There's a Building in Michigan Whose Whole Job Is to Be Wonderfully Weird

In a strip mall in the Detroit suburbs, behind an unassuming pink awning, sits one of the strangest and most beloved collections in America. It’s called Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. It’s part arcade, part museum, part fever dream. Thousands of coin-operated machines, antique automatons, fortune-tellers, and mechanical oddities cram the place wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. Almost all of them still work — and they’re waiting for your quarters.

The man behind it was Marvin Yagoda, a Detroit-area pharmacist. He started collecting vintage arcade machines and animatronics in the 1960s as a hobby. The hobby, in his own words, “went out of control.” He amassed so many machines that his wife suggested he put some in a local shopping center’s food court. By the 1980s it had grown into a full-blown museum of mechanical marvels. Marvin packed in everything. There’s a fortune-teller machine like the one from the movie Big, antique pinball, and a “tic-tac-toe chicken.” One coin-op contraption is built to look like a food inspector that endlessly, comically vomits. It’s the kind of place you can visit five times and still spot something you missed.

The genius of Marvin’s is that admission is free. Marvin made his money on the quarters people fed into the machines. He wanted everyone to be able to wander in and gawk. Marvin passed away in 2017, but his family has kept the collection going.

One important note: as of June 2026, Marvin’s is still mid-move to West Bloomfield. Plumbing and payment-system issues have held up the planned reopening. So a place that runs entirely on quarters can’t, for now, take yours. Pin down that the doors are actually open before you point the car toward it.