Why Arie Crown Theater matters.
Arie Crown Theater is a grand proscenium theater where the Near South Side's lakefront institutional character meets six decades of Chicago performance history, large-scale stagecraft and a rare surviving component of the original McCormick Place complex.
Set along DuSable Lake Shore Drive near Cermak Road and just steps from Wintrust Arena, the theater occupies McCormick Place's Lakeside Center on the Lake Michigan shoreline, with Burnham Harbor and Northerly Island extending north, Prairie Avenue's historic residential district lying west and the lakefront convention campus spreading south toward 31st Street Harbor. The 4,188-seat auditorium concentrates its scale behind a proscenium arch, using acoustic masts, suspended sails and box seating beneath those forms to shape the immense house. A deep stage and extensive backstage complex support productions ranging from concerts and ballet to theatrical performances and civic gatherings. Two 50-by-50-foot rehearsal rooms, nine two-person dressing rooms and two 40-person chorus rooms extend the performance infrastructure beyond the auditorium. The result is a major Chicago theater whose proscenium scale, acoustically shaped auditorium and extensive production spaces remain physically integrated with the city's lakefront convention complex.
What defines Arie Crown Theater.
Arie Crown Theater is best known for surviving the destruction and reconstruction of McCormick Place and emerging from a later architectural overhaul as a 4,188-seat performance hall. McCormick Place opened on November 18, 1960 after Illinois financed the complex with $41.8 million in revenue bonds, creating a 320,000-square-foot main exhibition area, 23 meeting rooms and a theater originally configured for more than 5,000 seats. The auditorium first received an audience in February 1961 for Motorevue of 1961, staged twice daily in conjunction with the Chicago Auto Show, followed within months by Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, the Metropolitan Opera, the Moiseyev Dance Company and Perry Como. On June 23, 1961, the Metropolitan Fair and Exhibition Authority named the theater for Arie Crown, the Lithuanian-born Chicago businessman, philanthropist and arts patron. Its stage subsequently received American Ballet Theatre, Marlene Dietrich, the Kirov Ballet, Louis Armstrong, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, Dave Brubeck, Harry Belafonte and numerous other performers, placing popular music, dance, opera and civic programming inside the same auditorium. Fire devastated McCormick Place on January 16, 1967 and closed the theater during reconstruction of the convention center. The replacement East Building, designed by Gene Summers of C.F. Murphy Associates, opened in January 1971 with the surviving theater incorporated into the new complex. Another major intervention closed the auditorium for much of 1997 as a $6.5 million renovation introduced new seating, carpeting, box seating and acoustic side-wall panels before reopening in November. The Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects recognized that work with its 1999 Interior Architecture Honor Award for Excellence in Architecture, marking a second architectural chapter for a theater already preserved through one of Chicago's consequential postwar building disasters.
Acoustic masts and broad suspended sails give the renovated auditorium its strongest technical character, breaking down the scale of the 4,188-seat house and directing sound through architectural forms visible from the seating tiers. Box seats occupy positions beneath the sails, bringing smaller audience groupings into the larger room and strengthening the relationship between acoustic treatment and seating geometry. Production infrastructure extends directly behind the proscenium through two weather-protected loading berths adjacent to the stage, allowing large theatrical and concert equipment to move directly into the working backstage zone. Nine dressing rooms support pairs of performers, two chorus rooms accommodate 40 people apiece and a full wardrobe room adds dedicated production support. Twin rehearsal rooms measure 50 feet square, with mirrored walls, wood floors and dance barres supporting companies before they enter the stage. A separate green room measures 20 feet 7 inches by 58 feet 4 inches, completing a backstage plan conceived for productions whose personnel requirements extend far beyond individual performers. The auditorium and backstage plant operate as a single performance system, pairing the acoustic reconstruction visible to audiences with rehearsal, dressing, wardrobe and loading infrastructure built for large touring companies.
How Arie Crown Theater fits.
Arie Crown Theater works as the anchor for a Near South Side outing connecting Chicago's pre-fire domestic architecture, the industrial wealth that remade Prairie Avenue and an Arts and Crafts sanctuary created after fire transformed a major nineteenth-century congregation.
Begin at Clarke House Museum, built 1836 for hardware merchant Henry B. Clarke and surviving as one of Chicago's oldest buildings and the city's strongest remaining domestic example of Greek Revival design. The house originally stood near Michigan Avenue before urban development forced successive relocations, including a 1977 move to its present Prairie Avenue District setting after the structure had spent decades farther south. Henry Clarke died in 1849, leaving the property associated with his widow Caroline, whose family retained the residence through Chicago's extraordinary mid-century expansion. Its columned facade and symmetrical composition preserve a domestic architectural period preceding both the Great Chicago Fire and Prairie Avenue's later emergence as the address of the city's industrial elite. Continue to Glessner House, commissioned by farm-machinery executive John J. Glessner and Frances Glessner from Henry Hobson Richardson, who developed the residence between 1885 and 1887 around an inward-facing courtyard shielded by a rugged granite exterior. Richardson pushed the house to the lot line and organized its rooms around private interior space, producing an urban residence that challenged the conventions of neighboring Prairie Avenue mansions. Threatened with demolition after its corporate owner placed it on the market in 1965, the house was purchased for $35,000 by the newly formed Chicago School of Architecture Foundation in December 1966, a preservation campaign involving architects and advocates including Phyllis Lambert, Richard Nickel, Harry Weese and Ben Weese. Conclude at Second Presbyterian Church, whose congregation organized in 1842 and commissioned James Renwick Jr. to design the Gothic Revival building completed on Michigan Avenue in 1874. A March 1900 fire destroyed the sanctuary interior but spared the exterior walls, leading architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and artist Frederic Clay Bartlett to create an Arts and Crafts interior of carved wood, molded plaster, murals, metalwork and stained glass. Twenty-one significant stained-glass windows include nine by Tiffany firms and two designed by Edward Burne-Jones for Morris & Co., and 175 angel figures appear across glass, wood, plaster and murals. The progression moves from Clarke House's survival from Chicago's pre-fire settlement through Richardson's dramatic domestic architecture for Prairie Avenue industrial wealth and culminates in Second Presbyterian Church, where a catastrophic interior fire produced one of the country's most intact Arts and Crafts sanctuaries.
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