CLASSIC CINEMA
Local entrepreneurs help rebuild downtowns
by renovating and reopening some of the state's oldest movie houses

by Beverley Scobell

Some nights it's a ghost town. Carson Pirie Scott, Sears and Penneys have long moved to the mall north of town. Former candy and card shops, jewelry and shoe stores, even the drugstores that just two decades ago lined Water Street now mostly draw customers of city and county services. But four nights a week, Friday through Monday, bright lights once again beckon Decatur residents downtown. The Avon Theater's marquee again advertises a slice of life for the price of a $5.00 ticket.

"Try the Chicago-style popcorn," Skip Huston encourages as he steps out of the ticket booth. It's a slow night, the last showing of Kenneth Branaugh's version of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. Huston moves with customers toward the concession stand, an oval of glass showing off SnoCaps, M&M's, Jujybeans and Junior Mints, where his one paid employee (the rest of the staff are volunteers) offers moviegoers a choice of four flavored popcorns, including the cheese, buttered and caramel combination recommended. The smell of fresh popcorn drizzled with real butter fills the small lobby. Huston treats patrons like party guests, anxious for everyone to enjoy the experience of watching a movie in a house that has history and character — heck, even its own resident ghost — an ambiance, he argues, that cannot be found in the modem multiplexes.

"I'm there greeting people as they come in and thanking them as they leave," says Huston. The personal touch is just one of the reasons why Huston believes people have been again filling the seats. Built in 1916 as a movie house rather than a vaudeville theater that showed movies, the Avon welcomed moviegoers for 70 years without interruption. However, the changing economy and shifting shopping habits took their toll, and new management closed the theater in 1986. There were sporadic attempts to reopen the Avon, but it was mostly closed until the Huston family took over in early 1999, offering art and alternative films.

Classic Cinemas, Downers Grove The doors leading to the Paramount's auditorium were reconstructed, bringing back to life the polished hardware and stained glass windows.

"We kept hearing, 'Decatur art films is an oxymoron,'" says Huston. "Decatur has this reputation as a blue-collar town bereft of culture. I never believed that and our audiences are proving it to be untrue. The theater really fills a niche the community is hungry for." The Avon now averages 500 people a week during weekend showings. It even snagged the first downstate showing of this year's Cannes Film Festival winner. Dancer in the Dark.

Many of his customers, Huston says, come from Springfield, a city that tore down all of its historic theaters. The Roxy, the Strand, the Orpheum are all just memories. That was the trend across the country from the late 1960s on, says Terrance Demas, executive director of the League of Historic American Theatres. In the 1920s and '30s movies were the newest form of escapism and people went to see them by the thousands. "People had very little other entertainment and theater owners catered to that demand by building palaces that took people out of their lives and let them step into another world," says Demas. He compares the experience to that of Disney World, a theme park built around fantasy. But as the number of choices for people's entertainment dollars exploded in the last two decades, he says, the old 1,000-plus-seat theaters that have a movie for a week or two found it difficult, if not impossible, to compete with 10- and 20-screen multiplexes that gain revenue from a blockbuster for three months. "And what do you do with a theater that can't make money as a theater?" he asks rhetorically, knowing too well that the answer for so many has been a bulldozer.

However, the tide may have turned on the development mindset of the 1960s and '70s that saw so many of the older movie houses torn down. It's not always historic preservation in its purest form, but in those downtown areas where stubborn folk have been determined to save their movie theaters, they have found ways to do it and bring new life to downtowns. And audiences find they still have a few fun and sometimes even

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Classic Cinemas, Downers Grove The tower of the 1926 Sterling Theater in Sterling was again lighted in October after the theater was renovated over the summer. The vinyl siding that had covered the tower was replaced with opaque panels and new lights and the art deco interior was restored.

quirky places to go to watch movies that aren't overrun with 14-year-olds.

The Johnson family, who run Classic Cinemas out of Downers Grove, seem to have hit on a formula for giving the moviegoing audience what they want while indulging their passion for historic theaters. Willis, his wife Shirley and their son Chris operate 17 theaters in 16 communities surrounding Chicago and are members of the Theatre Historical Society of America. About half of their movie houses are historic downtown theaters where they have been able to blend the addition of the newest technologies of sight and sound with careful restoration of 1920s and '30s "palaces."

The Paramount Theatre in Kankakee is a telling example of how the Johnsons run a profitable business while saving and restoring historic theaters. When they bought the 1931 art deco theater in 1988, they did not want to divide it into two or three screens, which is the fate of most older, single-screen theaters, even some they own. Instead, they bought an empty lot next door, built a new four-screen multiplex and connected it to the Paramount. Then they carefully renovated the interior of the old theater, hiring artisan Bill Schermerhorn of Rochelle to repair the 1930s plaster moldings and duplicate them for the new theaters. They also hired Schermerhom to repair two statues salvaged from the demolished Marboro Theatre in Chicago. Those the Johnsons display in the Lake Theatre in Oak Park. Also in the Lake are two busts from the Southtown Theatre in Chicago and lights from a theater in Marengo that the Johnsons wanted to restore but the city bought and tore down for a parking lot.

Willis Johnson says they would like to indulge their love for preservation more completely, but they have 350 employees depending on them to make a profit. "The moviegoing public often doesn't appreciate the details," says Johnson. "Some of the [restoration] stuff we do is just for us."

