in nineteen twenty-one, which was a preposterous amount to spend on a room where people watched silent films. And that was the point. The palace was the
product. The movie was an excuse to be inside the palace.
But the thing that actually made these men rich wasn't marble. It was cold air.
Movie theaters in nineteen fifteen were miserable in summer — hot, airless rooms full of strangers. The industry shut down from June to September and treated it as weather. The Balabans went to a Chicago firm called Kroeschell Brothers, which built refrigerat
