DETROIT– A massive pipe organ that emphasized the drama and comedy of silent films with live music at Detroit’s ornate Hollywood Theater nearly a century ago has been dismantled into thousands of pieces and put into storage.
The Barton Opus, built in 1927, spent four decades stored in a garage, attic and basement in suburban Detroit. But the immense musical curiosity is being lovingly restored in Indianapolis and will eventually be transported, piece by piece, to the Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York to be reassembled and rehoused in a theater designed specifically 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 the piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, cymbals and drums and could produce sound effects including steamboats and bird whistles, Smith says.
For many spectators, the organs – and the organists – were the stars.
“One guy could do it all,” says Smith. “In big cities, they filled literally thousands of theater seats several times during the day. They were showing live shows along with the movies. It was a great production.”
The Barton Opus had good acoustics at the Hollywood Theatre, according to the Detroit Theater Organ Society. Detroit’s theaters at that time, the golden age of the city’s automobile 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,” says Lauter. “There were no Plain Jane cinemas back then.”
Lauter, who is also director of the Detroit Theater Organ Society and president of the Motor City Theater Organ Society, says the Hollywood Theater’s 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 at the Highland Theater in Chicago and the Rialto Square Theater in Joliet, Illinois.
Of the three, this is “the last one that hasn’t been changed,” says Smith.
In the decades that followed, televisions began appearing in living rooms across the country and silent movie theaters fell into disuse. The Hollywood Theater closed in the 1950s, its equipment was sold, and its famous Barton Opus was about to be lost to history.
But in the early 1960s, Lauter’s friend Henry Przybylski bought it at auction for about $3,500. Przybylski struggled to remove the enormous instrument, whose parts were two stories tall, before the theater was demolished.
“He got all his friends together in the winter of 1963,” Lauter says. “The building had no electricity or heating. They came with Coleman flashlights and blocked and attacked.”
They dismantled the organ, and Przybylski — an engineer and organ fan — transported the thousands of parts back to his home in Dearborn Heights, where it would remain, disassembled, for about 40 years.
“He never heard or played that instrument,” says Lauter. “He lived most of his life owning that thing. He would close the garage door and there would be that console. He made it clear he was the best there was.”
Przybylski died in 2000, but that didn’t mean the end of the Barton Opus odyssey.
Steven Ball, a professional organist who taught in the Organ Department at the University of Michigan, asked Przbylski’s widow in 2003 if the pipe organ was for sale.
“I got all the money I could,” Ball says.
But he also kept the pipe organ directly.
“This whole project was about keeping this organ safe, until I could find an institution to restore it to what it was,” says Ball, adding that he always hoped the Barton Opus would end up in a theater that mirrored 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 dean of engineering at the University of Michigan years earlier.
“I contacted Steven and asked where we could get the best theater organ,” Munson said. “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 opening of the theater that will house the organ is scheduled for January 2026. Restoration work on the organ is just over two-thirds complete, according to Smith.
“The theater was designed to accommodate this exact organ,” says Munson, adding that architect Michael Maltzan “designed the pipe chambers to be the same size as the Hollywood Theatre. the pipes were laid out.”
The exact cost of the work has not yet been determined, Munson says, adding, “It’s an investment we’re making, but I think the results will be remarkable.”
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