Chicago Civic Opera - New Opera House

New Opera House

Originally, like Chicago Opera Association, the Civic Opera Company was housed in the Auditorium theater. This theater was superlative for singing, the acoustics were and are second to none, but there was no back stage to speak of. This limits the productions possible to put on and that can be housed at one point in time, a limit that both Insull and Garden chafed under, so very early on, Insull decided that there would be a new opera house. The new Civic Opera House would be marginally smaller in seat capacity than the auditorium, but this was out-weighed by the back stage space which was to be larger than any other back stage space at that time, and the acoustics were not quite as good as that of the auditorium, but they are still very good. The building of the new opera house was to be semi-financed by Insull, and the rest would be leveraged in with bonds to be held by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The original plan was that the Civic Opera would retire these bonds over the next eighty years with rents from a 28 story office tower above the theatre. Thus they would completely own the building and rentals from the office space would subsidize the Civic Opera Company.

In the 1950s the theater became the home of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.