Famous people's places / Detroit – Black Bottom
Warfield Theatre
Closed – archive entry · 1959
A Hastings Street movie and stage theater in Detroit's Black Bottom, rebuilt in the 1930s for Black audiences, that lost its home when the Chrysler Freeway plowed through the neighborhood.
01 / The story of this place
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Albert Kahn designed the original Warfield Theatre, which opened on Hastings Street in 1914, the main commercial and entertainment spine of Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood. That first small theater was torn down in 1936 and replaced with a larger Art Moderne building that booked movies and live stage shows for Black Detroiters at a time when many downtown theaters kept them out. The Warfield's stage hosted amateur talent nights, and one of the acts that broke out from a Hastings Street contest there was singer Joe Weaver's group the Bluenotes, who went on to record doo-wop and R&B sides for Detroit labels in the early 1950s. The theater closed in 1949, reopened for a few more years in the early-to-mid 1950s, and shut for good in 1959 when the State of Michigan condemned the site to build the Chrysler Freeway, I-75, which erased most of Hastings Street along with it. Nothing of the building survives; the freeway runs through the site today.
- Designed by Albert Kahn, opened 1914 on Hastings Street
- Rebuilt in the 1930s as an Art Moderne theater for Black audiences
- Joe Weaver's Bluenotes broke out from a talent contest here in the early 1950s
- Closed for good in 1959, demolished for the Chrysler Freeway (I-75)
Famous Detroiters
Famous people tied to this place 1
Lexicon entries for the people who lived, worked, performed or liked to spend time here.
- Joe Weaver 1934–2006 · blues and R&B pianist, singer, bandleader
Performed here
Hastings Street movie and stage theater whose talent contests the Bluenotes won; lost with the street to the freeway.
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 ↗