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"The outstanding fact about our association with Balaban and Katz has been their one great desire to build for all time. In all our conversations about theaters, our long hours of planning, that idea has dominated. Balaban and Katz theaters are put up to last forever."
-C. W. Rapp, 1925
One of America's great gifts to the world was the movie palace. The last twenty years have not been kind to these luxurious compendia of world architecture, the first and foremost total environments of our century. They have been twinned, tripled, quadrupled, simply knocked to the ground, or gutted and turned into supermarkets that feature Turkey Loaf Specials and Today-Only Toilet-Paper Sales in lieu of Valentino and Clara Bow. Can the remaining Paradises and Paramounts survive as performing arts centers? The problems of the Radio City Music Hall are but one local, isolated example.
New York was home to the first movie palaces, built in the Teens, and in the Twenties came the Roxy (arguably the finest of all) and others nearly as impressive. Not one New York example survives from that decade, intact and functioning as originally intended. In the Twenties, the movie palaces flourished in Chicago on a scale unsurpassed in any city in the world; enough of them are still in operation to make a tour of that city's theaters a staggering experience. This year, though, two of the Loop's magnificent survivors-the Chicago and the Oriental, both intact and functioning-may bite the dust.
Kings of Atmosphere
There were three giants in the field of American picture palace design: Thomas Lamb, John Eberson, and the Chicago firm of Rapp and Rapp. Lamb was in there first, a master of the classic or standard school. He was born in Scotland and studied architecture at New York's Cooper Union. His first commission was for William Fox's City (1909) on 14th Street, then Movie Row. His next theater was Sam "Roxy" RothapfeFs (and New York's) first de luxe movie house: the Regent (1913) on 116th Street.
Lamb's services were in great demand in New York after the Regent. The Strand (1914), the Rialto (1916), the Rivoli (1917), the Capitol (1918), Loew's State (1921), and the Academy of Music (1926, now the Palladium and used for rock...