Copernicus Center, Chicago
Near Chicago Lake Michigan, Illinois
The building on West Lawrence Avenue in Jefferson Park started life in nineteen thirty as the Gateway Theater, a nearly nineteen-hundred-seat movie palace built for the Balaban and Katz chain and designed by the architects Rapp and Rapp in the atmospheric style, meaning its interior ceiling was painted to look like an open Italian courtyard under a sky of drifting clouds and stars. It was the first movie theater in Chicago built exclusively for talking pictures. Decades later, Jefferson Park had become the heart of Chicago's Polish American community, and in nineteen eighty-five the Copernicus Foundation took over the theater, renaming it the Copernicus Center and opening its doors to the Polish American community and its neighbors.
A ten-year restoration brought the atmospheric ceiling back to its original glory. Today it is the only surviving atmospheric theater in Chicago designed by Rapp and Rapp, and still one of the city's busiest performing arts venues.
