The Auditorium Theatre threw itself a 125th birthday party last week, on its own capacious stage. John Mahoney was the master of ceremonies, and Broadway’s Patti LuPone was the star attraction.
The checkered history of the landmark Auditorium Building and its 3,900-seat theater provided the narrative for the evening. Designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan (when Frank Lloyd Wright was a draftsman at their firm), it was the nation’s largest structure when it opened, and one of the first mixed-use buildings. Besides the theater, built as an opera house (with its entrance on Congress), the building housed a 400-room hotel (facing Michigan Avenue) and 136 offices (oriented toward Wabash). Businessman Ferdinand Peck, who dreamed it up to put postfire Chicago on the international map (does that sound familiar?) and bring culture to the masses, figured that the hotel and offices would subsidize the theater.
Roosevelt won the battle with a state supreme court decision in 2002. The lawsuit wound up costing millions more than had originally been at stake, but it resulted in a restructuring that gave the school absolute control of the venue, which became the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University.
