Auditorium Theatre

This guide to Chicago's Auditorium Theatre follows the opera house's strange afterlife after it went bankrupt in the early 1940s, when the city handed the building to the war effort and servicemen bowled a twelve-lane alley across the stage. It traces Roosevelt University's 1946 purchase and the tangled ownership that followed, including a Chicago lawyer named Abraham Teitelbaum, better known for a very different client, who held out for a fortune the university didn't have. Teitelbaum's slice of the building included the heating plant, the fire escapes, and several freight elevators.