Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

When it opened, it was the tallest building in Chicago, the heaviest modern building on earth, and the first structure anywhere to combine a theater, hotel and offices under one roof. The Auditorium Theatre at 50 East Ida B. Wells Drive was dedicated on December 9, 1889, by President Benjamin Harrison, with opera idol Adelina Patti singing Home, Sweet Home to a standing-room crowd. The building was Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's masterpiece, commissioned by civic idealist Ferdinand Peck to be a theater open to all Chicagoans - 4,200 seats with no boxes in the original plan, every sightline democratic, lit entirely by incandescent bulbs and cooled by the first central air conditioning system, with a young Frank Lloyd Wright drafting interior details. The acoustics remain the legend: Adler's elliptical ceiling arches, gilded in 24-karat gold leaf and traced with Sullivan's stencils, carry an unamplified voice from the stage to the last row of the gallery. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played here until 1904 and the city's opera companies until 1929; bankruptcy closed the theater in 1941, and during the war the building served 2.2 million servicemen, with bowling lanes laid over the stage. Roosevelt University, owner since the 1940s, backed trustee Beatrice Spachner's crusade to save the hall: architect Harry Weese restored it and the New York City Ballet reopened it on October 31, 1967, after which the room spent the seventies hosting the Grateful Dead ten times over. Today the 3,875-seat National Historic Landmark hosts touring dance, concerts and events - the Joffrey Ballet called it home from 1998 to 2020 - with a $3 million restoration of the atrium and stained-glass skylight announced in 2025 to complete Adler and Sullivan's original design intentions by fall 2027.