The Chicago Theatre opened on 26 October 1921 with 125 white-gloved ushers and a fifty-piece orchestra playing along to silent films. Evening admission cost fifty cents. Its creators, the Balaban and Katz families, modelled the interior on Versailles, right down to a miniature Arc de Triomphe on the façade. They called it the Wonder Theater of the World.

That claim was not entirely outlandish. Chicago was then the film capital of the United States, the city where Charlie Chaplin developed his Tramp character at the nearby Essanay Studios. The theatre launched a chain of twenty-eight and set the template for lavish movie palaces across the country.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours connect the Chicago Theatre to the city's broader cultural story, tracing how Balaban and Katz institutionalised jazz nights as early as 1922 and charting the building's transformation from silent-film palace to a stage for Prince, Aretha Franklin and Robin Williams.