Davis Theater

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Built in 1918 as the Pershing Theater, this Renaissance Revival-style building was designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager, and has since become known as the Davis Theater upon its conversion to show “talkie” films in the 1930s. The building features a red brick facade with a large mixed-use retail and residential block in the Renaissance Revival style in front of the auditorium to the rear, with similar but simpler details than the portion of the facade at the theater’s lobby, which is the most ornate section of the facade. The building’s red brick exterior has terra cotta trim and accents, with one-over-one windows, a stepped parapet on the commercial block, multiple retail shopfronts, and doorways with arched transoms and decorative terra cotta trim surrounds. The theater lobby section features a base clad in colorful vitrolite panels, with a large vertical sign attached to a metal frame structure atop the roof of the lobby displaying the name of the theater, below which a sign displaying current movies playing at the theater cantilevered from the facade below. The lobby’s facade features three arched windows with a decorative terra cotta surround including engaged columns, decorative keystones, urns, and multiple lightbulbs, with this being surrounded by terra cotta trim and red brick laid in varying orientations, and a parapet with a cornice with dentils and decorative terra cotta reliefs above. The theater’s auditorium is further shielded from view by an adjacent building that sits on the flatiron-shaped corner lot at Wilson Avenue and Lincoln Avenue, which is similar in style to the theater, but with details that distinguish it’s appearance from that of the theater building. The Davis Theater served as a foreign language cinema and film festivals starting in the 1950s, with the building being renovated in 2016-18 under the direction of architecture firm Kennedy Mann, today serving once again as a neighborhood movie theater, anchoring the Lincoln Avenue Business District in Lincoln Square, and now having four separate theaters inside the cavernous auditorium structure.. Openly licensed photograph selected near the verified coordinates.
Photograph: w_lemay · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Source & credits