The Kenosha Theatre is the last standing Movie Palace between Milwaukee and Chicago that was built for and owned by Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle. During his legal battles with the Edison Trust, he was called “The Little Giant of Kenosha” as a perjorative after he formed the Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) group of theatre owners that wanted to break away from the Edison monopoly. Known as the “Playground of the North Shore”, Laemmle built the Kenosha Theatre as a tribute to his time in Kenosha as a clothing salesman. Kenosha is where he honed his advertising skills, which led to his promotion to his companies headquarters in Oshkosh, WI. He worked there for 12 years before moving on to Chicago, where he bought his first small movie theater. From that point on the fledgling movie business was about to undergo radical positive change. At the time it was built, the Kenosha Theatre was hailed as “The most ornate interior in the state”.  It immediately became an important stop in the vaudeville circuit and played major, yet mostly forgotten role in the history of entertainment and imagination in Kenosha. It truly was “the room where it happened”. The history of it’s operational period and the story of the group struggling to bring it back parallel with the history of the city of Kenosha itself.