Detroit's Music Hall
Near Detroit, Michigan
The Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts opened in nineteen twenty-eight as the Wilson Theatre, built by real-estate heiress Matilda Dodge Wilson as a gift to Detroit's cultural life. The beaux-arts house seats nearly seventeen hundred and originally hosted touring Broadway productions and opera. After years of varied use, including a stint as a Cinerama movie house, a nonprofit coalition saved it in the nineteen seventies and rechristened it Music Hall.
Today it anchors Detroit's theater district and hosts a wide range of jazz, dance, and world music programming, and was the home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from nineteen forty-six to nineteen fifty-six. It stands as one of the last surviving neighborhood-scale performance halls from the city's Roaring Twenties building boom.
