Famous people's places / Detroit – Downtown
United Artists Theatre
Closed – archive entry · 1971
1928 movie palace whose empty auditorium became the Detroit Symphony's recording studio under Antal Doráti; the auditorium was razed in 2022.
01 / The story of this place
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The United Artists Theatre opened on February 3, 1928, at the base of an 18-story office tower on Bagley Street. It was designed by C. Howard Crane, architect of the Fox Theatre and Orchestra Hall, and for more than four decades it was a first-run movie palace, until it closed in 1971. The empty auditorium then found a second career thanks to its superb acoustics: from the late 1970s into the early 1980s the Detroit Symphony Orchestra used it as its recording studio. Under music director Antal Doráti, the Budapest-born pupil of Bartók and Kodály, the orchestra made a celebrated series of albums here for Decca's London label, many of them early digital recordings, with music by Bartók, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin and Copland. Its 1981 recording of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring won the Grand Prix du Disque. The orchestra finally left because of the cold, a leaking roof and unreliable power. After decades of neglect the auditorium was demolished in the fall of 2022 and its site became parking; the restored tower reopened as the Residences @ 150 Bagley apartments.
- Opened February 3, 1928; designed by C. Howard Crane
- Closed as a movie theater in 1971
- Recording studio of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Antal Doráti
- Doráti's 1981 Rite of Spring, recorded here, won the Grand Prix du Disque
- Auditorium demolished in 2022; the tower is now apartments
Famous Detroiters
Famous people tied to this place 1
Lexicon entries for the people who lived, worked, performed or liked to spend time here.
- Antal Doráti 1906–1988 · conductor, composer
Recorded here
The closed 1928 movie palace whose auditorium served as the orchestra's recording studio for Doráti's Decca sessions, including The Rite of Spring (1981); the auditorium was demolished in 2022 and the office tower became apartments.
Sources & fact check · Checked: 2026-09-25
An independently written bilingual guide. This collection is not an attendance-based ranking.
03 / Events
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