Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Chicago's convention-hall theatre has outlived a fire and six decades of fashion. The Arie Crown Theater opened in February 1961 as the 5,086-seat Big Theater of the brand-new McCormick Place, staging twice-daily shows for the Chicago Auto Show; that June the trustees named it for Arie Crown, the Lithuanian immigrant merchant and philanthropist whose family fund - led by his son, industrialist Henry Crown - had underwritten the hall. The catastrophic McCormick Place fire of January 1967 closed the theatre for four years; its emotional reopening came on 29 January 1971, when over 6,000 mourners - Mayor Daley, Coretta Scott King, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr. and Aretha Franklin among them - filled the unfinished hall for Mahalia Jackson's funeral. The defining renovation arrived in 1997: a 6.5-million-dollar rebuild that added acoustic masts, sails and a hanging cloud, box seating and new sightlines, trimming capacity to 4,188 and winning the AIA Chicago Interior Architecture Honor Award. Now operated by Oak View Group within the Lakeside Center at 2301 South DuSable Lake Shore Drive, the proscenium house - 90 feet wide, 40 high, with a 58-foot-deep stage and ten dressing rooms - splits its life between the convention trade's corporate spectaculars for clients from Disney to Microsoft and a public calendar of concerts, comedy, gospel and touring theatre. The Green Line's Cermak-McCormick Place stop and the Metra Electric put it a short hop from the Loop, with the lakefront out the lobby windows. The theatre's scale - for decades Chicago's largest proper proscenium house - made it the natural home for spectacles that needed more seats than the Loop theatres could offer: long Nutcracker runs, gospel festivals, touring symphonies and headline comedians all cycle through, and the convention centre's loading docks and hotel inventory make it the easiest big room in the city to produce into. The lakefront setting adds the finishing touch no downtown house can match.