History

By the mid-1930s, American cities had developed a distinct neighborhood theater typology: the single-screen neighborhood movie house, smaller and more domestically scaled than the downtown movie palace, serving the residential blocks within walking distance. These theaters were the primary entertainment venue for working-class and middle-class city neighborhoods before television, and their architecture expressed the Art Deco and Art Moderne aesthetic of the 1930s in a commercial vernacular that balanced fashionable design with construction economy.

Saul and Hattie Sloan commissioned Charles Easton Allen to design a theater on East Warren Avenue in the Morningside neighborhood, a predominantly residential area on Detroit’s east side. The theater opened on August 22, 1935, equipped with the modern amenities expected of a quality neighborhood house: current sound projection equipment, comfortable seating, and air conditioning — the last still a luxury in 1935. Its first lease was to George Washington Trendle, the Detroit theater magnate later famous as the creator of the Lone Ranger radio program. For forty years the Alger served its neighborhood as a standard movie house. Socioeconomic changes in the surrounding area reduced attendance from the 1970s onward; the theater closed in 1981. A brief reopening as a B-movie house in 1984 failed within a year. In 1986, neighborhood residents and businesses organized the Friends of the Alger Theater to purchase and preserve the building, which has since been maintained as a community cinema and cultural venue in the Morningside neighborhood.