The Avalon Regal: A Persian Palace on the South Side
Near Chicago Lake Michigan, Illinois
On East Seventy-Ninth Street in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood stands a building that looks as though someone airlifted a Persian palace into a working-class block and forgot to tell anyone. The Avalon Theater opened on August twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty-seven, and from its first night it was unlike any movie house most Chicagoans had ever entered.
The architect was John Eberson, an Austrian-born designer who specialized in what he called atmospheric theaters, auditoriums made to feel like the open courtyards of ancient cities. Eberson said the inspiration for the Avalon came from a Persian incense burner he found at an antiques store. The result was a palace of more than two thousand seats clad in Moorish ornament, colored tile, and gemstone-set ceilings. The auditorium ceiling was painted as a night sky and fitted with hundreds of small lights that mimicked stars. One wall replicated a Persian garden, complete with arches, a reflecting pool, and stuffed flamingos. The other wall resembled a Moorish palace with domes and minarets. You sat inside and felt, according to the advertisements, as though you were watching the film beneath an open desert sky.
The Avalon ran as a first-run movie house for decades. Then the demographics of South Shore shifted as Black families moved in and white families moved out, and the theater's story shifted with them. In nineteen eighty-seven it was renamed the New Regal Theater, positioning itself as a home for Black musical talent on Chicago's South Side. It joined the legacy of the Chitlin' Circuit, the loose network of venues across the country where African American artists could perform and draw audiences without facing the exclusion of white-owned venues. Ray Charles, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, and others played the New Regal in its later years.
The theater closed in two thousand three. It has sat dormant since, its atmospheric ceiling still intact, waiting for a restoration that neighborhood advocates have been pursuing for years. It was designated a Chicago Landmark in recognition of both its architectural and cultural significance.
