The local movie house was once a hub of life, the place where we saw our first movie or our last one, where we fell in love or met our friends and neighbors. We shared a common experience in the dark.
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Those who go against the grain face an uncertain future. In 1989 Kenilworth lawyer Barbara Salmeron happened upon the closed 70-year-old Hub Theatre, located on Chicago Avenue in West Town. “I was driving by with my daughter, who’d been a candy girl at the Bryn Mawr, and her boyfriend, and I thought, wouldn’t running that be fun?” she recalls. With help from her daughters and their significant others, Salmeron, who had no theater experience, reopened the 600-seat house as a second-run venue. She served a menu of action adventures, horror flicks, comedies–plus Chinese movies on Monday–and she was friendly with local toughs, blunting potential gang problems. The Hub had no air conditioning, so customers sweltered in summer, but enough people came that Salmeron realized a small profit for three years.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, her audience vanished. In hindsight Salmeron blames several factors. The more multiplexes there were, the longer it took a hit movie to get to the second-run Hub–and the smaller the audience once it got there. With only one screen, she couldn’t maximize her fixed costs–heat, light, electricity, and staff–the way her competitors could. As West Town grew more bohemian, the families that had been the Hub’s anchor customers moved away. “And when I programmed for the artist types, only a handful of people showed up.” The Hub closed permanently in June 1994. The building is being converted into a parking garage for a social-service agency, says Mary Ritchie, executive director of the Chicago Avenue Business Association.
Many exhibitors who’ve abandoned or altered the single-screen approach shake their heads at Alex Kouvalis and the Patio. “Alex is a nice guy, but he’s not making any money, which is the idea here,” reflects Rooding. “His real estate generates the cash–the theater just happens to come with the building.” Vlahakis says, “I told Alex to split up the Patio Theatre, but he’s concerned about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that. If you’ve got to put food on the table, would you make that kind of investment?”
