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Portage Theater
Located at Six Corners in the Portage Park neighborhood of Chicago's Northwest Side, the Portage Theater is one of the oldest movie houses in Chicago. The Portage Theater opened on December 11, 1920 as the Portage Park Theatre (the former name is still visible on the building's facade). Built for the Ascher Brothers circuit with 1,938 seats, the Portage was the first theater built specifically for film (and not vaudeville) in the area. The Portage Theater's interior features a megaphone-shaped auditorium based on a formal Beaux-Arts opera house design. When the theater was taken over by Balaban and Katz in 1940, its marquee, entrance lobby and foyer were redecorated in a sleek, streamlined art deco style to complement other prominent art deco designs at Six Corners such as Sears department store and the Klee Brothers building. The Portage remained a popular fixture of the neighborhood, becoming a second-run movie house in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the theater underwent a dr ...
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Sears
Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears ( ), is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began as a mail-order catalog company migrating to opening retail locations in 1925, the first in Chicago. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. In 2005, the company was bought by the management of the American big box discount chain Kmart, which upon completion of the merger, formed Sears Holdings. In 2018, it was the 31st-largest. After several years of declining sales, Sears' parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. It announced on January 16, 2019, that it had won its bankruptcy auction, and that a reduced number of 425 stores would remain open, including 223 Sears stores. Sears was based in the Sears Tower in Chicago from 1973 until moving out to Ho ...
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Polish-American Culture In Chicago
Polish Americans () are Americans who either have total or partial Polish ancestry, or are citizens of the Republic of Poland. There are an estimated 8.81 million self-identified Polish Americans, representing about 2.67% of the U.S. population, according to the 2021 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The first eight Polish immigrants to British America came to the Jamestown colony in 1608, twelve years before the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts. Two Polish volunteers, Casimir Pulaski and Tadeusz Kościuszko, aided the Americans in the Revolutionary War. Casimir Pulaski created and led the Pulaski Legion of cavalry. Tadeusz Kosciuszko designed and oversaw the construction of state-of-the-art fortifications, including those at West Point, New York. Both are remembered as American heroes. Overall, around 2.2 million Poles and Polish subjects immigrated into the United States between 1820 and 1914, chiefly after national insurgencies and famine. They ...
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Music Venues In Chicago
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all human societies. Definitions of music vary widely in substance and approach. While scholars agree that music is defined by a small number of specific elements, there is no consensus as to what these necessary elements are. Music is often characterized as a highly versatile medium for expressing human creativity. Diverse activities are involved in the creation of music, and are often divided into categories of composition, improvisation, and performance. Music may be performed using a wide variety of musical instruments, including the human voice. It can also be composed, sequenced, or otherwise produced to be indirectly played mechanically or electronically, such as via a music box, barrel organ, or digital audio workstation software on a computer. Music often plays a key r ...
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Chicago Landmarks
Chicago Landmark is a designation by the Mayor of Chicago, Mayor and the City Council of Chicago for historic sites in Chicago, Illinois. Listed sites are selected after meeting a combination of criteria, including historical, economic, architectural, artistic, cultural, and social values. Once a site is designated as a landmark, it is subject to the Chicago Landmarks Ordinance, which requires that any alterations beyond routine maintenance, up to and including demolition, must have their Construction permit, permit reviewed by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Landmarks Commission. Many Chicago Landmarks are also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, providing federal tax support for preservation, and some are further designated National Historic Landmarks, providing additional federal oversight. Criteria The Mayor and the City Council appoint a nine-member Commission on Chicago Landmarks to develop landmark recommendations in accordance with a 1968 Chicag ...
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Concert Halls In Illinois
A concert, often known informally as a gig or show, is a live performance of music in front of an audience. The performance may be carried by a single musician, in which case it is sometimes called a recital, or by a musical ensemble such as an orchestra, choir, or band. Concerts are held in a wide variety of settings and sizes, spanning from venues such as private houses and small nightclubs to mid-sized concert halls and finally to large arenas and stadiums, as well as outdoor venues such as amphitheatres and parks. Indoor concerts held in the largest venues are sometimes called arena concerts or amphitheatre concerts. Regardless of the venue, musicians usually perform on a stage (if not an actual stage, then an area of the floor designated as such). Concerts often require live event support with professional audio equipment. Before recorded music, concerts provided the main opportunity to hear musicians play. For large concerts or concert tours, the challenging logistics of ar ...
