Act 1: Michael Moyer will never forget the time he met Mel Brooks, the comedy film director, screenwriter and actor. Moyer was observing a rehearsal for “The Producers” during its 2001 pre-Broadway run at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago’s Loop when Brooks, the musical’s creator, plopped down three rows in front of him.
Moyer greeted Brooks.
“How do you know me?” Moyer recalled Brooks saying playfully. Moyer casually said he had seen him around. “He laughed,” Moyer said.
Five years earlier, Moyer and the Van Kampen family, which made its fortune in the mutual fund industry, had bought the Cadillac Palace Theatre from the Wirtz family, owner of the Chicago Blackhawks. They restored the 1926 building, reopened it in 1999 and still own the venue, considered one of the city’s premier institutions for live events.
Act 2: These days, Moyer, 55, is leading an investor group planning a $55 million restoration of another ’20s-era building, the Congress Theater in the Logan Square neighborhood.
The Congress operated as a live music venue until it closed in 2013 after a string of code violations. It occupies a relatively lonely stretch of Milwaukee Avenue.
“When I originally did the Cadillac Palace, I looked at it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Moyer said. “Now I have two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.”
Dominated by a three-story entrance visible from the Blue Line, the Congress is one of the most intact neighborhood movie “palaces” in Chicago from the boom years of the 1920s, according to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. By the end of that decade, Chicago had more than 30 such movie palace theaters, but, by 2000, fewer than a half a dozen had survived. In 2002, the Congress Theater was designated a landmark by the city of Chicago.
“They just don’t make buildings like this anymore,” Moyer said, the 6-foot-6 Seattle native stressing each of the eight words in the sentence. Moyer plans to be a long-term owner of the Congress along with other investors he declined to name, but said the group doesn’t include members of the Van Kampen family.
Moyer said the first person he walked through the Congress with was Mike Faron, chairman of W.E. Oneil, the general contractor that will orchestrate the restoration. The Chicago-based construction firm also worked on the Chicago Theatre and, with Moyer, the Cadillac Palace Theatre.
“They’re versed in old buildings like this,” Moyer said. Faron and Moyer spent about two hours walking around. “He sees things that I don’t see.”
A major part of the renovation will be the domed auditorium. “A year from now this whole room will be scaffolded,” he said while giving a tour to a reporter. The theater once had more than 2,900 seats; they were removed years ago. Moyer doesn’t plan to reinstall seats on the main theater floor, which will resume hosting live music. Without seats, the room’s capacity is 4,900 people.
Moyer said he’s working with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency to also get the Congress on the National Register of Historic Places. His team includes MacRostie Historic Advisors, a consultant that helps clients get the government certifications needed to qualify for local, state and federal historic tax incentives.
Moyer said he’s talking to local and national theater operators to run the facility when it reopens. Woodhouse Tinucci, the architecture firm Moyer has hired for the Congress restoration, has done renderings of the project.
The proposed purchase of the property, for what a source says is about $15 million, looks increasingly likely to be consummated since litigation was settled involving the theater’s current owner, and a lawsuit brought by a concert promoter was dismissed last month.
“This is going to happen,” Moyer said. “The Congress will reopen.”
Moyer expects the purchase to close by the end of April and work to start in June. He expects the theater to reopen in 2017.
The proposed restoration calls for an inn with about 32 rooms and the redevelopment of the street facade to include restaurants and retail. The new venue will also include a rooftop lounge. What are currently 14 apartments will be spruced up and operated as affordable housing, Moyer said.
Most of the storefronts on the block are bereft of retail, restaurants or services.
Norma Gomez, who has run an insurance agency, Acceptance Agency, on Milwaukee Avenue for 19 years, is one of the few occupants of a storefront on the block. “I’d like to see them restore the storefronts along” Milwaukee, she said. “It’s a beautiful building,” she said of the Congress. “It just needs to be taken care of.”
Intermission: Moyer’s conviction that the project will come to fruition is based in part on two legal rulings last month.
On Jan. 22, as part of a 2012 lawsuit the city of Chicago had brought against the current property owner over code violations, Cook County Circuit Judge Pamela Gillespie signed an “order to vacate the premises,” meaning that residents living in the property’s apartments must leave by April 1. She said the city made its case that there was “an imminent threat to health, safety and welfare of tenants” at the property.
Eddie Carranza, who owns the Congress, said he has “worked very closely with Mr. Moyer and his team and I absolutely believe he will close on the transaction.”
He said lawsuits with two concert promoters have been settled, and he has “fully cooperated with the city’s Law Department and they have been very helpful in my efforts to prepare the building for the change in ownership,” he said. “I believe my attorneys and the city attorneys have been coordinating the notification to tenants in terms of how and when those will go out.”
Act 3: Lair Scott, a tenant, isn’t pleased about having to move. “I feel scammed by the city that suddenly the building is sold and then condemned?” Scott said. “Some of us will face homelessness, including me, in attempting to find rental properties that accept pets and are within my” income.
Raymond Valadez, chief of staff to 1st Ward Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno, said the alderman’s office gave Scott a list of affordable housing resources and a list of developments that have affordable units available. One project is in the 1st Ward, but the rent may be above the price range that Scott was seeking, Valadez said.
Curtain call: Donald Dionesotes, 85, who came all the way from Bensenville to attend an open house at the Congress in late January, said he has been interested in architecture “all my adult life.” The retired manufacturing manager and limousine driver said of Moyer: “I applaud this gentleman” to do $55 million in repairs.
Stage notes: Michael Moyer holds a bachelor’s degree in business and a minor in economics from the University of Puget Sound, and master’s degrees in accounting and political science from Washington State University. Hobbies include fly-fishing, particularly in Alaska. He lives in Inverness.
In 2008 and 2009, he pursued investments in Iraq, working with the government of Iraq and international investors. He said he took 12 trips there over 18 months, though he didn’t end up making any investments because of security concerns.
Health scare: In 2010, he had an “aortic dissection,” or tear, that sidelined him for about a year. “I’m lucky to be alive,” he said. He was in surgery 16 hours and was initially given a 5 percent chance of survival. “Everything that needed to go right did,” he said. He was in the hospital for two weeks and didn’t leave his home for about two months, and his full recovery took about two years.
Moyer began his career at Price Waterhouse in its Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, offices. He started working with the Van Kampen family in 1994 when he moved to Chicago to become a consultant at Kenneth Leventhal, which was later bought by Ernst & Young; he later helped the Van Kampen family find real estate investments. Moyer was a former finance vice president for Melvin Simon & Associates, now publicly traded Simon Properties, whose properties include Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. The entity that owns the Cadillac Palace Theatre is PalMet Venture, of which Moyer is managing member.
Twitter @beckyyerak
