Within the auditorium, the stage is framed by a grand, intricately designed proscenium arch. The effect works: More than any other existing downtown Detroit theater building, the great hall invites visitors to stroll up and down its length. To give the promenade a feeling of length, the lobbies on each side are kept intentionally small for such a large theater. The great hall is a long promenade, connecting Broadway and Madison streets, flanked on one side by the auditorium. Fashioned in the Italian Renaissance style, Crane incorporated all the features that made Detroiters then (and now) feel as though they had taken the trip to Europe without leaving their hometown: large crystal chandeliers, a grand marble staircase, lavish carpeting, walls decorated in elegant murals and original oil paintings. Crane also designed many famous non-theater buildings in Detroit during this period, including the Lafayette Building, Orchestra Hall, and Olympia Stadium, a former home of the Detroit Red Wings hockey team.īy 1922, Crane had toured the great opera houses of Europe, and they became the major influence in his design for the Capitol Theatre. He also designed the Adams and the Madison, and later, the State (now the Fillmore Detroit), Fox and United Artists theaters. Howard Crane, who by 1920 had established himself as the city’s foremost theater architect.Ĭrane got his start converting an existing Detroit building into The Casino for Kunsky in 1906. To design the biggest and best theater in Detroit, they turned once again to architect C. The pair worked together to relocate the city’s entertainment center from Monroe Street and Campus Martius to the growing shopping district surrounding Grand Circus Park. Trendle, his former accountant and lawyer. By 1922, Kunsky had bought out his partner Caille’s share of the theater business and taken on as a junior partner George W. It was the dawn of the Jazz Age, when bigger was beginning to mean better. “By the time the Kunsky-owned Capitol opened across the street from the Madison in 1922,” writes Stuart Galbraith IV in “Motor City Marquees,” “the movie theater began to make the movie itself a secondary experience.” Just one year before Catlin published his book, Kunsky had outdone himself once again, opening the biggest and most elaborate movie theater Detroiters had yet seen, the first in Detroit built in what would become known as the “true movie palace style,” the Capitol Theatre. Kunsky also was responsible for many other Detroit theaters, including the larger Adams and Madison theaters, both built near Grand Circus Park in 1917. Catlin calls Kunsky “the leading impresario of Detroit.” It was Kunsky, with his partner Arthur Caille, who opened The Casino. Soon, movie theaters, or “silent dramas” (remember, early films had no audio), were drawing patrons away from “legitimate theaters.” At the time Catlin’s book was published, in 1923, the theater industry in Detroit had matured a great deal, and the name of one man became synonymous with its success. Detroit’s first proper movie theater, The Casino, opened in 1906, on Monroe Street. In the first years of the 20th century, small vacant shops downtown were converted into pop-up theaters showing short picture reels. Most of the spectators were relieved when the exhibition was over.”Ĭatlin goes on to describe the beginnings of the motion picture business in Detroit. Catlin describes the poor quality of the production, and the equipment: “The tremulous flickering of the picture was quite distressing. Catlin’s “The Story of Detroit,” the film was of a bullfight in “the City of Mexico,” using an early projection device called an eidoloscope. The first public showing of a motion picture in Michigan took place in 1896, at what was then the Detroit Opera House on Campus Martius. The Capitol Theatre would live on again as the Detroit Opera House. And it was nearly left for dead until an intrepid general director of the Michigan Opera Theatre saw that a movie palace designed to look and feel like a grand opera house of Europe might be the perfect home for his company. But dark times would see the theater close and become ravaged by time, vandals and the elements. It is the site of many Detroit firsts, including the city’s first rock ‘n’ roll show, and its first international film festival. It was one of many grand monuments built in a time when the city of Detroit was reaching the zenith of its importance and wealth, and like many of those monuments, its grandeur began to fade as the city’s wealth and prestige diminished. It began its existence in the early 1920s as Detroit’s first true movie palace, the Capitol Theatre. The story of the Detroit Opera House is punctuated by a series of grand openings, closings and re-openings.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |