At a time when most American children were slaves to their television sets, Siskel preferred walking several blocks to the historic Nortown Theater, his favorite place to catch a show. Like a child stepping into a fantasy world, he would lose himself in the Nortown’s spacious Mediterranean interior and find himself gazing into the effervescent glow of the theater’s unique lighting system. As Siskel himself once said, he was ’swept away’ by the experience.”

Gene Siskel, first half of the famous film critic pair Siskel and Ebert, used to spend his afternoons in the unique marine themed auditorium of Chicago’s Nortown Theatre, as shown in this quote from his official biography.

(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)