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Historic place

Flagstar Strand Theatre for the Performing Arts

12 N Saginaw Street, Pontiac, MI

Six movie palaces once lined downtown Pontiac's theater district. The Strand is the one that came back from the dead.

📅 1921–present🏛️ TheaterStill hereBuilt 1921
Open on the mapSlide back to 1921
Flagstar Strand Theatre for the Performing Arts, 12 N Saginaw Street, Pontiac, MI
Flagstar Strand Theatre exterior, 2020 · Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The story

The Strand opened on March 3, 1921, a three-story Renaissance-style house designed by Pontiac architect Leo John Heenan, with close to 1,200 seats across a main floor and two balconies. It got a major facelift in 1949 from C. Howard Crane, the architect behind some of Detroit's grandest theaters. Then television and the suburbs did to the Strand what they did to downtowns everywhere, and it went dark near the end of the 1970s.

The City of Pontiac bought the building in 1986 hoping someone would restore it. A 1987 plan collapsed; a roughly $10 million effort around 2000 stalled out amid cost overruns. The save finally came in late 2013, when developers Kyle and Brent Westberg bought it and assembled about $20 million -- including federal historic tax credits -- for a full rehabilitation. The work wrapped in November 2016, and the doors reopened December 1, 2016.

What's There Now

A working performing-arts venue hosting touring acts, local performances, and arts education.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The restoration absorbed the adjacent three-story building at 8 N Saginaw, giving the complex roughly 45,600 square feet.
The 1949 remodel was by C. Howard Crane, designer of the Fox Theatre and Orchestra Hall in Detroit.
The reborn venue runs three stages -- the main theatre (about 863 seats), the Second @ Strand, and the Marquee stage.
It briefly went by "Campus Art Theatre" starting in 1967 before closing.
The "Flagstar" name comes from a corporate naming-rights sponsor; the original 1921 name was simply the Strand.

Connected places

State Theatre / The Fillmore Detroit

Detroit, MI
C. Howard Crane

MGM Grand Detroit

Detroit, MI
Fox Theatre

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Eagle Theater

15 S Saginaw Street · 49 m away
A Gothic-tiled movie house with vaudeville apartments hidden on its top floor -- now it's a nightclub on South Saginaw.

Pontiac Motor Division

220 E Columbia Avenue · 2.6 km away
The car was named after the city. The city was named after an 18th-century Odawa war leader. For 84 years the place and

Summit Place Mall

315 North Telegraph Road · 3.0 km away

Pontiac Silverdome

1200 Featherstone Road · 3.2 km away

Chrysler World Headquarters and Technology Center

1000 Chrysler Drive · 5.1 km away
One of the largest office buildings in America rose out of 504 acres of Auburn Hills farmland, crowned by a 15-story tow

Aaron Webster's Mills (Auburn settlement)

Auburn Road & Squirrel Road · 5.7 km away
Before the Stellantis towers and the outlet mall, this corner was a dam, a millpond, and one man's bet that the Clinton

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