Famous people's places / Detroit – Downtown
Shubert-Lafayette Theatre
Closed – archive entry · 1964
A vaudeville-turned-Broadway house on West Lafayette that Joseph Z. Nederlander helped run in its final decades, demolished in 1964 for a parking structure.
01 / The story of this place
Make time for these
The theater opened in 1914 as the Orpheum, a vaudeville house on West Lafayette Boulevard at Shelby Street, with an Italianate interior that included murals by the illustrator Maxfield Parrish. It was renamed the Shubert-Lafayette in 1925 when the Shubert theatrical organization took it over to run touring Broadway shows, and the name shifted back and forth between the Lafayette and the Shubert-Lafayette over the following decades. Joseph Z. Nederlander, whose family had started out running Detroit theaters before building a nationwide chain, worked with the Shuberts to operate the house from the 1940s into the early 1960s, bringing touring productions to downtown Detroit audiences. Changing tastes in entertainment and downtown Detroit's shifting foot traffic caught up with the theater, and it closed and was torn down in June 1964. A parking structure serving the nearby Dime Building now occupies the site, with no trace of the old Orpheum-turned-Shubert left standing.
- Opened in 1914 as the Orpheum vaudeville house
- Interior featured murals by illustrator Maxfield Parrish
- Renamed Shubert-Lafayette in 1925 under the Shubert organization
- Joseph Z. Nederlander helped run it from the 1940s to the 1960s
- Demolished in June 1964; now a parking structure
Famous Detroiters
Famous people tied to this place 1
Lexicon entries for the people who lived, worked, performed or liked to spend time here.
- Joseph Z. Nederlander 1927–2021 · theater owner and operator, producer
Worked here
The Lafayette Boulevard theater the Nederlanders ran with the Shuberts from 1940; demolished in 1964.
Sources & fact check · Checked: 2026-09-25
An independently written bilingual guide. This collection is not an attendance-based ranking.
03 / Events
Events at this place
Published events automatically linked from our event guide. Times are local to the venue.
We have no published upcoming events linked to this place yet. That does not mean the venue has no events; check its official calendar too.
Source and former website ↗