Mayor Harold Washington is expected to unveil plans Monday for a performing arts center in the former Avalon movie palace at 1645 E. 79th St.
A development group headed by Edward and Bettiann Gardner, owners of Soft Sheen Products Inc., will transform the Avalon into a live theater catering to Chicago`s black community, said a source close to the project.
It will be the first such theater in the city since the old Regal Theater, 47th Street and King Drive, was torn down in 1973.
The Avalon, a 21,875-square-foot building with 2,400 seats, was designed in the Moorish style by theater architect John Eberson. It was built in 1929 by Warner Bros., according to a spokesman for Sheldon F. Good & Co., a Chicago real estate brokerage that represented the property`s seller, R.W. Schambach Ministries of Tyler, Tex.
The building still retains most of its original ornamentation, the spokesman said.
Schambach Ministries, which had operated a Miracle Temple church there since about 1980, had asked $150,000 for the property, the Good spokesman said. The broker did not disclose the property`s selling price.
The Gardners apparently are seeking to bring back to the city the grandeur that was the Regal, a 3,000-seat theater constructed by Balaban & Katz in 1927 to serve the surrounding black neighborhood.
”The Regal Theater occupies a special place in the Negro theater, for here the Negro stars perform,” The Tribune reported in 1955. ”Indeed, many got their start in the Regal. Nat King Cole, for example, won an amateur contest there before becoming nationally known.
”Thus, when South Siders want to see Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Billy Eckstine, Ethel Waters and Lena Horne, they go to the Regal,” the article said.
By the 1960s, however, the Regal had gone into a tailspin. Black businessman S.B. Fuller of Fuller Products Co. bought the theater in 1964, spent $150,000 on renovations and attempted to revive it by booking horror films and such contemporary artists as James Brown.
The effort failed, and the Regal was razed in 1973 to make way for a parking facility for a senior citizens complex.
