Thanks to a grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation the Chicago Architectural Photographing Company Collection (CAPC) is available in our online catalog.

The collection consists of 1,400 views of 255 theatres, mostly in the Midwest. Many of the photographs were taken at the time the buildings opened. The images were taken  mostly for Rapp & Rapp and Paramount Publix Theatres.  CAPC files in our archives are  8×10 film negatives, with some 8×10 glass plate negatives and 4×5 copy negatives.

All 1,090 negatives from the Chicago Architectural Photographing Co. (CAPC) Collection were scanned to create high quality digital master  files, then each was converted into a reference JPEG for our catalog program.

THS joined the Chicago Collections organization, a consortium of archives and special collections around the Chicagoland area. In the summer of 2015 work began on the consortium wide search catalog, which gathers material from each institution into one common web portal. The grant from the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation allowed THS to upload the CAPC collection to the catalog. The Chicago Consortium Collections launched publicly in October, extending our ability to disseminate the materials to a much wider audience with these  important materials documenting historic theatres. Follow this link to explore the CAPC collection online.