Uptown Square Historic District

Uptown Square is a dense cluster of theaters, banks, hotels, shops, offices and a church in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, laid out along Broadway, Lawrence Avenue, Wilson Avenue and nearby streets. It includes 45 contributing and 8 noncontributing buildings, most built between about 1900 and the 1940s in Classical Revival, Commercial Style, Art Deco and Spanish-inspired designs. Landmarks include the Uptown Theatre, the Aragon Ballroom, the Green Mill Gardens, the Uptown Broadway Building, the Wilson Avenue elevated station and the Peoples Church of Chicago. The district grew around elevated train stops, which made it a convenient entertainment corridor and an outlying business center that mirrored downtown on a smaller scale. Apartment hotels such as the New Lawrence and the Wilton housed a young, mobile population. The Great Depression and later wartime changes altered the area's fortunes. Today the buildings continue to illustrate the neighborhood's peak years, though several large structures, including the Uptown Theatre, stand vacant.