Ghost Ads as Revealed by Destruction of the Nortown Theatre

The Nortown Theatre at 6320 N. Western Ave in Chicago was my dad's favorite movie theatre. Designed by J.E.O. Pridmore, it was an atmospheric theater, which was known for it amazing sea horse, mermaid, and zodiac motifs. My dad used to tell me stories about how his mother would take him and his siblings there for a matinee. They would stop in one mom and pop store to buy candy, and in another to get popcorn, then they would spend all afternoon watching newsreels, cartoons, and movies.

The theatre was torn down in 2007. Had my father lived to see the day, it would have broken his heart. So much of his early memories were wrapped up in this plaster-and-terracotta palace. When Urban Remains of Chicago announced that they were selling some of the original decor, I dragged Ted over to their showroom, and bought a plaster panel like the one below, that was part of a repeating frieze on the second level. I found myself overwhelmed with nostalgia for a place I had never been, but one that had been so important to Dad, and I had to have it.

At the moment, it's packed away. We're not quite sure where, or how, to hang it.

For over a year now, every time we've driven past the spot where the theatre stood for generations, I've meant to take a picture. Not of the empty lot, that's too depressing. When the theatre was torn down, several "ghost" ads were revealed on the building next door. These advertised businesses that existed prior to 1931, the year the Nortown opened. Today (thanks for reminding me, Ted!) I finally managed to bring the camera along:


This wall is like a little time capsule of 1930s Chicago. I checked to see if The Bowmanville National Bank still existed, and I did find an old reference that it was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places. However, when I pulled up the site on Google Maps, I found another bank, a bland and boring-looking one, in its place.


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So much great Chicago architecture is lost every year to be replaced with generic, uninspired buildings. Do you want to know what's going up in place of the Nortown Theatre? You guessed it. Condos. Phooey.

Nortown Terrace. When will it be built? Who knows. The site has been vacant for well over a year now.

My Bank, as Seen in the Trailer for the Johnny Depp Film "Public Enemies"

This is very exciting. The trailer for the new Johnny Depp movie, Public Enemies, has been released. It heavily features the 80-plus-year-old Bridgeview Bank (originally Sheridan Trust and Savings), located at Lawrence and Broadway in Chicago. Ted and I opened our business accounts here, just so we could get to visit this amazing bank on a regular basis, and I'm thrilled to see it get such coverage. I'm pretty sure that's our safety deposit vault that they're robbing! (I think the only thing in there at the moment are our passports and a backup of my computer files, circa 2006.)

You can watch the trailer here:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/publicenemies/large.html

Thumbnail image of the Sheridan Trust and Savings Bank, Uptown, Chicago, 1924. Image courtesy University of Minnesota Libraries, Manuscripts Division, Northwest Architectural Archives.

Custard Shade Art Deco Chandelier for the Tenants' Unit, and a Plea for Input

Did I mention that our dream tenants have decided to get their own place? I can't blame them--now's the time to buy if you can--but they're wonderful, wonderful neighbors and I'm really going to miss them. Their lease is up this summer.

We rented the unit out to them just a few months after we moved into The Box House ourselves. We had made some minor repairs to the unit at the time, but knew there was a list of things we wanted to one day accomplish to make the unit even nicer. So we're looking at this in a positive light, and will take the time to make some additional improvements.

So, my theory is that replacing some of the light fixtures in the tenants' unit will help us get a higher rent. (In truth, I just get to indulge my light fixture fetish and hunt through eBay, online merchants, and the local shops to find one-of-a-kind vintage pieces.) There are two and possibly three fixtures I definitely want to replace before the next set of tenants--whoever they may be--moves in. The dining room and entryway have really, really cheap looking lights. The living room ceiling doesn't have a ceiling fixture at all; at the moment, I can't remember if there is an electric box in the ceiling for one or not, like there is downstairs. At a minimum, we want to replace the two and if possible, put a ceiling fan in the living room.

This is what Ted found on eBay for the dining room (these are the seller's pictures):

It's not as fancy as some of the lights we've been looking at, but it's also not as expensive. We negotiated with this seller, and got it for a very, very reasonable price. It'll arrive as soon as I get around to paying for it.

Because it's going into the tenants' unit, we wanted something more practical and sturdier than the more fanciful slip shade chandeliers, like the one we got for our unit downstairs. (Which, by the way, arrived by FedEx today and, although it was very well packed, has a broken arm. *Sob* I think we can fix it, but more on that tomorrow.)

Now I have my eye on this one for the entryway. It, too, is reasonably priced. It's circa early 1930s and is currently located in Europe. I haven't placed a bid on it yet, but I'm very tempted.

