If the walls of the Douglas Park Auditorium could talk, they might well speak Yiddish. A three-story structure, its facade sporting bas-relief lions and angels, it stands at the intersection of Kedzie and Ogden avenues. When it opened around 1911, Eastern European immigrants were transforming North Lawndale into a Jewish neighborhood.
Their ears were attuned to the overtly sweet and unabashedly sentimental cadences of the Douglas Park Auditorium’s Yiddish theatrical troupe. Maynard Wishner was child member of the troupe who went on to a distinguished legal career that included a stint as executive director of Chicago’s Commission on Human Rights. “The Douglas Park Theatre did not aspire to great artistic theater,” Wishner recalled in a 2000 interview with the Chicago Reader.
“This was a people’s theater.” “They were all so alike,” he recalled, rattling off a series of typically schmaltzy plays: “‘A Mother’s Heart’, ‘A Mother’s Tears,’ ‘A Mother’s Heart and Tears.’ ” The Yiddish theater was just one of many activities that made the Douglas Park auditorium a vibrant hub of community life in the first half of the 20th century, after which it became a church for the neighborhood’s African American residents.
In the early years, it served as a stylish setting for events ranging from alumnae reunions of the Marks Nathan Jewish Orphan Home; benefits for the Council of Jewish Juniors’ summer camp; and dinner dances for the Chicago Bindery W.