Nevertheless, local government officials do appreciate the effect increased foot traffic, especially during evening hours, has on their communities. "You can't put a dollar amount on what a theater like the Paramount brings to a downtown," says Tim Schmidt, executive director of Kankakee Development Corp. Indeed, in 1988, the first year the Paramount opened, more than 135,000 moviegoers bought tickets, and attendance has gone up from there. "We were told, 'No one will ever come to movies in downtown Kankakee,'" says Johnson.

Schmidt says downtown movie houses have to be operated by the right owner to have a positive impact on downtown businesses. In the 1960s and '70s many older theaters started showing adult movies, meaning porno, which often had a negative effect on surrounding businesses. However, the restoration and expansion of the 870-seat Paramount has given new life to its neighborhood.

"It would have been cheaper for Willis Johnson to just divide the Paramount into several small screens. But he didn't because he knew that wouldn't have excited anyone," says Schmidt. Now, he says, people come to downtown Kankakee at night — something they didn't do before the Paramount reopened — and window shop before going to the movies. "If not for the Paramount, the north end of downtown would be dead."

Another Classic Cinema, the York Theatre in Elmhurst, was restored with the help of low-interest loans and tax breaks through one of the early tax increment financing districts in the state. Mayor Thomas Marcucci says downtown Elmhurst was in desperate shape in the 1980s after Oakbrook Center shopping mall opened next door. The 1924 York is now part of a five-screen theater that draws customers for several other businesses — sandwich, ice cream and coffee shops, with more opening up. Those are the obvious beneficiaries of lots of foot traffic generated by people going to the movies, says Marcucci. But other storefronts with increased business include a party store on one side of the York and a bookstore on the other. "Adults coming to the movies or dropping kids off know where to go when they plan their next party or just want a good book," he says. Elmhurst has had

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Classic Cinemas, Downers Grove

The Arcada in St. Charles was built in 1926 with 1,009 seats. Architect Elmer F. Behrns designed a Venetian-Spanish decor with the entrance through a two-story-high arcade with ceiling beams ornamented with carved heads and hand paneling. A 1994 restoration returned the organ to its original silver, black and gold with flamingoes, which is played every Friday and Saturday night before movies begin.

significant property tax gains and sales tax revenues from downtown retail dollars that have been climbing steadily the last four years, according to the mayor.

The Catlow Theater in Barrington is another family-owned historic movie house, one of the few to have run movies continuously since it opened in 1927. It was built from the "throwaway plans" for the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, a 1,440-seat movie house of Mayan temple design by Frank Lloyd Wright understudy Alfonso Ianelli. Wright Catlow, a local businessman, built his 700-seat theater using Ianelli's original design, a mixture of Tudor and Prairie styles that has survived pretty much intact, according to one of its current owners, Roberta Rapata. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Rapata and the other owners of the Catlow Theater have created Illinois' first dinner-and-a-movie under one roof to keep their customers coming back. They can take meals from Baloney's, the restaurant attached to the lobby, to their seats and eat while watching the movie.

Other theaters operate as nonprofits. Indeed, according to Demas of the League of Historic American Theatres, the only serious preservation of historic movie theaters occurs through nonprofit organizations. One that has been reopened as a nonprofit is the Normal Theater, owned and operated by the city of Normal. "The theater is a prominent architecture in the middle of downtown. The mayor and town council didn't want it turned into a parking lot," says Dawn Riordan, who manages the theater for the city. The 1937 art deco theater closed in 1990. Community fundraisers helped the city to restore the layered, multicolored neon on the ceiling, the blue, maroon, salmon and silver-painted walls and the plush coral-colored seats. It reopened in 1994 showing classic films like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, as well as independent and art titles.

Huston of the Avon has experience with both nonprofit and for-profit efforts. Until this summer he was part of a volunteer group trying to restore the other historic theater in Decatur, the Lincoln, which opened one month before the Avon and has not been changed, though it sorely needs restoring. "There's something to be said for a dictatorship," says Huston. A nonprofit works through a board of directors, committees and fundraisers, a process he finds "burdensome and hindering." In getting the Avon ready for business, he "spent the money, worked on it a month and got it done."

But, unlike the Lincoln, few remnants of the Avon's original decor exist. "Improvements" in the 1950s and again in the '70s left the Avon, like downtown Decatur, a shadow of its former self. Though it still has its balcony and a couple of plaster medallions on the walls, gone are the bas-relief casts of women's heads circling the auditorium above the lion's heads with eyes that glowed in the dark. Gone are the pipe organ and the private seating boxes above it. Only in a 10-yard corridor behind the screen that was installed in 1953 to show Panavision and 3-D is there a hint of the grandeur earlier moviegoers experienced. There on the walls and ceiling are examples of the original paint, plaster and stencils that used to extend to the projection booth. Just above where the original curtains used to hang is a statue of a nude woman, reclining and holding a wreath toward an audience that can no longer see nor appreciate her welcoming gesture. Just as hidden are a pair of angels holding an ornately decorated metal shield inscribed with the letter "A."

Huston can envision the Avon restored to its 1916 artistry (The lion heads might be behind the 1970s walls.) He can also see sparks of life downtown. "They used to talk about development on this block in terms of demolition. Now they're talking about starting a restaurant next door."

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