{"product_id":"chicago-theater-vertical-sign","title":"Chicago Theater Vertical Sign","description":"\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eADDRESS: 175 North State Street, Chicago, IL\u003cbr\u003eBUILT BY: Thomas Cusack\u003cbr\u003eYEAR BUILT: 1921\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeventy-six feet of vertical light. Seven letters. One word: CHICAGO.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sign rises from the marquee of the Chicago Theatre like a glowing column planted in the middle of State Street. It is not the tallest thing on the block. It is not the oldest. But it is the thing you see first, the thing you photograph, the thing that tells you where you are before your brain catches up with your eyes. It has been doing this for over a century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sign has a story. And it is the story is worth knowing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe man who built it was Thomas Cusack. Born in Kilrush, County Clare, Ireland, in 1858. His family immigrated to New York in 1861. Both parents died shortly after. Cusack, orphaned and barely out of childhood, was sent to relatives in Chicago. He learned to paint signs. At seventeen, he started his own business with a paint pot, a brush, and nothing else.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy the early 1900s, the Thomas Cusack Company was the largest outdoor advertising firm in the United States, with branches in over a hundred cities and leases on more than 100,000 billboard and wall locations. Cusack controlled forty million square feet of advertising surface. He was known as the Billboard Baron. He served on Chicago's board of education, then in the United States Congress. When he retired in 1924, it took a Wall Street banking syndicate to buy out his company. His balance sheet showed assets over twenty-six million dollars.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis was the man Balaban and Katz hired to build their sign in 1921. They didn't want a sign. They wanted a beacon. They wanted every person walking down State Street, the busiest shopping corridor in the Midwest, to look up and see the name of their theater burning in the sky.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCusack delivered.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sign stands 76 feet high and 17 feet wide. When it was first switched on, on October 26, 1921, the same night the theater opened its doors, it contained 2,534 exposed incandescent lamps. The letters were channel-cut, spelling C-H-I-C-A-G-O vertically, each one large enough to read from blocks away. The border featured a four-trough system of chaser lights that cascaded in a swirl pattern, a waterfall of electricity pouring down the face of the building.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe original letters were soon replaced with porcelain enamel-coated sheet metal, an early use of this material in commercial signage. The structure itself was steel, and it was heavy. Over fifty thousand pounds of it, hanging off the facade of a building that was never engineered to carry that kind of load.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the top of the sign, above the letters, sat the name of the owner. First, it read Balaban and Katz. Then ABC-Great States. Then Plitt. Then it says simply THE. The Chicago Theatre. The crown changed hands. The sign stayed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sign did not just identify the building. It dominated the street. Unlike modern signage that sits flat against a wall, this sign projected outward from the facade, perpendicular to State Street, so that pedestrians and drivers could see it from both directions. It functioned less like an advertisement and more like a monument. A glowing column of typography rising above the sidewalk.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sign changed during World War II. The cascading chaser lights were abandoned, likely as part of wartime dimout regulations that restricted illuminated signage in American cities. After the war, the color scheme was altered. The sign adapted. It survived.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy the 1970s, the theater beneath it was dying. B-movies played to empty seats. The screen had bullet holes. Rodents outnumbered patrons. On September 19, 1985, the doors closed. The wrecking ball approached. But the sign kept standing, dark now, its letters unlit, a ghost of what it had been.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1986, the theater was restored and reopened. Frank Sinatra headlined the gala. The sign burned again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen, in September 1996, a routine inspection revealed the truth: seventy-five years of Chicago weather had corroded the original steel structure from the inside out. The sign that had survived war and neglect and decades of snow and rain and Lake Michigan wind was rotting at its core. It had to come down.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSteve Kieffer, owner of Kieffer and Company in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was hired to build the replacement. The job cost half a million dollars and took 860 hours of painstaking work. Everything had to be identical: the seams between the metal pieces, the obsolete maintenance ladders outside the sign, the intricate scrollwork. The new sign was fabricated from aluminum rather than steel, reducing its weight from 50,000 pounds to 33,000. An exact reduction of one-third. The building's bones could finally breathe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe replica was built in Sheboygan, shipped to Kieffer's office in Buffalo Grove, and transported to State Street for installation. When they raised it into position, it looked exactly like the original. That was the point. Preservation is not about keeping the object. It is about keeping the truth of the object alive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2011, a Chase Bank logo was added to the top of the vertical sign, replacing the spot where Balaban and Katz once announced their name. The city's 2004 redevelopment agreement permitted changes only to that top section, and Preservation Chicago considered the corporate sponsorship a reasonable price for the landmark's continued security. The sign now carries a bank's name where a family's name used to be. The letters C-H-I-C-A-G-O remain untouched.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the tension at the heart of preservation in a commercial city. The sign exists because it was always an advertisement. Balaban and Katz built it to sell tickets. Thomas Cusack built it because selling signs was his business. The sign became a symbol of the city not because anyone planned it, but because it outlasted the intentions of the people who made it. It stopped being an ad and became a landmark. The Chase logo is a reminder that the process can also run in reverse.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sign is one of the few remaining original exposed-lamp electric signs still in use in the United States. It is one of the most photographed pieces of typography in the country. Its neon font inspired the title design for the 2002 film Chicago. It appears in movies and television shows whenever a director needs a single image to establish the city. No skyline required. No lake. No river. Just seven red letters burning against the night.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn Irish orphan who started with a paint pot built the original sign. A family of Jewish immigrants from Odesa built the theater beneath it. A sign maker in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, built the replica that stands today. The Smithsonian holds the bones of the first one. The city holds the light of the second.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat is what a sign does when it outlives its purpose. It stops selling and starts meaning. It stops advertising a theater and starts announcing a city. The building is the proof. The marquee is the signature.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe light still burns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","offers":[{"title":"MATTED \/ 08x10","offer_id":51076890329366,"sku":null,"price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MATTED \/ 16x20","offer_id":51076890362134,"sku":null,"price":125.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 16x16","offer_id":51076890394902,"sku":null,"price":200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 24x24","offer_id":51076890427670,"sku":null,"price":450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 32x32","offer_id":51076890460438,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 44x44","offer_id":51076890493206,"sku":null,"price":2200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 24x24","offer_id":51076890525974,"sku":null,"price":325.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 32x32","offer_id":51076890558742,"sku":null,"price":525.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 44x44","offer_id":51076890591510,"sku":null,"price":1450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 60x60","offer_id":51076890624278,"sku":null,"price":3950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 90x90","offer_id":51076890657046,"sku":null,"price":8750.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 120x120","offer_id":51076890689814,"sku":null,"price":14950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1306\/7343\/files\/ChicagoTheaterVerticalSigncopy.jpg?v=1772635130","url":"https:\/\/www.menaker.com\/products\/chicago-theater-vertical-sign","provider":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","version":"1.0","type":"link"}