The Schwartz Ballroom opened on October 20, 1928, with music by Harold Austin and his New Yorkers during the big band craze of the Roaring 20s, when dance hall construction boomed and recording and radio broadcasting spread new urban sounds across the nation. It attracted major performers including Perry Como, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. Beginning in 1931, local radio station WTMJ broadcast live via CBS, bringing the Schwartz coast-to-coast recognition, and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians drew a record crowd when 6000 people jammed the ballroom while several hundred more listened from outside. Designed by Milwaukee architect Robert A. Messmer and funded by local brewer Joseph Schwartz Jr., the ballroom features an octagonal Great Hall rising 36 feet at its center, crowned by an ornate one-ton wrought-iron Art Deco chandelier, and its 112-foot unobstructed dance floor can accommodate 1500 dancing couples. From 1944 to 1946, it served as a Prisoner of War camp for 300 or more German POWs, who provided labor at local factories to make up for wartime labor shortages. After the war it became Zivko’s Ballroom, and it was later saved from demolition by the Hartford Rotary and the Hartford Historic Preservation Foundation and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.