The Spanish movie palace hiding on Western Avenue

Step inside the big theater on West Western Avenue in downtown Muskegon and you are suddenly somewhere far from Lake Michigan. The ceiling is a Spanish castle courtyard. There are cherubs and griffins, gold detailing, deep red drapes, plasterwork twisting around every arch. It opened on September 16, 1930, as the Michigan Theater, with a screening of a comedy called “Queen High,” and it cost $600,000 to build — a fortune in the first year of the Great Depression.

A local movie man named Paul Schlossman was behind it. Famous around town for his camel-hair coat and the way his hat tipped over one eye, he had already put up three theaters in Muskegon and wanted a real palace this time. He hired the architect C. Howard Crane, the man who designed Detroit’s Fox Theatre, and asked for a Moorish, Spanish-Renaissance fantasy. Muskegon got one of seventeen theaters downtown in that era, and the grandest by a wide margin.

Then the movie business changed and the palace nearly died. The original Spanish colors were painted over in the 1950s, Schlossman’s company folded in the 1960s, and the theater sat boarded up. What rescued it was a will. A local industrialist named A. Harold Frauenthal left a large gift to the Community Foundation with instructions that it be used for the good of the community. In 1976 the foundation bought the whole block, restored Crane’s castle, and renamed it the Frauenthal Center.

Today it hosts concerts and touring shows, but the real reason to go is to sit down and look up at the painted Spanish courtyard ceiling, gold leaf and all, in the middle of a working harbor town. A grocer left a garden; a steel man left a castle full of velvet seats.