Detroit's Fox Theatre: A 3,000-Pound Rug, 24-Hour War Shifts and Kung Fu

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Film pioneer William Fox commissioned Detroit's Fox Theatre in 1928 from architect C. Howard Crane, building a movie palace of more than 5,000 seats inside a 10-story office tower faced in cream terracotta. Crane mixed Burmese, Chinese, Indian and Persian motifs: vermilion scagliola columns in a lobby 87 feet deep and six floors high, plaster lions with jeweled eyes, a 108-foot auditorium with a 70-foot proscenium topped by an elephant's head, and a 2,000-pound chandelier of 1,200 glass pieces. A 13-rank Moller organ played the lobby and a 36-rank Wurlitzer with about 2,700 pipes filled the hall. Eve Leo, who hated bare floors, had a 3,000-pound wool rug covering 3,600 square feet laid in the lobby.

During World War II the Fox ran 24 hours a day for defense plant shifts, charging 35 cents and grossing about $75,000 a week as workers slept in the seats. As downtown declined, neighbors like the Michigan Theater closed, the Fox shut its mezzanine and gallery balcony, and it survived on blaxploitation and martial arts films. In 1988 Mike and Marian Ilitch of Little Caesars bought it, moved their headquarters into the tower and spent $12 million restoring it with crews cleaning plaster by cotton swab. Pulling up the old rug revealed a perfectly preserved terrazzo floor with brass inlays, and the theatre reopened in November 1988 with Joe Williams and the Count Basie Orchestra.

• The Fox is the largest surviving 1920s movie palace and the largest of the original Fox theatres.
• The 36-rank Wurlitzer's pipes sit behind tinted mirrors and grills in the auditorium walls.
• The restoration anchored Foxtown, followed by Comerica Park in 2000, Ford Field and Little Caesars Arena.
• The theatre appeared in the Eminem Super Bowl commercial driving through Detroit.
• It hosted Democratic presidential primary debates in July 2019.