Motor City Theater
8120 E. Nine Mile Road,
Warren,
MI
48089
8120 E. Nine Mile Road,
Warren,
MI
48089
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The Motor City Theater opened in 1939 and closed around 1960. A year later the building was converted into the Motor City Roller Rink. The building was demolished in the 1980’s and replaced by a strip mall.
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Lost Memory
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There are some additional photos on this page:
http://tinyurl.com/64nvtr
The Motor City Theatre stood at 8120 E. Nine Mile Road in Warren, Michigan. My uncle’s list shows the Motor City as a 1939 Johnson Construction Company project.
One of my grandfather Albert S. “Al” Johnson’s slides, taken in August 1948, shows a relatively large entrance with four sets of double doors and an immense vertical Motor City neon sign above the marquee. The 1948 film “Alias a Gentleman” with Wallace Beery, and the 1937 Western “Rustler’s Valley” were showing at the time. A second slide shows the another side of the building (both images uploaded to this website).
In the same building, a drugstore can be seen to the left of the theatre. The visible sides of the building facing the two streets are done up in a nice art moderne or art deco style, and feature the porcelain enamel tiled finish which characterized several of the theaters that Johnson built and remodeled between the 1930s and 1950s.