News that the Pickwick Theatre would show its final picture in January sparked a flurry of local discussion about what would happen to its 1928 art deco-style building, but its owner — and a local ordinance — will ensure that the historic structure remains as it is.
Less than a day after co-owner Dino Vlahakis announced the final showing would take place early next year, a “Save the Pickwick” Facebook page sprang up and area residents expressed worry about the future of the vintage theater, which many consider a symbol of Park Ridge and a jewel in the area.
Now, a cadre of interested operators and a jump in ticket sales have its owners optimistic about the future of movies in the space — but whatever happens, the building itself will stay intact, Vlahakis said.
Local ordinance protects the facade
Vlahakis explained that local law ensures the Pickwick’s facade will be preserved regardless of who owns the building or what its use is.
“Now, the actual auditorium, believe it or not, can be destroyed,” he said. “Well, under my watch, that’s not going to happen.”
In fact, Vlahakis said, the local Park Ridge preservation ordinance has more teeth to preserve the Pickwick than does its status on the National Register of Historic Places.
Register status “just gives you the title; there’s some tax benefits,” Vlahakis said.
The city of Park Ridge designated the theater a landmark under a city ordinance that created the Historic Preservation Commission, Community Preservation and Development Director Drew Awsumb told baiduhai/Pioneer Press.
The ordinance passed in January 2010, and the Pickwick became the first landmark in September of that year, Awsumb said.
Awsumb noted that local landmark rules are the backbone of enforcing community preservation — more so than placement on the National Register.
“A local landmark has a lot of regulatory control … behind it. The local landmarking is a very powerful tool.”
Under the ordinance, “no alteration may be performed on any site designated as a landmark” without a “certificate of appropriateness” or in response to cases of severe damage.
To issue a certificate of appropriateness to alter a landmarked site, the Historic Preservation Commission must consider a battery of architectural and aesthetic concerns.
Preservation concerns even 50 years ago
By the time James Vlahakis, Dino Vlahakis’ father, applied for status for the Pickwick on the National Register of Historic Places, art deco’s day had passed and changes were occurring in building styles by the 1970s.
Notes on the paperwork accompanying the 1974 application for the register deem the theater an “unusually well-preserved example of Art Deco Theater Architecture.”
Attached photographs show the Pickwick Fountain Service was operating where Pazzi di Pizza restaurant is now located.
An “statement of significance” in the application notes: “The Pickwick Theater is an important cinema locally and perhaps regionally in the Art Deco style. … It has come down to us with few changes so that its art and architecture can still be appreciated directly without the need for interpretation.”
The application observes that the building, as it stood in 1974, had undergone some minor changes.
“These include the modernizing of the office and store spaces, usually in the form of new lighting and dropped ceilings,” the report states. “The originally two story high lobby was fitted with a false ceiling dropping its height to one story.”
But, the application stated, the theater was “largely unchanged” from the way it was built in 1928 for local leading citizen and former Mayor William H. Malone, who had named it the Pickwick after the “The Pickwick Papers” by Charles Dickens, according to Vlahakis.
Malone was later charged with evading $59,579 worth of federal income taxes in 1928 and 1929, according to Tribune coverage from 1936. He was convicted and spent from 1933 to 1936 out of the country and served just under half of a two-year sentence before President Franklin Roosevelt pardoned him in 1945, according to Tribune reporting.
Malone died in 1956. About two decades later, it was clear that a different type of architecture had risen to prominence in Park Ridge and that the theater he commissioned could be altered to fit the new style.
“The tastemakers in Park Ridge have succeeded in imposing ‘colonial’ design on new construction and remodeling,” the 1974 application states before going on to predict that “it will not be long before the owner of this great Art Deco theater begins to think of remodeling in a colonial style.”
The theater was granted status on the register in 1975.
However, Awsumb noted the National Register of Historic Places doesn’t have the practical weight that people often think of it as having.
“You hear national and you think, ‘Oh, Washington DC, powerful stuff,’ but it doesn’t have a lot of protections,” he said.
Amy Hathaway, a survey and National Register specialist at the Illinois State Historic Preservation Office, echoed this.
“The National Register of Historic Places is an honorific program and does not afford additional protection to resources in and of itself,” she said. “As long as private property owners follow local laws and there is no state or federal involvement, they can do whatever they want to their property.”
Frank Butterfield of Landmarks Illinois added that “in most cases, (for) a private homeowner with a private home, (or) private business owner with their own building, the National Register does not have any say on alterations or demolition.”
As a Park Ridge native, though, Butterfield noted Vlahakis’ commitment to preserving the appearance and function of the building.
And he saw reasons beyond the theater’s ownership to be optimistic as well, he said: “For a building as valued by the community and the region as much as the Pickwick Theatre, finding a creative solution is absolutely worth it.”