Fancy Pants

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Architect B.C. Wetzell designed this roughly 600-seat neighborhood movie house on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park, which opened in 1915 under the name the Highland Park Theatre. As the movie business changed, the theater was renamed the Paris in 1967 and began showing adult films, becoming the Hiland Arts Theater in 1969, and by the 1980s it had been converted into a strip club called Fancy Pants, with a catwalk installed near the old stage. On June 19, 1982, Chinese American draftsman Vincent Chin held his bachelor party at Fancy Pants; an altercation there with autoworkers Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz spilled outside and escalated, and the two men later beat Chin with a baseball bat outside a nearby McDonald's, a killing that went unpunished by any real prison time and helped spark the modern Asian American civil rights movement. Fancy Pants closed sometime afterward, and the long-vacant theater building has stood in worsening decay for decades, with its roof and lobby partially collapsed.

1. Opened 1915 as the Highland Park Theatre, seating around 600
2. Became an adult theater as the Paris (1967) and Hiland Arts Theater (1969)
3. Converted into the Fancy Pants strip club by the 1980s
4. Site of Vincent Chin's bachelor party on June 19, 1982, the night of his fatal beating
5. Long closed and abandoned, with severe structural decay