DETROIT — A giant pipe organ that underscored the drama and humor of silent movies with live music at Detroit’s ornate Hollywood Theatre nearly a century ago has been dismantled into thousands of pieces and hidden away.
Built in 1927, the Barton opus has been stored away in a garage, attic and basement in suburban Detroit for four decades. But this enormous musical curiosity is being lovingly restored in Indianapolis and will eventually be trucked in pieces to the Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York, where it will be reassembled and rehoused in a theater designed especially for it.
Carlton Smith, who has been restoring the organ since 2020, says that in its heyday, the Barton Opus was capable of recreating the sounds of a number of instruments, including strings, flute and tuba. It also incorporated real percussion instruments like a piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, cymbals and drums, Smith says, and could create sound effects including steamboat and bird whistles.
For many moviegoers, the organs – and the organists – were the stars.
“One guy could do it all,” Smith says. “In the bigger cities, they would literally fill thousands of theater seats several times a day. They were showing live shows along with the movies. It was a big production.”
According to the Detroit Theatre Organ Society, the Barton Opus at the Hollywood Theatre had good acoustics. According to organist and organ technician John Lotter, Detroit’s theaters at the time, which was the golden age of the city’s auto industry, were as attractive as any theater in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“We were such an affluent market for moviegoers that theater owners built these luxurious places,” says Lotter. “There were no ordinary movie theaters at that time.”
Lotter, who is also director of the Detroit Theatre Organ Society and president of the Motor City Theatre Organ Society, says the Hollywood Theatre Organ was one of the largest organs ever built by the Bartola Musical Instrument Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Only three were sold, while the other two were installed in the Highland Theatre in Chicago and the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois.
“Of these three, this is the last one remaining that has not been altered,” Smith says.
In the decades that followed, televisions began appearing in living rooms across the country and silent movie houses fell out of fashion. The Hollywood Theatre closed in the 1950s, its fixtures sold off and its famous Barton opus on the verge of being lost to history.
But in the early 1960s, Lotter’s friend Henry Przybylski purchased it at auction for about $3,500. Przybylski worked hard to remove the huge instrument before the theater, parts of which stood two stories high, was demolished.
“He gathered all his friends in the winter of 1963,” says Lotter. “The building had no electricity or heat. They brought in Coleman lanterns and block and tackle.”
They took the organ apart, and Przybylski — an engineer and organ lover — shipped the thousands of pieces back to his home in Dearborn Heights, where it sat unassembled for nearly 40 years.
“He never heard or played that instrument,” says Lotter. “He spent most of his life owning that thing. He would open the garage door and there would be that console. He said it was the best.”
Przybylski died in 2000, but that didn’t put an end to the journey of the Barton opus.
Steven Ball, a professional organist who teaches in the University of Michigan’s Organ Department, asked Przybylski’s widow in 2003 if the pipe organ was for sale.
“I raised all the cash I could,” Ball says.
But he also put the pipe organ straight into storage.
“The whole point of this whole project was to preserve the organ until I could find an institution to restore it,” Ball says, adding that he had always hoped the Barton Opus would become a theater just like its original location.
In 2019, Rochester Institute of Technology President David C. Munson contacted Ball, whom he had known from when Munson served as Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan years earlier.
“I approached Steven and asked where we could buy the best theater organ,” Munson says. “Steven said, ‘Well, it’ll be mine.’”
Ball will donate his Barton Opus to the school, where it will be the centerpiece of the new performing arts center. The theater where the organ will be housed is expected to open in January 2026. According to Smith, restoration work on the organ is a little more than two-thirds complete.
“The theater is designed to accommodate exactly this organ,” says Munson, adding that architect Michael Maltzan “designed the pipe chambers to the same dimensions as the Hollywood Theater. We have all the original plans for that organ and how the pipes were laid out.”
Munson says the actual cost of the work has yet to be determined, adding, “We’re investing in it, but I think the results will be significant.”
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