Lake Forest-Lake Bluff History Museum

DeLuxe Theatre: Lake Forest's First Movie House

Making It Home

Vincent Quarta was a local jack-of-all-trades. In addition to the theatre, he also ran a confectionery, furniture repair shop, and music shop.

1917 Sanborn fire insurance map showing the DeLuxe Theatre on Westminster, adjacent to O’Neill’s Hardware store.

DeLuxe Theatre program, 1922. At the time, movies were 27 cents for adults and 13 cents for children under 12.

Joseph O'Neill opened Lake Forest’s first motion picture house on Westminster in 1912, next to the new location of his hardware store. The Lake Forest City Council spent the next six years regulating this new- fangled operation, largely focusing on whether to allow the theatre to show movies on Sundays.

By 1917, O’Neill had turned operation of the movie house over to Vincent Quarta, who named it the DeLuxe Theatre and put in a new $5,000 pipe organ. New films screened daily, paired with shorter comedies or serials.

Beyond the movies, Quarta made an effort to transform the theatre into a community gathering place, hosting political meetings, patriotic fundraisers for the war effort, and benefits for local organizations. The DeLuxe Theatre operated through 1929, when competition from the new, larger, more modern Deerpath Theater ultimately encouraged Vincent Quarta to retired from the motion picture business.

"Box office opened onto Westminster and a corridor sloped upward to the lobby behind the projection booth. Two aisles led to the left, down to the stage on which there were occasional vaudeville-type acts by college students. ... The films were silent with live piano accompaniment. We watched feature films, Green Archer serials and news reels. Cost? Ten cents." Memory of David T. Roberts, 1980, reported in the Lake Forester.