DETROIT– Nearly a century ago, a massive pipe organ in Detroit’s ornate Hollywood Theatre was used to accent the drama and comedy of silent films with live music. It was dismantled into thousands of pieces and stored away.
The Barton Opus, built in 1927, has spent four decades in storage in a garage, attic and basement in a Detroit suburb. But the towering musical curiosity is being lovingly restored in Indianapolis and will eventually be transported, piece by piece, to the Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York, to be reassembled and housed in a theater specially designed to house it.
In its heyday, the Barton Opus could recreate the sounds of many instruments, including strings, flutes and tubas, says Carlton Smith, who has been restoring the organ since 2020. It also featured real percussion instruments such as a piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, cymbals and drums, and could produce sound effects such as steamboat and bird whistles, Smith says.
For many moviegoers, the organs – and the organists – were the stars.
“One person could do it all,” Smith says. “In the big cities, they literally filled the theaters with thousands of seats multiple times a day. They showed live shows alongside the movies. It was a big production.”
According to the Barton Opus, the Hollywood Theatre had good acoustics. Detroit Theater Organ Society. Detroit’s theaters, in that era, the golden age of the city’s auto industry, were as glamorous as those in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, said John Lauter, an organist and organ technician.
“We were such a wealthy market for moviegoers that theater owners built these palatial places,” Lauter says. “There were no typical movie theaters back then.”
Lauter, who is also a director of the Detroit Theatre Organ Society and president of the Motor City Theatre Organ Society, said the Hollywood Theatre organ was one of the largest made by the Bartola Musical Instrument Co. of Oshkosh, Wis. Only three were sold, with the other two installed at the Highland Theatre in Chicago and the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Ill.
Of the three, this is “the last one that hasn’t been modified yet,” Smith says.
In the decades that followed, televisions began to appear in living rooms across the country and silent movie houses fell out of favor. The Hollywood Theatre closed in the 1950s, its fixtures sold off and the famous Barton Opus was in danger of being lost to history.
But in the early 1960s, Lauter’s friend Henry Przybylski bought it at auction for about $3,500. Przybylski rushed to remove the massive instrument, parts of which were two stories high, before the theater was demolished.
“He gathered all his friends in the winter of 1963,” Lauter says. “The building had no electricity and no heat. They came in with Coleman lanterns and block and tackle.”
They took the organ apart and Przybylski, an engineer and organ enthusiast, transported the thousands of parts back to his home in Dearborn Heights, where it would sit unassembled for about 40 years.
“He never heard that instrument or played it,” Lauter says. “He owned that thing most of his life. He rolled up the garage door and there was that console. He told me it was the best thing there was.”
Przybylski died in 2000, but that did not mean the end of the odyssey of the Barton Opus.
Steven Ball, a professional organist who taught in the University of Michigan Organ Department, asked Przbylski’s widow in 2003 if the pipe organ was for sale.
“I collected every last bit of money I could find,” Ball says.
But he also immediately put the pipe organ into storage.
“This whole project was to keep this organ safe until I could find an institution that could restore it to what it was,” Ball said, adding that he had always hoped the Barton Opus would end up in a theater that reflected its original home.
In 2019, David C. Munson, president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, contacted Ball, whom he had known since Munson was dean of the engineering department at the University of Michigan years earlier.
“I contacted Steven and asked where we could get the best theater organ,” Munson says. “Steven said, ‘Well, that would be mine.’”
Ball will donate his Barton Opus to the school, where it will be the centerpiece of the new performing arts center. The theater that will house the organ is expected to open in January 2026. Restoration work on the organ is just over two-thirds complete, Smith said.
“The theater was designed to house this organ exactly,” Munson says, adding that the architect, Michael Maltzan, “designed the pipe chambers to be the same dimensions as the Hollywood Theater. We have all the original plans for that organ and how the pipes are laid out.”
The exact cost of the work has not yet been determined, Munson said, adding: “It’s an investment we’re making, but I think the results will be remarkable.”