DuPage Theatre's Auditorium Demolished
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Mar. 8, 2007
The 1928 DuPage Theatre's 900-seat auditorium is gone.
Credit: Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois
Although only half of a National Register-listed theater in suburban Chicago is left, locals haven't given up hope that they can save the last pieces of the 1928 DuPage Theatre in Lombard, Ill.
"We call it an amputation at this point," says Deb Dyanko, president of the Friends of the DuPage Theatre, a group that formed in 2002. "It's not over until it's over."
Despite a previously approved plan to rehab the theater, Lombard's board of trustees voted on Mar. 1 to demolish the entire village-owned structure and build a new community center on the property. The same six-member board of trustees voted in June 2006 in favor of a $40 million plan for condos and shops would preserve the lobby, facade, and retail portion of the theater.
Now scrapped, that plan called for the demolition of the auditorium, which was torn down earlier this month. "We thought that wasn't a perfect scenario, but it was better than the alternative. We would still have a historic presence on that corner," Dynako says. "If we made a compromise, we would be seen as trying to meet everyone halfway."
The board of trustees plans to finish the job as soon as the necessary permits are issued. "We're looking at end of April or middle of April," says trustee Greg Gron of the demolition. "That is the soonest that it would be done."
The village of Lombard has owned the 900-seat theater since 1999, when a developer backed off on its restoration and donated it to the Chicago suburb of 44,000. The theater won a Save America's Treasures grant, but the trustees decided not to use it.
"This village said informally that we're not committing taxpayers to 50 years of a bottomless pit," Trustee Dick Tross told Preservation in 2005.
The board's Mar. 1 demolition order doesn't allow Dynako's group to salvage anything from the theater. "The resolution says, 'Haul it off to the dump,' which shows no mercy to a group of people who have worked so long and hard to make our community a better place," Dynako says. "There's no tale of inspiration here. It's just nastiness."
Lombard voters are scheduled to elect new trustees in April.
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Comments
Submitted by Kurt at: September 11, 2009
Good riddance