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[Majestic Theatre, Detroit, Mich.], Motion Picture Theaters

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[Majestic Theatre, Detroit, Mich.], Motion Picture Theaters

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Summary

Picryl description: Public domain image of a historic building in Detroit, Michigan, free to use, no copyright restrictions.

Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the late 19th and the first half of 20th century. The city grew into a hub of commerce and industry spread along Jefferson Avenue, with multiple manufacturing firms taking advantage of the transportation resources afforded by the river and a parallel rail line. Around the start of the 20th century, numerous entrepreneurs in the Detroit area forged into a production of the automobile, capitalizing on the already-existing machine tool and coach-building industry in the city. A thriving trade set the stage for the work of Henry Ford, whose automobile Highland Park Ford Plant in 1910 revolutionized not only automobile manufacturing but virtually created the concept the assembly line and mass production. Historic Gilded Age gave rise to upscale neighborhoods, including the Boston-Edison, Indian Village, and Palmer Woods. In 1930s, with the factories came high-profile labor unions. The labor activism during those years increased the influence of union leaders in the city such as Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters and Walter Reuther of the Autoworkers. The city became the 4th-largest in the nation in 1920, after only New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, with the influence of the booming auto industry. The Great Depression was devastating for Detroit, as sales of automobiles plunged and there were large-scale layoffs at all industrial enterprises. Major Murphy insisted that no one would go hungry, and set up the Mayor's Unemployment Committee that set up relief soup kitchens and potato gardens. From 1942 to 1945, production of commercial automobiles in the city ceased entirely, as its factories were used instead to construct M5 tanks, jeeps, and B-24 bombers for the Allies. By 1945, Detroit was running out of space for new factories. The postwar years 1945-70 brought high levels of prosperity as the automobile industry had its most prosperous quarter-century. Detroit, like many places in the United States, developed racial conflict and discrimination following rapid demographic changes as hundreds of thousands of workers were attracted to the industrial city. In the 1970s and 1980s dozens of violent street gangs gained control of the city's large drug trade, which began with the heroin epidemic of the 1970s when the crimes became increasingly more destructive. Hundreds of vacant homes across the city were set ablaze by arsonists. The number of fires was reduced only by razing thousands of abandoned houses - 5,000 in 1989-90 alone. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city began to experience a revival, much of it centered in Downtown, Midtown, and New Center.

Movie posters and movie theaters.

The height of the silent movie era (the 1910s-1920s) was a period of artistic innovation. Silent film stars had to use their faces to express every emotion — a skill that was lost on most actors when talkies replaced silent movies. Several silent stars including Wallace Beery, Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Greta Garbo, and Janet Gaynor made a successful transition to talkies.

The popularity of “moving pictures” grew in the 1920s. Movie "palaces" sprang up in all major cities. For a quarter or 25 cents, Americans escaped their problems and lose themselves in another era or world. People of all ages attended the movies with far more regularity than today, often going more than once per week. By the end of the decade, weekly movie attendance swelled to 90 million people. The silent movies gave rise to the first generation of movie stars. At the end of the decade, the dominance of silent movies began to wane with the advance of sound technology.

date_range

Date

01/01/1900
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Contributors

Detroit Publishing Co., publisher
place

Location

Detroit (Mich.)42.33139, -83.04583
Google Map of 42.331388888888895, -83.04583333333333
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Source

Library of Congress
copyright

Copyright info

No known restrictions on publication.

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