On the day following her stellar halftime performance at the Super Bowl, Lady Gaga, announced a new world tour, dubbed "Joanne," including an August date at Wrigley Field.
Her ladyship will join a roster at the home of the Cubs that includes Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, James Taylor with Bonnie Raitt, Green Day, Billy Joel, Dead & Company (twice) and the Zac Brown Band. Concerts aren’t new at Wrigley Field, but they always felt like special events in the past. In 2017, Wrigley is presenting a bona fide live entertainment season. You could enjoy a summer of music — especially if you are of a certain age — and go nowhere else.
You’ll soon be going to what’s looking more and more like a new entertainment district for the North Side, replete with a hotel, numerous upscale restaurants, a new outdoor plaza with bars and a huge exterior video screen (it was hoisted there in the past few days), a bowling alley, a movie theater, a Shake Shack and so on and so forth. Within two or three years, good ole’ Wrigleyville surely will start to look more like the entertainment district of Rosemont, maybe, or River North, or downtown Chicago, or even downtown Las Vegas.
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It’s not hard to see the why of all this change for an area of bars, walk-ups and an old ballpark. The Ricketts family, owner of the world champion Cubs, have an asset that it’s smart to utilize for its own profit and for the coattails profit of small neighboring businesses. (The Cubs also have a shrewd distribution system of concert tickets that take care of those who live in the neighborhood, thus dampening opposition to traffic and fuss.) For the concert promoters, Wrigley delivers more than 42,000 seats, far more than most outdoor summer venues, and yet does not come with the usual drawbacks of cold arenas and stadia with their excruciating sponsored nameplates.
On the contrary, Wrigley (and those Ricketts-owned or sanctioned rooftops) lend cachet and hallowed ground charm, and the perception of intimacy, especially to the demographic the Cubs favor. The venue works in favor of the artist and the art. You can bet your life that Lady Gaga will come out with a Cubs cap — thus cross-promoting the baseball, but also making the night seem special. You can bet Joel will wave at the rooftops. And they’ll wave back. Everyone will be having fun.
You can confirm this in casual conversation: people don’t say they are going to see James Taylor in concert, they say they want to see him at Wrigley.
And then since Wrigley Field is doing all these events, and since its team is hot, too, of course people need a place to eat and stay, especially people of a certain age and wealth who don’t want to get sweaty at the Cubby Bear. And then when you have that hotel — in this case the Hotel Zachary, rising apace — then you have to fill those rooms and thus the need for more concerts and so on and so forth.
All of this has happened with relative ease and quiet because so much (although not all) of the district is controlled by one entity, one master developer, not unlike the situation in Rosemont. Of course, the entertainment developments in Rosemont have far more public involvement, the village having a long history of entertainment entrepreneurship. In the case of the new Wrigleyville, this is the product of private money chasing a belief in the future development possibilities of a hitherto underutilized asset, an urban ballclub with colossal emotional pull. Private money can move fast when there is opportunity.
So aside from a few minor issues of noise or traffic, some bellyaching over who gets the income from that last beer, and what time it is served, all of this is great for Chicago, right?
On many levels, yes. The Cubs are the only Chicago team with enough of a national following (if only one of casual curiosity) that they are a huge generator of out-of-state tourist dollars. There will be new jobs aplenty in the new Wrigleyville.
But let us ponder for a moment the impact of all this on the fate of Uptown and its historic theater, constructed in 1925. The two issues are not unrelated. The Uptown Theatre is only a bit north of Wrigley Field, but it faces completely different realities.
The Uptown, the 4,381-seat creation of the Balaban & Katz theater chain, was back in the news a few days ago when artist Regina Spektor filmed a new music video there, starring a dancer, Victoria Jaiani, from the Joffrey Ballet. Glimpses of the Uptown interior have been relatively rare these past few years — the theater needs extensive restoration work and has not been open to the public for more than 25 years — and the video was, for many, either new information or a reminder of the dust-covered riches that remain therein.
Of course, there was a lot about the Uptown that the artfully shot video, which used temporary lighting and picked its spots carefully, did not show. You did not see the water damage to the ceiling or the chronic leaks, and although there was peeling paint, it peeled atmospherically and artily. Old theaters have a ghostly sensibility that people enjoy and that do well in music videos. But if you can’t get people through the door, then it all eventually crumbles to dust. The Uptown Theatre is not ruin porn. But it looked that way.
The Uptown is also part of an entertainment district.
An entertainment district with actual history and venues like the Riviera Theatre (1917) and Aragon Ballroom (1926). But not an entertainment district getting anything like the investment pouring into Wrigleyville.
Why not? Well, there’s no income generation going on, unlike the situation to the south, where the Cubs’ World Series run threw off cash. Old buildings are costly to maintain, and there’s a further political problem that has been the main cause of inaction on the Uptown. The Uptown is privately controlled (by an entity formed by the partners behind Jam Productions) but no private operator wants to lay out the tens of millions necessary for renovation. They want that to come from public funds, especially when there is a history of precisely such investment in Chicago. But it’s politically difficult for those public entities to invest that money at present, given competing priorities. You could argue that they don’t have it to give.
The situation is not much more complicated than that. But then you also have the relatively small capacity of the Uptown (certainly compared with Wrigley Field) and the issue that presents when music artists derive higher and higher proportions of their income from touring and thus need a lot of seats. You’d be left with stand-up comics and nostalgia acts, neither of which are ideal for the space.
Throughout the past two decades, the Uptown preservationists, dedicated souls committed to the long game, have argued the theater needs to be at core of a new entertainment district involving retail, restaurants and the other venues. That is a sound argument.
But those preservationists did not anticipate precisely such a district arriving in and around the ballpark a mile or two to the south. It is hard to imagine duplicative efforts occurring anytime soon in Uptown, where the people would have to pay. At least in part.
Of course, you could argue that the one may (and should) eventually bleed into the other, especially since the Cubs are establishing a destination away from downtown, long assumed as the epicenter of a night out. They are doing so within the city limits, of course, indicative of a kind of new urbanism, different from what Rosemont has done and different from how Chicagoans played half a century ago. Wrigleyville is looking a lot like the future of live entertainment.
So does the Uptown benefit? Or lose? Either way, there is a stubborn truth in play here. Nobody will ever dare to knock the theater down. Something, eventually, will have to be done. The Rickettses would be a good place to start.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
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