A few weeks ago, I finally took my kids to Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. If you know, you know. If you don’t: It’s a big, dark, loud arcade/museum crowded with antique and modern coin-operated games, boardwalk fortune tellers, nickelodeons, dioramas, automata, posters, banners, model airplanes, Chuck E. Cheese animatronics, etc., much of it collected by the late Marvin Yagoda, who was just a guy who worked at his family’s drugstore for most of his life and loved this stuff. It’s nuts.
My childhood memories of Marvin’s are potent. I find myself saying: It’s one of my favorite places in the world, I went there all the time when I was a kid. But did I really? Or is Marvin’s so thick with such specific sensory information that all of its thousands of details were flung into my memory with extra force? Have I even been there 10 times? Before this trip with my kids, the last time I’d been there was in 2010, and I have the blurry my-first-iPhone photos (and a blog post!) to prove it. And yet when I went to the magician’s cemetery last fall, I couldn’t stop thinking about Marvin’s, because I could bring to mind, without browsing my phone, several antique magic posters I knew I’d seen there.1 This is not how my memory usually works! I can’t remember what books I read last year. I’ve started to forget the names of people I dated in college. I can visualize specific M&Ms on the floor at Marvin’s.
Until recently I was waiting for the “right time” to take my kids to Marvin’s, an experience that could either be magical for all of us or else overstimulating, frustrating and potentially nightmare-inducing. (I still don’t want to mess with the game where it looks like you’re gonna get your hand chopped off.)
Then came the unthinkable — yet somehow predictable — news that Marvin’s might lose its lease. It’s been in the same tucked away side-building in a strip mall since 1990. Now the strip mall is failing and its owners want to tear it down and build a new strip mall?2 and, yes, put in a Meijer. No more time for preciousness, no more doubt: I took my kids nigh-on immediately. They are 5 and 3.
They fucking loved it.
I forgot that there are rides. If I’d waited too much longer my son would have been too old for the rides. Don’t sleep on the rides! There’s an indoor carousel and mini-Ferris Wheel, a Sante Fe Railway train car, a Chuck E. Cheese “photo ride” that snaps your pic with the creepy mouse. Also: many ways for a kid to win a little rubber ball or a toy in an egg. My daughter was a surprise savant at a candy claw machine. I gave them each a little paper cup with $10 in quarters, which to them was basically infinite quarters. Forget your inflationary troubles at Marvin’s! Most of the games still cost 25 cents.
And if I’d noticed it before, I’d forgotten, but there’s this great sign near the front door. It reads: Nothing nicer anywhere. God, do I agree.
That same weekend, I started writing about the National Theatre — one of those stories, rare for me these days, that “wrote itself.” Finding the photos took longer than cranking out the first draft. And while I was doing that, I kept turning up these pictures of another, unrelated theater in Detroit, a theater called the Princess.
There’s not much out there about the Princess. It was at 98 Woodward Ave., between Congress and Larned, where the Ally building is now. It opened in 1907 and was the first theater in Detroit that exclusively showed motion pictures, according to a 1916 article in the trade magazine “Moving Picture World.” By the time that story was published, the Princess was also the last of Detroit’s first three motion picture houses still showing movies. It was operated by the Princess Amusement Corporation, headquarters uncertain, several similarly named companies blipping in and out of existence around this time. There were a few other Princess Theatres around the country. Detroit’s sat 316 people and showed Universal pictures. When did it close? When was the building torn down? All the internet seems to know about it is everything I’ve just written, plus this photo from the Library of Congress:
What an incredible photograph. There’s so much to see. How skinny the building is! The decorative festoons. The too-many-words in too-big letters. The way the box office almost looks spotlit. The shops on either side! The mystery of the unseeable blade sign! The way your hands can imagine what it would feel like to push open one of the doors, a leatherette sort of texture, and swing into the close darkness of the cinema.
And then — and I love that you can’t see them at first, because it’s rewarding when they come into focus — the letters above the entryway that spell out: Nothing Nicer Anywhere.
Easier to see in this postcard from the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. Comfort! Elegance!
I thought maybe this was a slogan that was popular at the time, words I’d find above the box offices of other theaters, maybe even specifically Princess Theatres, in other similar photographs from this point in time. But searching for this phrase only turns up the same couple of images of this Princess, plus the website of an artist who adopted the slogan from a photo she saw on Shorpy. You guessed it: It’s the photo we’re already talking about.
Last week, the Farmington Hills City Council OK’d redevelopment plans for the strip mall, thus apparently sealing the fate of Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. The museum’s owner, Marvin’s son Jeremy, has emphasized that the museum will be moving, not closing, and thousands of people (Mitch Albom, even!) have effused their moral, financial, and possible real estate support in recent weeks. Maybe it will be bigger and better.
In the middle of this news cycle, I sheepishly messaged the museum’s Facebook page to ask about the Nothing Nicer Anywhere sign. I wasn’t expecting a quick reply. But I got one a few hours later, offering a simple explanation: “My dad saw a sign like that somewhere and had it made.”
Based on my (brief) research, it seems pretty likely to me that the sign Marvin saw was the one on the Princess Theatre. I’ve been thinking a lot about the quirky afterlife of this short-lived and otherwise unremarkable movie theater, its perfect catchphrase blowing over a century like a dandelion seed.
The truth is, I’ve been feeling really stuck this month, due to some combination of a chronic pain flare-up, changes in routine, and plain old regrettable February. Last night I went back and read the blog post I wrote about Marvin’s in 2010 and it turns out I pulled this same trick: getting hung up on one artifact there, connecting it to some artifact of Detroit history, trying to conjure the same sense of carousel-spin wonder that both Marvin’s and, I guess, the past stir in me. It’s OK; it still works. I could probably write it over and over again for a lifetime and be happy with that. There’s nothing nicer.
Links & such
If you haven’t been yet, I really recommend a visit to the Cranbrook Art Museum to see “LeRoy Foster: Solo Show” and “Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit” before they close on March 3. The centerpiece of these companion exhibitions is a mural by the Black, queer realist painter LeRoy Foster about the renaissance of Detroit post-1967 that used to hang in the old Cass Tech building. The painting was heroically saved when the building was demolished, then sat in storage for 20 years. It was restored for this show and will be re-installed permanently at the new Cass Tech when it closes, but it’s so great to see it in context with some of Foster’s portraits and beside the monumental paintings by contemporary artists in the companion show. More info about the show here and here’s a great story from Michigan Public about Foster’s life and work.
A housekeeping note
Some folks have asked me how to comment on a post. The truth is, I don’t have comments turned on! I don’t really have the time or energy to monitor or moderate comments. But you are always welcome to just reply to this email! I love to be in touch! Maybe I’ll put a little mailbag together from time to time when responses warrant.
Marvin was also a magician, which tracks, per his obituary in the Jewish News; a broken wand ceremony was performed at his funeral.
“I remember when this was all Gap stores!” OK, but seriously, ask me about what it was like to work in this strip mall in the year 2001, including on the night of 9/11, and later that year during an anthrax scare. Oral historians of notable Midwestern strip malls, … be in touch.