In Chicago

Chicagoans believe in a rosy-cheeked, white-mustached, short, chunky, soft-spoken Santa Claus. He gives them what they want. He gives them efficient light, gas and trolley cars. After Harold Fowler McCormick had given them grand opera at a deficit of a million yearly, Santa Claus (whose Chicago name is Samuel Insull) stepped in and reduced the deficit by more than 50%. He implied that he would furnish grand opera at no deficit.

Chicagoans throbbed with confidence and gratitude towards Mr. Insull when last autumn he acquired an inland tract on the city's grimy river bank and announced that here he would erect a $7,500,000 midwestern music Mecca (TIME, Nov. 29). And last week Chicagoans throbbed again, including even the strictly business-like Journal of Commerce & La Salle Street Journal, when Mr. Insull explained to the 2,500 long-suffering guarantors of the Chicago Civic Opera Co., of which he is president, how this music Mecca could avoid losing money.

Mr. Insull's plan was quite simple. The new opera site abuts on broad Wacker Drive, on Market between Washington and Madison streets. It is a convenient neighborhood for business offices and is increasing rapidly in beauty. Simply surround and cap your opera auditorium and dressing-rooms with 22 stories of offices priced in proportion to the cultivated air of the building, and the rents from brokers, lawyers, insurance men, advertising agents, etc. will help audiences pay for expensive scenery, costumes, batons, temperaments, vocal chords.

Mr. Insull announced that already the opera's business manager and the technical director, and also Architect Ernest Robert Graham (who has been building Greater Chicago since World's Fair days) were headed for Europe to study the last words in opera-house design. And he promised the new auditorium, fully equipped and staffed to amuse 4,000 Chicagoans nightly, for about Christmas time, 1930.