The Temple Theatre: a Shriners' movie palace with its 1927 organ still playing

A pipe organ from 1927 still warms up the crowd before shows at the Temple Theatre on North Washington Avenue. It’s a Barton — three keyboards, eleven ranks of pipes hidden in the walls — and volunteer organists play it for tours and most events, the same instrument that was here when the doors first opened. That’s rare. Most theatre organs were ripped out and sold off decades ago.

The Temple opened in July 1927, built by Saginaw’s Elf Khurafeh Shriners as a vaudeville and silent-movie palace. When the lights went up, it was billed as the showplace of northeastern Michigan, the kind of room with painted plaster, gilt trim, and a balcony that seemed to float. The W. S. Butterfield Theatres chain ran it for about fifty years, sending vaudeville acts, films, and orchestras across its stage.

Then it nearly slipped away, the way these grand old houses do. By the start of this century the building was carrying water damage and faded paint. A Saginaw doctor, Samuel Shaheen, bought it in 2002 and poured money into a restoration, scrubbing off the damage and bringing back the original decorative painting. The seating got reset to about 1,750 in the process, with more legroom than the 1920s ever bothered to give anyone.

Today the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra and the Saginaw Choral Society call it home, and the screen that drops for movies is the largest indoor screen in Michigan north of Detroit. Come early for a show and you might catch the Barton, its pipes breathing through the walls of a room built by men in fezzes almost a hundred years ago, still doing exactly the job it was made for.