The Old Redford movie palace built to look like a Japanese garden

Sit in the Redford Theatre on Lahser Road and look up. The ceiling is meant to be a night sky. The walls are meant to be a Japanese garden. The whole room pretends you’ve stepped outside into someone’s idea of Kyoto. The Kunsky chain opened it on January 27, 1928, in the Old Redford neighborhood on Detroit’s northwest edge. They pitched it to the suburbs as the city’s most unusual picture house, a place where the décor did half the entertaining before the film even started.

That style has a name: an atmospheric theater, where the ceiling fakes open air and the side walls play at being a courtyard. The Redford leaned hard into a Japanese and Chinese motif, down to the carving on the organ console. During World War II, with anti-Japanese feeling running high, a lot of that décor got painted over or boarded up. It only came back, panel by panel, in restorations decades later.

The real treasure is the organ. A three-manual, ten-rank Barton pipe organ was bolted in for opening night in 1928, and it has barely changed since. When the lights go down before a classic movie, an organist still rises up out of the pit playing it. That’s the way crowds heard music here before talkies took over.

What saved the place was an odd twist of fate. By the 1970s the single-screen movie house was the kind of building that usually meets a wrecking ball. Instead the Motor City Theatre Organ Society — people who loved that Barton — bought it in 1977 to keep the instrument playing. They ended up running the whole theater on volunteer labor. Every usher, projectionist, and ticket-taker works for free. They got it onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, and they’re the reason you can still buy a ticket and watch a black-and-white film under a fake Japanese sky in Detroit.