Description
Avast, a real piece o’ Chicago, and a hefty one. The captain tells it plain: this little piece of architecture is an element from one of the corners of the wall, down at the base, at the Congress Theater in Chicago, and it dates to the 1920s. The old movie palace on Milwaukee Avenue gave up a bit of her finery, and here it be.
The face is a tall, curling spray of acanthus leaves, every frond cut deep and finished in a worn gold that’s gone bronze in the hollows, with flecks of pale blue peeking through where the paint has chipped. The leaves sit in a curved, concave channel framed by a dark brown border with patches of old pink and magenta paint, and a flat ledge runs across the bottom. The top is flat and mottled in the same dusky pink and plum.
Turn it round and you’ll see what she’s made of: the back is raw white plaster, rough and lumpy where it was cast (shown in the photos). Chips and losses along the edges, as you’d expect from a theater piece of her years.
