On the hot night of July 22, 1934, the FBI ended the career of Public Enemy Number One at the movie theater in front of you. On the hot night of July 22, 1934, the bank robber John Dillinger came to the Biograph to watch the gangster film Manhattan Melodrama. He had been betrayed by an acquaintance, Ana Cumpanis, remembered as the lady in red, who tipped off federal agents.
As Dillinger left the theater and walked into the alley just south, agents under Melvin Purvis closed in, and he was shot dead on the spot. The killing made national headlines and helped cement the reputation of J. Edgar Hoover's young Bureau. The Biograph, opened in 1914, still operates as a theater.
Look at the marquee and then at the narrow alley beside the building; in that gap, the most hunted man in America fell, in the Prohibition era's last famous act of gangland violence.