The World's Most Beautiful Ballrooms BY NANCY BANKS
Those were the days-when the plain people of Chicago danced in palatial ballrooms to the music of the big bands.
HUNDREDS OF STARS TWINKLED OVERHEAD in the deep blue dome of the Aragon's ceiling while clouds drifted slowly by. The huge dance floor, built to resemble the courtyard of a Moorish palace, was filled with swirling dancers as the band swung into its theme song, "The W altz You Saved for Me." It was February 9, 1964, and Wayne King was playing his last dance at the ballroom that had given him his start as a bandleader and made him famous as "the Waltz King." The Aragon had been sold and was soon to be r::onverted to a roller-skating rink. The Trianon, its "sister ballroom" on the South Side, had been sold ten years earlier. It was truly the end of an era. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Aragon and the Trianon were known coast-to-coast as "America's Most Beautiful Ballrooms." Six nights a week, they featured the country's top bands-King, Dickjurgens,Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, Eddy Howard, Isham Jones, Lawrence Welk, and dozens more. "Dance" rhymes with "romance," of course, and over the years more young people probably fell in love at the Aragon and the Trianon than anywhere else in Chicago. The estimated total attendance at the Aragon alone was more than fifty million. The two "wonder ballrooms" had their unlikely beginnings in 1907, when a penniless young man named Andrew Karzas arrived in Chicago from Greece. Two years later, his younger brother William joined him. As soon as they managed to scrape together $300, the Karzas brothers opened a tiny storefront restaurant on the South Side. The restaurant prospered, and soon they made their first investment in the entertainment field, a nickelodeon at 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. As the fad for mov-
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Chicago History
ing pictures grew, so did the Karzas' fortunes, and they bought a small string of movie theaters on the South Side. In the early 1920s they built the Woodlawn, one of the earliest neighborhood movie palaces. They were following the lead of the Balaban and Katz theater chain, which had started the craze for ornate movie theaters in 1917 with its Central Park theater. Most of the early B & K movie houses were "inspired" by French architecture, especially Versailles. So was the Karzas brothers' Woodlawn theater, and as Andrew Karzas listened to the crowds exclaim over the splendor of his "movie palace" he determined to go a step further. He would build a regal ballroom, with the largest possible dance floor and the very best orchestras. He would model it after the Grand Trianon, a palace built by Louis XIV at Versailles, and decorate it with the finest marble, the most luxurious velvets and brocades. It would be located near public transportationand it would be air-cooled, so that dancing would be comfortable all year round. He would call it the Trianon, and it would attract (as he put it) "a very refined class of nice people." Public dancehalls were not a new idea by any means- in 19 r 7, there were no fewer than 440 in Chicago. But the vast majority were "dance dives" -small, poorly ventilated rooms located in the rear of saloons, where, as the Juvenile Protective Association reported, "Men and women become intoxicated and dance indecently such dances as 'Walkin' the Dog,' 'On the Puppy's tail,' 'Shaking the Shimmy,' 'The Dip,' 'The Stationary Wiggle,' etc." Young people from the "best" families danced at country clubs and private "dancing academies," and the few respectable public dancehalls