City of Amusements
Fun and pleasure for sale
Between 1900 and 1945, as the people of Chicago
adopted new leisure and consumption habits, the city's retail and
entertainment industries boomed. Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s,
movie theaters and dance halls opened across the city while downtown
hotels launched numerous expansion projects. When the Depression hit
and incomes fell, pennywise shoppers helped fuel the spread of
discount department stores and other retail chains, even as other
amusements, such as burlesque, vaudeville, and dime museums
languished. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 provided the city's
restaurants and night clubs a much-needed boost in business and the
popularity of the big band performances between films helped larger
movie theaters stay in the black. The Second World War returned
full-fledged prosperity to the local entertainment industry, due in
large part to the higher incomes of wartime and the spread of more
carefree attitudes toward nightlife.
Cognizant of the potential for enormous profits, dozens of
Chicago entrepreneurs invested millions in popular amusements. One
such individual was Joseph Beifeld, who, in the early 1900s, acquired
the moribund Hotel Sherman, renovated it, and turned its College Inn
into one of the hottest night spots in town. Other notable impresarios
of the period included Barney Balaban and Sam Katz of the Balaban &
Katz movie theater circuit; William A.Wieboldt, founder of the
Wieboldt department store chain; and J. Louis Guyon and Andrew Karzas,
dance hall promoters. Significantly, many of the city's leading
impresarios were Jewish and drew upon their experience in Yiddish show
business to help their new ventures succeed. They closely monitored
audience reactions to performances offered in their show palaces and
quickly dispensed with those acts that failed to win the approval of
their patrons. During Prohibition, such careful attention to the
ever-changing tastes of the host culture helped Jewish enterprises
thrive, while their Irish and German rivals suffered.
Geography also helped shape the spread of
commercial amusements in Chicago. Certain localities within the urban
grid emerged as leading retail and entertainment districts during the
early twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as "bright-light
districts" because of their concentrations of electrically lit
windows and marquees, they typically developed wherever several forms
of public transportation converged. The Loop was Chicago's largest and
most heavily patronized bright-light district, but its dominance
slipped during the 1930s as new districts, such as Uptown, Englewood,
and Woodlawn, expanded. No bright-light district was complete without
at least one department store, several movie houses, and dozens of
retail outlets, restaurants, and night clubs. The largest districts,
particularly the Loop, sported hotels, dance halls, dime museums,
tatoo parlors, pool halls, burlesque houses, brothels, and various
other amusement venues.
As far as Chicago's
bright-light districts went, the north end of State Street in the Loop
was almost unrivaled. By the end of the 1920s, there were no less than
three department stores, seven movie palaces, and dozens of
restaurants and night clubs within two blocks of the intersection of
State and Randolph.
Electricity helped make State Street a profitable retail and
entertainment zone by attracting Chicagoans to the area well after
dark, long after the business day was done. In 1926, State Street
merchants, recognizing the growing appeal of the Loop nightlife,
sponsored the installation of state-of-the-art street lamps (shown
above) that they hoped would turn the thoroughfare into the "Daylight
Way."
Illustration: "State Street, Chicago," postcard, A.C. Co.: #233 (n.d.), cropped.
Authored 1 Aug 98
Copyright
1998 by Scott A. Newman