Post #713772 by Ragbag Comics on Sun, Apr 13, 2014 11:59 AM

Does anyone of you super sleuths out there know when, approximately, the Polynesian Village closed? If I had to guess,
I would put it around 1966.

I know the Edgewater Beach hotel closed in 1967, and that the main building of the hotel was torn down not
too long after that (perhaps 1969 at the latest.) The Edgewater Beach Apartments, which co-existed with the hotel,
still stand today and really make a person appreciate how grand the architecture of the hotel must have been.

The hotel lost its beach access around the time the Polynesian Village opened, due to the northward expansion of
Lake Shore Drive (which stopped at Foster prior to the expansion; that took place around 1954-55)

The Polynesian Village would have been kaput prior to 1967 when the hotel shuttered - here's a snippet from one of the local
neighborhood blogs, quoting Les Waverly, who was a band leader at the hotel in the 50's and 60's:

"They replaced the Polynesian Village and they tried to bring back the Marine Dining Room. There would be people who would come back to relive their honeymoon of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago and they were looking for that nice hotel that they enjoyed so much—and they’d spend one night in the rooms up there with the peeling plaster and the crummy bathroom and all that. We saw the hotel slip little by little. The stores began to close and they stopped operating the summer theater, but still you thought it would keep going."

Up until the sale to the hotel group from Boston in the 1950's (and, apparently with that, the Skipper Kent connection),
the Marine Dining Room was the primo place to go in the city, especially throughout the 30's and 40's when Benny Goodman,
Glenn Miller and all the other great band leaders of the era played there.

It sounds like that change back to the Marine Dining Room wasn't too long before the hotel closed, so I would have to guess the Village closed around 66-67-ish.

I can say, the area surrounding the hotel (Uptown/Edgewater) hit a period of sharp decline starting in the late 60's. It had been the "entertainment capital" of the North side of the city for decades, starting in the teens and 20's, but (as happens in big cities) it became mostly a slum throughout the late 60's, 70's, and 1980's, and is only really starting to rebound now. Clark Street (one of the main North-South thoroughfares, several blocks West of the Edgewater Beach hotel on Sheridan Road) was referred to as the "Hillbilly Highway" in the media starting in the late 60's, due to the massive influx of poor Appalachian immigrants in the neighborhood. Clark Street was pretty solidly country and western bars (Carol's Pub at Clark & Leland is all that's left now of
that time period.)If you've seen the 1970's horror classic "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," which was filmed in that area, you can see what the Uptown/Edgewater area looked like by the mid 1980's.

Off the topic of Tiki, sure, but hopefully some context to what was going on in area around the Edgewater Beach Hotel at the time the Polynesian Village was wrapping up will be interesting to some. Just trying to get an idea how long the Polynesian Village would have been going... it couldn't have been TOO long, as artifacts and information about the place seems to be rare to come by.

--Pete