The steel-framed structure is of reinforced-concrete construction. The building, at 1509 Broadway, was designed by Detroit architect Robert Finn and built by the Otto Misch Co. 8, 1926, the 14-story building once housed the famous Wurlitzer Co., which made pianos, organs, jukeboxes, radios and instruments. The Detroit Times praised the Wurlitzer Building in December 1926 as “a structure complete in every detail and entirely worthy of the art to which it will be devoted.”ĭesigned in Renaissance Revival style and opened Dec.
As the company gained steam and the city grew into a thriving metropolis, Wurlitzer built a skyscraper just south of Grand Circus Park to house its thriving business.
The Wurlitzer store in Detroit was founded in a modest location that carried a small line of pianos and musical instruments. They were billed as “the world’s largest music house.” Detroit’s music house It also was under their leadership that the company expanded its presence in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, building towers to house administrative operations and sales. Under their sons, the Wurlitzer company got into the jukebox business in the 1930s, dominating the market. 14, 1914, in Cincinnati, leaving the business to his three sons. The organs had such “brilliancy and life-like power as literally to transport the listener into fields of imagery, hold vast audiences spellbound, and make people who never sing when alone, join in chorus with others,” the Detroit Times wrote in December 1926.
When the Wurlitzer was installed in the Fox Theatre in 1928, its owners boasted that the organ was so powerful, it had to be muted to keep from cracking the marble columns, the Free Press reported in September 1963.
“You couldn’t build a movie palace – in those days called ‘cathedrals of the cinema’ – without boasting of a bigger and better pipe organ than any theater ever had.” “There isn’t an old movie fan alive who doesn’t remember when that ‘mighty Wurlitzer organ’ wasn’t as important to the bill as the featured picture,” the Free Press wrote in September 1963. The Capitol Theatre, now the Detroit Opera House, also had a Wurlitzer, as did certain churches, such as Sts. Wurlitzer became renowned for these organs, providing them for the Fox, Fisher, Michigan and State (now the Fillmore) theaters in Detroit. The organs could produce a variety of sounds, from banjos to harps to orchestra bells to train whistles and galloping horses. With the rise of silent films in the early 1900s, Wurlitzer began pumping out huge theater organs that provided the movie soundtracks, as well as entertained the patrons before the show. “It is quite a feat, when one stops to think about it, that cultural Europe turns to the United States to furnish the best of its organs and other musical instruments,” Rudolph Wurlitzer once crowed to reporters. Its musical instruments were widely regarded as being high quality and were popular stateside as well as in Europe. His company would quickly become the biggest supplier of instruments in the country and soon started manufacturing pianos sold through a chain of retail stores. in 1856, though his family had started dealing in musical instruments in 1659 in Europe. Rudolph Wurlitzer emigrated to the United States in 1853 and settled in Cincinnati. In the decades before it sat silently decaying, the Wurlitzer Building was filled with music, home to one of the largest music stores in the world – and helped thrill thousands of theater-going Detroiters.