What do y'all think? Would these lights make you say "wow" when you walked in, and want to rent the place? Would they distract you from the fact that the kitchen doesn't have a dishwasher, and won't until we get the chance (*cough* funds) to redo the kitchens in both units? Do lights matter as much as I think they do?

I don't have pictures of the light fixtures currently in place up there. But trust me, they're fug, and do the unit no favors.

Cleaning Our Antique Light Fixture, Pulling More Wire, and Another Conduit Mystery

Well, much to my disappointment, the antique light fixtures we won on eBay still haven't arrived at our door. Granted, one of them I paid for just last week, but it's been a few weeks since we sent payment for the other. What's that seller's excuse? Grrr. I want to get these installed soon, because my cousin is coming in town in a few weeks and she hasn't seen the place yet. I want to distract her from the disastrous bathroom and the super outdated kitchen with pretty, sparkly lights.

Well, I can't really complain too much. We still have to finish pulling new wire through the conduit before the lights can be installed, anyway. So that's what Ted and I did today. With a little help--as always--from Seamus.

I think I've gotten over my fear of rewiring; I'm no longer hyperventilating and thinking "OMG, I'm working with electricity!" Because really, I'm not. I'm just the Girl Friday, the one that chants "heave, ho!" and feeds the wires into the wall. Ted is the one who knows what he's doing and can hook everything back up again. Of course, I nag him to test and test and test the lines again to make sure they're not live. But that's me; I worry cuz I care. And because he humors me, he tests them again in my presence, even though he's already tested them several times and maps everything he discovers in our "Box House Book."

So, pulling old wires and replacing them with new has become fairly routine. We'll be ready to install the dining room chandelier and the front hall light when and if they ever get here.

And while we're at it, we're replacing all the cloth wiring along that circuit. That includes the wire leading up to the light fixture in the front stairwell, the stairwell that leads to both the front door of our unit and the tenants' door upstairs.

The stairwell is lit by two gorgeous matching light fixtures, one on each level, that are probably original to the house. Seriously, the lights are what really sold me on The Box House. I walked through the door and fell in love, just like that. Here's one of them:

But look closer; some moron in the past painted the ceiling without bothering to either tape up the canopy piece or loosen the screw to drop it enough to paint under it. What a mess. (Click on the picture to enlarge and truly understand my annoyance.)

I was really nervous to try to remove this paint, because I was terrified I'd also remove the gold paint underneath. The lamp is some kind of pot metal with a red, green and gold polychrome paint job. What I finally did was to get a shallow bowl and fill it with an inch of warm, sudsy water--I just used dish soap. Then I let the canopy soak in the water for fifteen minutes or so. This seemed to soften the paint enough that I could remove it with my fingernail. It was tedious, and underneath the splashed on white latex was a layer of slopped over taupe-colored enamel--the dreaded enamel that seems to cover the wood trim in the bedrooms, and is nearly impervious to strippers. Luckily, for once, it didn't seem to adhere to this particular surface. I was able to scrape it off with my fingernail as well. Voila!

I don't think these lights have been taken down in decades; here's what it looked like when I started to wipe away the dust with a damp cloth:
Granted, some of that is sawdust from when we refinished the stairs--that stuff gets everywhere.

I had decided not to take the panels out to clean the glass. Each is held in place by a foldover metal tab, and I did not want to risk bending the old metal in case it snapped. So I used a damp sponge and warm, sudsy water to gently wipe the whole lamp down. To get the moisture out from behind the metal grill work when I was done, I used a can of compressed air to blow it out. All in all, it worked very well. It's possible to see more detail on the surface now, and I'll take another picture when I get the light back in place.

We did encounter another mystery while pulling the wire. We thought it would be a straight shot from the dining room ceiling fixture to the ceiling box in the living room, a distance of maybe 20 feet max. Afterall, there are no other fixtures that it could be powering. However, the wire we pulled out was more than three times that length. So the conduit was not straight, and was traveling off somewhere else, to power what, we're not entirely sure yet.

We first double-checked the remaining wall outlets in the living room, including the one in the floor that powers our old electric fireplace. No luck. None of those wires were connected.

So now, our best guess is that there's another electric box or two hidden behind the plaster. The most likely scenerio, since the conduit seems to be heading in that general direction, is that there were two sconces above the fireplace, in typical bungalow fashion. And just as we found a dip in the plaster where there was once a lightswitch, careful inspection above the fireplace shows a few dips in the plaster that might have been the location of sconces.

Arrgh, I neglected to take another picture of the fireplace to show y'all, and the only one I seem to be able to find on the hard drive is this one from Christmas. It'll have to do. In the space on either side of the mirror there is a suspicious swirl of plaster, no doubt covering up newspaper-stuffed electric boxes.

We need to do some investigation as we did before, possibly some test drilling to find the boxes, but I'm so excited at the thought that we might have discovered another vintage detail buried by a previous owner.