History
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Artifacts
Our Thoughts
The history of Grande Ballroom is gathered from many internet and text sources. Though every attempt is made to present up-to-date and accurate information, we cannot guarantee that inaccuracies will not occur. All rights reserved.
| Grande Ballroom | |||||||||||||||||||
| 8952 Grand River Ave., Detroit |
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| Status: | Closed | AKA: | |||||||||||||||||
| Style(s): | Moorish Deco | Architect : | Charles N. Agree | ||||||||||||||||
| Owner: | Unknown | Architectural Firm: | Unknown | ||||||||||||||||
The building was designed in the Moorish Deco style and contained storefront space on the first floor and on the second a ballroom featuring a floor on springs that gave dancers the feeling of floating. The first retail tenants were W.T. Grant Department Stores, Beverly's and a drugstore. The Grande, on Grand River at Joy, was the place for west side Detroiters to go. Its sister was the Vanity, also designed by Agree, on the city’s east side. Throughout the years the ballroom featured jazz, before switching to ballroom dancing and big bands until the styles lost popularity. During the early 1940s, the Grande featured Inter-Parish Nights on Fridays. Sometime in the 1950s, it became an alcohol-free dance club but struggled and eventually closed and used as a storage facility. This set the table for the man who would immortalize the Grande. Local school teacher Russ Gibb, also a popular radio DJ at the time, saw the empty ballroom as a popularity to fill a void in Detroit’s psychedelic and garage rock scene. In the mid-1960s, he took over the Grande and turned it into a rock mecca, molding it after popular rock halls on the West Coast like the Fillmore and Whiskey A Go-Go. It featured one of the largest strobe lights ever built at the time. It reopened Oct. 7, 1966, and quickly became as well-known for its drug use and stoner counter-culture as it did its music. Gibb, who was paying about $700 a month in rent, started off booking local acts like the MC5, Stooges, SRC, The Frost and Alice Cooper. The following year, however, he started bringing in famous and local rock acts such as Cream, The MC5, The Stooges, Pink Floyd, The Who, Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, the Velvet Underground and more. After the Grande closed as a rock venue in 1972 because of money troubles, it was seldom used and fell into neglect. It was left wide-open to urban explorers, scrappers and vandals, the latter two stripping it of its fixtures and destroying much of its chances of survival. Broken windows allowed rain and snow to transform its plaster ceilings into concrete-like, uneven mounds on the floor. The Spanish-tiled roof has several large holes in it that led to the rotting of the ballroom floor. An entire wall by the men’s bathroom – adjacent to the stage, which is still there - looks as if someone took a sledgehammer to it. Many of its decorative, spiraling pillars have been smashed. The ballroom and building remain closed today. In July 2006, signs appeared on the exterior of the building proclaiming, "Future home of Chapel Hill Ministries." The fate of the building is unknown. |
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