Copernicus Center, Chicago

In Chicago's Jefferson Park neighborhood, the Copernicus Center anchors one of the largest Polish communities outside of Warsaw. The building opened in nineteen thirty as the Gateway Theatre, an atmospheric-style movie palace designed with a Spanish-courtyard interior to make audiences feel they were watching films outdoors under a starlit sky. That style was invented by Chicago architect John Eberson in the nineteen twenties and swept the country.

The Gateway closed as a cinema in the nineteen seventies and was acquired by the Copernicus Foundation, which renamed it for the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and converted it into a performing-arts and cultural center serving the Polish diaspora of the northwest side. Chicago's Polish population, which peaked at several hundred thousand in the mid-twentieth century, made it for decades the largest Polish city outside Europe.