And Lo The Renewal Became The Renewed - Royal George Theatre

The Royal George Theatre (1641 N Halsted) opened in 1986, the project of one Royal Faubion¹, a Hinsdale-based developer who originally drafted a mixed-use development with a 200-seat theater to "anchor" the retail stores and attract tenants and customers alike. With the influence of theater producer Michael Cullen, this grew, and grew, and eventually devoured the whole lot to become a standalone theater, featuring a 450-seat 'main stage', a 200 seat cabaret theater, a 100 seat 'great room', and a 50-seat black box theater.. The name "Royal George", was in the time honored tradition of mashing the proprietors names together- Royal Faubion, and his secretary-soon-wife, Georgean Jones.

Credit Library of Congress/Sanborn Map Co. 

The theater broke ground on July 16th, 1985, on a freshly cleared lot in a then backwater of the rapidly gentrifying Lincoln Park. The total development spanned 7 "standard" city lots, pictured above in a 1935 Sanborn map, with only the the southernmost building at 1633 N Halsted remodeled into the Cafe Royal. The rest- 4 brick and 2 wood framed primarily residential buildings- were bought out and demolished. As with most vernacular buildings lost to urban renewal, sifting through the newspapers only brings up scattered details- a small grocery store at 1639, the apartments at 1643 being converted into SROs, and countless 'looking for work' ads from tenants of every building in every era.

1649 N Halsted in 1961 - Credit Loop North News/Don DeBat

We do have a valuable history and photograph of one building- 1649 N Halsted, replaced unceremoniously with a parking garage ramp for the Royal George. Our information here comes from Loop North News contributor Don DeBat, whose father purchased the property in 1948, and lived there for decades before it was purchased for the theater's construction. If you're curious, the building- originally split into tiny, four-room one bedroom apartments, was purchased for $4,800 (~$67,000), and later sold $40,000 (~$126,000). The article, written around the time the theater's redevelopment was first discussed in 2022, is an interesting reflection of a lost era of Lincoln Park, and I invite you to thumb through it for a more detailed description of the humble balloon-frame, clapboard building illustrated above. 

The former site of 1649 N Halsted; note the surviving neighboring building

Architects Lisec & Biederman were brought in to draft the new theater's design, with allusions made to it being a 'theater in the old style', with an italianate design to blend into the area's remaining historic structures. I will excise some of the harsher criticism contained in earlier drafts of this post, but overall I find the Royal George rather mediocre. Lisec & Biederman would go on to make more projects in this style, like the Bloomsbury townhomes (5230 S Cornell, 1988), and I think they only improved with time.  The Royal George by comparison feels like it's had all its details pressed flat back into it's facade, giving it the air of a cheap pressed veneer rather than Italianate craftsmanship.

Theater interior - Source: lisecarchitects.com (archived)

After a short period of previews, the Royal George opened on December 3rd, 1986 with Little Shop of Horrors, marking the complex as complete (the adjoining restaurant, The Royal Cafe, had opened a year prior). Royal Faubion however was not one to rest on his laurels, as in August 1988 he announced he was already embarking on a second theater complex, right across the street at 1630-1650 N Halsted. Set to contain new homes for both the prestigious Steppenwolf and Second City theater companies, it doesn't seem to have gotten much farther than breaking ground before things rapidly began to fall apart. Second City bailed that fall, deciding they'd instead stay at their then-and-now current location at 1616 N Wells, and Steppnewolf was not long behind them, formally bailing on Faubion's project on March 9th, 1989. The plan was basically fully scrapped by the summer, when the Steppenwolf 'stepped' back into the picture, buying their slice of the project to build their new theater themselves, and Faubion made out with only a parking garage on the south end of the property.²

Back at the Royal George, the producers of multiple shows weren't being paid, culminating in the producers of Steel Magnolias seizing box office revenues after a $64,000 check bounced in early 1989, and by February Faubion had admitted to the press that he owed "a lot of money". The theater was listed for sale in early March, and would go briefly dark in mid 1989 before being rented to a new management company run by Robert Perkins, reopening in late 1989 with The Cocktail Hour and Cowardly Custard (Perkins would later buy the theater outright in 1994 with Broadway theater producer Rocco Landesman³). The Cafe Royal, who's floundering finances were one of the speculated reason's for Faubion's money troubles, also turned over at this time to the fantastically bland-named "Halsted Bar & Grill". 

The game of hot potato would finally end in 1998, when it traded hands to it's final owners, Reading Entertainment.⁴  With this the theater could finally settle into truly regular operation, and from what I've found during my research it was a pretty popular space in the Chicago theater scene. The neighboring restaurant would continue to trade names, culminating with Balena, an Italian restaurant run by Boka Restaurant Group and B. Hospitality Co, which operated until 2017, when it suffered a devastating fire. The space would be locked in insurance back-and-forth for a further two years before the owners gave up on reopening it in 2019, and it laid vacant until the building's demolition.

The Royal George itself would continue as usual until the Covid-19 pandemic, with the theater closing in March ahead of the premiere of Hit Her With The Skates, with show pages cheerfully noting the theater "Will Be Back Soon". After a year in stasis, owners Liberty Theatres⁵ told the producers of the venues last shows they had until April 11th, 2021 to have their equipment removed, as they were prepping to sell the building for redevelopment. A deal was made by June that year, selling the property to Draper & Kramer of Chicago, IL, From there, work entered a frustrating but familiar rhythm- plans would be announced a year later, approved another year after that, and it would take another two agonizing years before the excavators of Precision Excavation would roll up to the site in late November 2025.

My first visit came the day after demolition permits were granted on November 1st, 2025, as I was still attempting to 'keep up with the Joneses' in respect to Chicago demolitions. That was a venture I quickly burnt out on, and so my coverage ended up a bit spotty. The photo above, taken on November 23rd, shows the earliest demolition work, removing the 1980s connecting building built by Faubion. 

By the time I broke out of a mixed holiday cheer and seasonal depression stupor and returned in February, the site had been almost fully cleared, saved for the stubborn remains of the parking garage. A post from @BuildingChi on Twitter shows that demolition had reached the main theater building by the 3rd.

The parking garage would hold on into March as excavators gnawed away at the steel-reinforced concrete, but the last remnants of the early pioneer of an off-Loop theater revival would soon fade. 

Architectural rendering via Draper & Kramer and SGW Architecture & Design

The approved design, an eight-story mixed use building with a sawtoothed glass facade, is quite nice in my opinion, and does also come with 20 units of affordable housing. The rendering above is also interesting as it includes an approved but seemingly abandoned neighboring development, 1623 N Halsted, that would have knocked out the remaining buildings between the Royal George and the tracks for a similar if less eye-catching 7-story mixed use building.

At time of writing, the site has been fully cleared, though construction has not begun in earnest. I can only wish them luck, as I love to see any residential development that isn't adding to the city-draining trend of deconversions and demolitions for single-family-homes, of which Lincoln Park is particularly infested.

If you'd like to see all the photos I've taken at this site, you can find them here on Flickr
A list of sources can be found here

    1. Up for grabs if anyone's looking for a drag name

2. A proposed "European style" hotel never seemed to materialize; if I had to speculate, this would have gone in the space between the garage and the Steppenwolf that later became the Arts & Education Center. 

3. I found record of a supposedly done-deal in 1992 for the theater to be purchased by real estate lawyer Jerry Schain, who wanted to rename it "Hollywood on the Lake"; it appears nowhere else in newspapers I can find after it's initial announcement.

4. The legal successor of the Reading Railroad, established all the way back in 1833!

5. Reading's live theater subsidiary