Reviving Hollywood glamor of the silent movie era, experts piece together a century-old pipe organ

DETROIT – A massive pipe organ that underscored the drama and comedy of silent movies with live music in Detroit’s ornate Hollywood Theatre nearly a century ago was dismantled into thousands of pieces and stashed away.

The Barton Opus, built in 1927, spent four decades stored in a garage, attic and basement in suburban Detroit. But the towering musical curiosity is being lovingly restored in Indianapolis and eventually will be trucked, piece by piece, to the Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York, to be reassembled and rehoused in a theater specifically designed to accommodate it.

In its heyday, the Barton Opus was able to recreate the sounds of many instruments, including strings, flutes and tubas, says Carlton Smith, who has been restoring the organ since 2020. It also contained real percussion instruments such as a piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, cymbals and drums and could produce sound effects including steamboat and bird whistles, Smith says.

For many moviegoers, the organs — and the organists — were the stars.

“One guy could do it all,” Smith says. “In the big cities, they were literally filling the theaters’ thousands of seats multiple times during the day. They were showing live shows along with the films. It was a big production.”

The Barton Opus enjoyed good acoustics at the Hollywood Theatre, according to the Detroit Theatre Organ Society. The theaters in Detroit at that time, the golden age of the city’s auto industry, were as glamorous as any in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to John Lauter, an organist and organ technician.

“We were such a rich market for moviegoers that the theater owners built these palatial places,” Lauter says. “There were no plain Jane movie houses back then.”

Lauter, who also is the 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 made by the Bartola Musical Instrument Co. 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 the three, this is “the last one left that hasn’t been altered,” Smith says.

In the decades that followed, televisions began to appear in living rooms across the nation and silent movie houses fell out of favor. The Hollywood Theatre closed in the 1950s, its fixtures were sold and its famed Barton Opus was on the verge of being lost to history.

But in the early 1960s, Lauter’s friend, Henry Przybylski, bought it at auction for about $3,500. Przybylski scrambled to remove the massive instrument, parts of which stood two stories tall, before the theater was demolished.

“He pulled together all of his friends in the winter of 1963,” Lauter says. “The building had no electricity and no heat. They came in with Coleman lanterns and block and tackle.”

They took the organ apart and Przybylski — an engineer and organ buff — transported the thousands of pieces back to his Dearborn Heights home where it would remain, unassembled, for about 40 years.

“He never heard or played that instrument ever,” Lauter says. “He lived a majority of his life owning that thing. He’d roll up the garage door and there would be that console in there. He made it known it was the very best there was.”

Przybylski died in 2000, but that did not spell the end of the Barton Opus’ odyssey.

Steven Ball, a professional organist who taught at the University of Michigan’s Organ Department, asked Przbylski’s widow in 2003 if the pipe organ was for sale.

“I came up with every last bit of cash I could,” Ball says.

But he also put the pipe organ straight into storage.

“This whole project was to see this organ through to safety, until I could find an institution to restore it to what it was,” Ball says, adding that he had always hoped the Barton Opus would end up in a theater mirroring its original home.

In 2019, Rochester Institute of Technology President David C. Munson reached out to Ball, whom he had known since Munson served as the dean of engineering at the University of Michigan years earlier.

“I contacted Steven and asked where we could acquire the best theater organ,” Munson says. “Steven said, ‘Well that would 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 that will house the organ is expected to open by January 2026. Restoration work on the organ is a little over two-thirds complete, according to Smith.

“The theater is designed to accommodate exactly this organ,” Munson says, adding that the architect, Michael Maltzan, “designed the pipe chambers to have the same dimension as in the Hollywood Theatre. We have all the original plans for that organ and how the pipes were laid out.”

The exact cost of the work hasn’t yet been determined, Munson says, adding, “It’s an investment we’re making, but I think the results are going to be remarkable.”