Keeping the masses safe
How do you convince people they’re not at risk? In the 1920s, the Uptown Theatre had some cool ideas
As Chicago’s streets fill with tables for outdoor dining, it’s clear that many of us have decided we’re much safer interacting with our fellow humans in the fresh air — even with the temperature headed into the 90s.
Even now, little is certain about how best to avoid the COVID-19 virus, at least once you have decided to venture out of your basement, but a general public health consensus has been reached that alfresco is your friend.
And thus museums, restaurants, bars, music venues, theaters, airplanes — really, any place where attendance is discretionary and the public enters voluntarily — are dealing with one all-consuming marketing problem as they plot their survival tactics on Zoom this summer: How do you convince people they will be safe inside?
It’s tough, if not impossible. But this is not a new problem.
In 1925, Balaban & Katz opened their magnificent Uptown Theatre. This auspicious event was less than seven years after the so-called “Spanish flu” had killed at least 8,500 Chicagoans.
Unfettered by subtlety or worries about the morality or legality of health claims, the company’s marketers waged a sustained campaign to convince customers that not only would they be safe inside the Uptown, but they’d be far safer inside among the “acre of seats” than remaining outdoors, on the streets of a sultry, infectious city.
Most people are aware that movie palaces sold regular folks the promise of glamor and escape through their mystical and exotic environments (“Watch the bright light in the eyes of the tired shopgirl who hurries noiselessly over carpets and sighs with satisfaction as she walks amid furnishings that once delighted the hearts of queens.”) Fewer remember that they also sold the health benefits of their buildings, especially once Balaban & Katz had developed the first air-conditioned theater in Chicago, the Central Park Theatre at West 12th Street and Central Park, and then extended that technology to the company’s Riviera Theatre at the corner of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue.
But at the showcase Uptown, just north of the Riviera, the company’s claims went much further than just keeping people cool. It was necessary to distinguish the costly theater from the tiny nickelodeons that were dotted all over Chicago’s neighborhoods and were usually little more than cheap setups in formerly vacant storefronts and thus cramped, unhygienic and sympathetic to any lurking virus.
Deep under the Uptown (in a subterranean lair that still shocks by its size), the owners had installed a massive “freezing and air-washing plant,” designed, they said, to change the air in the colossal theater every two minutes (similar claims currently are being made by airlines for their HEPA cabin filters). Under the seats could be found a perfuming system, further designed to convey cleanliness, hygiene and safety.
In a commemorative magazine put out by the company at the time, Balaban & Katz claimed that countless Chicago physicians would send their convalescent patients out of the potentially infectious city and into their theaters without regard to what might be playing but just “for the beneficial effects of the dry pure air that pervades the interiors as on mountaintops.”
Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, which has largely spared children, the Spanish flu had killed many young people. So Balaban & Katz doubled down on maternal fears.
“Bring or send the children to our theaters,” the company extolled mothers, selling their interiors as affordable
versions of rural health spas or that out-of-reach house on Lake Geneva. “Fresh, invigorating air, purified by our magical machines awaits them.”
And when the theater opened, its staff of more than 130 included a fulltime nurse with her own well-equipped medical station.
Was all this just the hocus-pocus of its era? To some extent. And there are legitimate worries now about the impact of airconditioning vents on COVID-19 infection patterns, especially since a study of an outbreak in an air-conditioned restaurant in Guangzhou, China, found that “airflow direction was consistent with droplet transmission.”
But that eatery was far smaller than the Uptown and Balaban & Katz were widely praised for their response to the Spanish flu epidemic and seen not as a source of the problem, as today, but as a part of the ongoing solution to healthier living.
In fact, theaters such as the Uptown were instrumental in banishing the notion that going to Hollywood movies was an unhealthy activity in other ways. That was a position taken by many progressive reformers of that day, including Chicago’s Jane Addams, who had wanted to see the authorities take over the capitalist film business and, with input from school and museum boards, put on more moralistic material.
It is remarkable, really, that once the new fashion of huge movie palaces took over in the late 1920s, Chicago saw very few health problems associated with the hugely popular activity of moviegoing.
Merely savvy marketing? Perhaps. With every email that arrives listing sanitary precautions, many of us wonder the same about what is happening now.
Is that restaurant really safe? Does the cleaning happen as often as they say? Is the risk worth taking for a hamburger you can make on your grill? Will the wrong someone invade your social-distanced experience?
It’s common to hear people assert that they will only return when the science says it is safe. But science is rarely that prescriptive and, as we all know by now, COVID-19 has divided and conquered America by taking advantage of extant political divisions, ensuring that sniping and inconsistency has overwhelmed any messaging of scientific guidelines.
Any guarantees of absolute safety are a long time away, if they are to come at all. For the foreseeable future, in a country where critical thinking is at an all-time low, we will be called on to make individual judgment calls for ourselves and those we love.
But it’s worth noting that social distancing still is far easier in a cavernous venue with 4,400 seats. If the long-awaited Uptown Theatre restoration was not still pending, it probably would allow for economically viable concerts, even at 25% capacity.
And since the theater was designed to turn over its entire audience several times a day in minutes, and thus needed wide corridors and aisles, it still would be possible to enter and exit that giant performance space without ever needing to stand in a crowd. The performers would be separated far from the audience on a stage wide enough to swallow a battalion. And the bathrooms would be as big as some buildings.
In fact, back in the day you could enjoy a visit to the Uptown without much invasive reaction with your fellow humans at all.
What’s not to like about that right now?