Bruce Springsteen, well-oiled during the second set of the “Bomb Threat” show at the Uptown Theatre on October 2, 1975. Photo by Rick Kohlmeyer, courtesy of brucebase.wikispaces.com.
Last Friday marked the 40th anniversary of the legendary Bruce Springsteen “bomb threat” show at the old Uptown Theatre on North 49th Street , a landmark event in both local music and Springsteen history. You can read some pretty interesting items on the show, or even listen to it here. But, the bomb scare show is also a chapter in the weird history of the Uptown Theatre itself, which transitioned from movie palace to smut theater to concert venue during its lifespan, running the gamut of respectability and playing to wildly diverse customer bases.
The Uptown opened in 1927, one of five “neighborhood palaces” opened by the Saxe Brothers in the late 1920s (the Oriental Theatre was another of these, and opened the same year). The idea of the neighborhood palace was to bring the luxury of the downtown theatres closer to the people. These houses were not quite to the level of true Milwaukee palaces like the Wisconsin or the Warner, but they were impressive improvements over the typical bare-bones neighborhood theatre (the Downer is an example of one of these). Nor did they offer first-run films, which were still reserved for the downtown houses, but they could offer fairly new pictures at reasonable prices and in surroundings plush enough to bring a date along.
The Uptown was the western-most theatre in the city when it opened, built into the middle of a slate of lots awaiting development. The theatre featured an 1,800 seat auditorium and was outfitted with art-deco chandeliers and a blue stone fountain in its three-story lobby. The Uptown was also one of the first theaters in Milwaukee to have a candy counter included in its original design… a rare feature for the 1920s, but one that would become commonplace during the Great Depression.
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The stage and screen area of the Uptown. Courtesy of astortheatre.com.
The location of the Uptown was a bit of a gamble, but the neighborhood quickly developed around the theatre, and it earned a steady and loyal customer base among the largely German Lutheran and Jewish enclaves in the area. However, as with most theatres in the city, the post-war era took a toll as the rise in popularity of evening radio programming cut into its profits, a trend that continued through the 1950s with the rise of television and the shift of the middle class to the suburbs.
The Uptown actually stayed in the mainstream a little longer than most of its peers. By 1973, however, the theater was no longer drawing crowds by showing second-run hits and classic revivals (Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was among the last mainstream pictures to show there) and its programming became decidedly less “family friendly.” With mall cinemas now drawing the old urban movie-going public, the Uptown was left with pictures like School Girls Growing Up (“They could teach you a thing or two!” went the tagline) and Country Cuzzins.
It was also around this time that the Uptown started hosting rock shows. Acts like Supertramp, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and Iggy Pop all played some of their earliest Milwaukee shows at the theatre. The Uptown was also one of the first Milwaukee theatres to show midnight movies. With programs aimed at college kids and other counter-culture types, radio station WZMF sponsored regular midnight screenings at the Uptown in the mid-1970s. Programs included contemporary films like the Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant and exploitation classics like Reefer Madness, both of which packed more than 1,500 people into the theatre. Other programs consisted entirely of old cartoons. An image of the theatre near the end of its run, with the marquee advertising a “Late Nite” show of Deliverance can be seen here.
The masses who flocked to the Uptown for the backward joy of a picture like Reefer Madness, of course, were far different from the well-dressed Lutheran and Jewish couples on dates, or the neighborhood kids who patronized the wartime matinees, or even the middle-aged shirtsleeve set who sat through Country Cuzzins. In 1978, regular complaints about the Uptown’s patrons led to a police raid that resulted in 60 arrests for drug possession and disorderly conduct. Another raid in 1979 swept up 33 adults and teens while waiting to buy tickets to a Judas Priest show. When UA’s lease on the building expired in 1981 and its doors were locked, few in the neighborhood considered it much of a loss. It sat empty until 1992, when a local arts group bought the building with the intention of rehabilitating it and reopening it a public theatre arts space. Six years later, however, when the city wanted to raze the building to make way for a new police station, it was still empty. A member of the city redevelopment said bluntly that the Uptown had been “a blight on the neighborhood for 17 years.” Despite objections from the arts group and preservationists, the theatre was acquired by the city and demolished in 2000. The site is presently home to District Three Police Station.
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