In downtown Park Ridge, Illinois, the Chicagoland grid, which isn’t quite uniform even in the city, breaks down just a little. A cluster of streets, and the commuter rail line, meet at the partial junction of Touhy, the Northwest Highway, Summit and South Prospect Avenues.
The downtown, which is about 15 miles northwest of the Loop, draws a fair number of visitors on a summer Saturday. Parking was tight, but I managed to shoehorn my car into a space at the library. The library building was dedicated in 1957, back when these kinds of rhetorical flourishes still made their way onto bronze plaques.
Close to the immortal words of Emil Faber, “Knowledge is Good.”
South Prospect has a row of handsome small buildings.
But none to compare with the Pickwick Theatre.
“Designed by the firm of Zook & McCaughey, the 1,500-seat, Pickwick Theatre opened November 26, 1928 with Colleen Moore in Lilac Time plus vaudeville acts on the stage,” Cinema Treasures notes. “It was equipped with a Virtuoso organ which was opened by organist Walter Flandorf.”
In as much as they are known any more, Zook & McCaughey are known for the deco Pickwick. The architects’ rendering, in the public domain, is borrowed from the blog Corridors, which looks to be a real treasure trove of the built environment.
I had somewhere else to be, namely lunch at the Harp & Fiddle across the tracks, or I might have taken in a movie in the historic auditorium, which now seats 1,000, because I never have. But I did have time later to play with one of my images of the Pickwick (the first one, above).
Prompt: Art deco illustration style.
Prompt: 1920s commercial art style.
I like that second one especially. There’s no doubt that it’s AI, but it hews to my goal of not being slop. The cars — a little stilted, but that’s AI for you — are from the 1920s, but the movies are still from the 2020s.