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Cinemas And Movie Theaters In Chicago
A movie theater (American English) or cinema (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), also known as a movie house, cinema hall, picture house, picture theater, the movies, the pictures, or simply theater, is a business that contains auditoriums for viewing films for public entertainment. Most are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing Ticket (admission), tickets. The film is projected with a movie projector onto a large projection screen at the front of the auditorium while the dialogue, sounds and music are played through a number of wall-mounted speakers. Since the 1970s, subwoofers have been used for low-pitched sounds. Since the 2010s, the majority of movie theaters have been equipped for digital cinema projection, removing the need to create and transport a physical film print on a heavy reel. A great variety of films are shown at cinemas, ranging from animated films to Blockbuster (entertainment), blockbuste ...
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Beaux-Arts Cinemas And Movie Theaters
Beaux Arts, Beaux arts, or Beaux-Arts is a French term corresponding to fine arts in English. Capitalized, it may refer to: * Académie des Beaux-Arts, a French arts institution (not a school) * Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, a Belgian arts school * Beaux-Arts architecture, an architectural style * Beaux Arts Gallery, a gallery of British modern art * Beaux-Arts Institute of Design a.k.a. BAID, New York City based art and architecture school * Beaux Arts Magazine, French magazine * Beaux Arts Trio, a classical music chamber group * Beaux Arts Village, Washington, a small town in the Seattle metropolitan area * École des Beaux-Arts, several art schools in France ** École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon ** École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris * Fine art, a style of painting popular at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, the source of the generalized concept of "fine arts", i.e. art for art's sake * Palais des Beaux Arts, a federal cultural venue in Brussels, Bel ...
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Art Deco Cinemas And Movie Theaters
Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around ''works'' utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes ''art'', and its interpretation has varied greatly throughout history and across cultures. In the Western tradition, the three classical branches of visual art are painting, sculpture, and architecture. Theatre, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, music, film and other media such as interactive media, are included in a broader definition of "the arts". Until the 17th century, ''art'' referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. In modern usage after the 17th century, where aesthetic considerations are paramount, the fine arts are separated and distinguished from acquired skills in general, ...
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Lincoln Avenue (Chicago)
Lincoln Avenue is a street of the north side of city of Chicago. It runs from Clark Street (itself a diagonal) on the western border of Lincoln Park largely to the northwest, ending in Morton Grove, Illinois. It leaves the city limits of Chicago at Devon Avenue, through the village of Lincolnwood, curves through the village of Skokie and ends at Dempster Street in Morton Grove. In total distance it is about long, although it is not completely continuous. Between Foster Avenue and Skokie Boulevard U.S. Route 41 runs on Lincoln Avenue. Most of Lincoln Avenue is zoned commercial, and is lined by shops, restaurants and other establishments. It is the site of the yearly Taste of Lincoln Avenue, held between Fullerton Avenue and Wrightwood Avenue. It is also the site of the Maifest and German American Fest in Lincoln Square. History Originally it was a Native American trail running along a slight ridge in the usually soggy ground of pre-settlement Chicago. Prior to the assassi ...
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Biograph Theater
The Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, was originally a movie theater but now presents live productions. It gained early notoriety as the location where bank robber John Dillinger was leaving when he was shot down by FBI agents, after he watched a gangster movie there on July 22, 1934. The theater is on the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a Chicago Landmark on March 28, 2001. History Designed by architect Samuel N. Crowen in 1914, the Biograph has many of the distinguishing characteristics of movie houses of the period, including a storefront-width lobby, recessed entrance, free-standing ticket booth, and canopy marquee. The building is finished with red pressed brick and white- glazed terra cotta. On July 22, 1934, after attending the film '' Manhattan Melodrama'' with brothel madam Ana Cumpănaș, also known as Anna Sage (or "The Woman in Red"), and Polly Hamilton, John Dillinger was shot dead ...
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