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.

Detroit opera house upcoming events