A few months ago I saw a photo essay that Time magazine had put together about Detroit and the empty structures that pockmarked the city. There was a photo of a luxurious theater that had closed and was turned into a parking lot in the eighties. I had to find this place and see it for myself.

It wasn’t very difficult to locate and was almost as easy to talk the security into allowing me and my mother in to photograph the structure. The security guy called his boss who gave us explicit guidelines.

- Do not go down the ramps

-Do not go up the ramps

- You have 5 minutes and then the guard will escort you out

Yeesh. No pressure.

The guard took us up to the third floor in an antiquated elevator car. We walked through a hallway, around a bend, pushed open a heavy exit door and bam. You have never seen anything like this, ever. (well, unless you have been here) It was a preview of our fall of Rome. It was modern era American ruins. The juxtaposition of a parking lot, completely void of any cultural value and the vast expanse of luxuriously broken excess. Incredible.

click image to see full size.

The sheer size of the space was overpowering. Parts of the curtain still hung from the original wire structures. The seat structure and aisles in the balcony still sat perched high above. The golden painted hallways stood open and stacked like shoe boxes. Cracked mirrors clung tight to the dirty and dusty ornately decorated frames. A basketball hoop that had been attached to the brick wall looked as though it had been up for twenty years. It was heartbreaking and incredibly exciting at the same time.

The energy was profound in the building. It was like being swallowed by a whale.

The theater opened on Aug. 23, 1926 with a seating capacity exceeding 4,000 at a cost of 3.5 million. Ironically, the building sits on the plot of land where Henry Ford built his first quadricycle. Legend says that Ford built the historic vehicle without planning on a way to get it out of the shed and had to tear down a wall with an axe to get the vehicle out. Sounds a bit like a metaphor the auto industry and Detroit.

The Michigan had a lobby four stories high with room for as many as 1,000 patrons who could wait for the next showing. Velvet ropes contained the crowds while a pianist entertained. Paintings by artists such as Thomas Hovenden, Edwin Blashfield and Douglas Volk adorned the lobby walls. The ceiling provided a sight as awesome as any cathedral, with white marble sculptures of “Cupid and Psyche” and a life-sized pair of rearing horses pulling a Roman chariot.

Inside the auditorium, a cloth-of-gold curtain hid the screen until showtime. Of the curtains, one manager said, “There were so many drapes that we had to check the blueprint to get them back in place when they were cleaned.”

A huge theater organ could be raised from the basement to stage level and back. The ceiling, which soared eight stories above the auditorium floor, could be lit by four 2,500-pound, 10-foot brass and crystal chandeliers, each of which required 210 light bulbs.

The Michigan was ‘a castle of dreams and an ocean of seats.’

Related Posts

No related posts found