But he knew it wouldn't be easy selling patrons on the idea - and enormous costs - of rehabbing a disintegrating Detroit theater at a time when some folks perceived the city as being left for dead. More than six decades later, even with plasterwork melting on the walls around him, it was precisely that status as a superior sound chamber that hooked DiChiera. Howard Crane, the city's brilliant early-20th-century theater architect (responsible for the magnificent Fox Theatre, The Fillmore, and Orchestra Hall, among others), the Capitol was designed to produce impeccable acoustics - a necessity in the era before widespread use of speaker systems. " then the theater came up for sale, and when David walked in, he knew right away." The soaked, sagging building had originally opened as the glittering Capitol Theatre: Detroit's first film palace, an elegant entertainment venue with a shallow stage for vaudeville acts, too. "It was a ghost town," said Michigan Opera Theater archivist Tim Lentz when describing how that part of the city felt back then, when Grand Circus Park neighborhood was home to vacant hotels, overgrown grass and hardly any foot traffic. Which is what makes the story of the Opera House, and of the gamble DiChiera made on it, nothing short of remarkable.
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