The Douglas Park Auditorium is at the corner Ogden and Kedzie avenues in North Lawndale, June 11, 2024. If the walls of the Douglas Park Auditorium could talk, they might well speak Yiddish. A three-story structure, its facade sporting bas-relief lions and angels, it stands at the intersection of Kedzie and Ogden avenues. When it opened around 1911, Eastern European immigrants were transforming North Lawndale into a Jewish neighborhood.
The Yiddish theater was just one of many activities that made the Douglas Park auditorium a vibrant hub of community life in the first half of the 20th century, after which it became a church for the neighborhood’s African American residents. Levy’s flexible aesthetics likely drew Samuel Polakow’s attention when he was looking for an architect for an auditorium on the property he purchased for $20,000 at Ogden and Kedzie. Polakow’s marching orders were straightforward. Make the Douglas Park Auditorium “one of the finest equipped amusement buildings in Chicago.”Levy’s blueprints specified that the building would house profit centers, top to bottom. It had six ground-level stores.
“Louis L. Seldman who will present Mme. Anna Pavlova here at a later date writes that the dancer who will appear at the Douglas Park Auditorium is not the famous artist. The Russian consul general here sends a similar message.” In addition to being the site of worker struggles, the Douglas Park Auditorium was a forum for politicians courting the Jewish community’s vote or asking its forgiveness.
“There ought to be more religion in politics and less politics in religion,” Schanfarber said. “We deprecate the actions of Jews in this community who feasted the acquitted senator … who is held in suspicion by the most of the people in this country.”
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