Chicago Coliseum
arena in Illinois, United States
Chicago Coliseum was the name applied to three large indoor arenas, which stood at various times in Chicago, Illinois, from the 1860s to 1982. They served as venues for large national conventions, exhibition halls, sports events, and entertainment.
The first Coliseum stood at State and Washington streets in Chicago's downtown in the late 1860s. The second venue was located at 63rd Street near Stony Island Avenue in the south side's Woodlawn community (near the site of the 1893 World's Fair). It hosted the 1896 Democratic National Convention (known for the "Cross of Gold" speech), and several early indoor American football games. After hosting a notable convention for the then new and growing bicycle industry, it burned a few months later.
The third Chicago Coliseum was located at Wabash Avenue near 15th Street on the near south side. It hosted five consecutive Republican National Conventions, (1904, 1908, 1912, 1916, 1920) and the Progressive Party National Convention in 1912 and 1916. It also hosted the Lincoln Jubilee in 1915. In the 1920s, it became a popular professional ice hockey venue, and hosted the world's first roller derby, during the Great Depression.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chicago Coliseum” as arena in Illinois, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2370898. Authority coordinates are 41.859, -87.625. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1893, 1896 and 1904.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chicago Coliseum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.