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Historic place

Eagle Theater

15 S Saginaw Street, Pontiac, MI

A Gothic-tiled movie house with vaudeville apartments hidden on its top floor -- now it's a nightclub on South Saginaw.

📅 1927–present🏛️ TheaterRepurposedBuilt 1927
Open on the mapSlide back to 1927
Eagle Theater, 15 S Saginaw Street, Pontiac, MI
Eagle Theater exterior, Pontiac MI · Andrew Jameson, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The story

The story on this corner starts in the 1860s with the Cooper House Hotel. By 1910 that hotel had been refurbished into Pontiac's first movie house -- the Eagle Theater -- and leased to the W.S. Butterfield theater chain. The building you see today is its 1927 replacement, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 16, 1984.

The 1927 Eagle is a three-story masonry building dressed in stucco and red quarry tile, with a heavily Moorish interior: a Moorish-arch proscenium and keyhole arches running between the columns along the side aisles. Like a lot of vaudeville-era houses, it was built to keep its performers close -- the third floor holds nine apartments originally meant to house traveling vaudeville acts, complete with Art Deco bathrooms and compact Pullman kitchens. In the 2000s the building was converted into a nightclub, operating as Elektricity.

What's There Now

A nightclub (Elektricity), in the 1927 building.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The third floor has nine apartments built for traveling vaudeville performers -- with Art Deco bathrooms and Pullman-style kitchens.
The interior leans Moorish: horseshoe arches, a Moorish-arch proscenium, keyhole arches between the columns.
The 1860s Cooper House Hotel that once stood here was reworked into Pontiac's first movie house in 1910 before the present building replaced it in 1927.
It was leased to W.S. Butterfield Theatres, a major early-20th-century Michigan theater operator.
It's been a nightclub (Elektricity) since the 2000s -- not a movie theater for decades.

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Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Flagstar Strand Theatre for the Performing Arts

12 N Saginaw Street · 49 m away
Six movie palaces once lined downtown Pontiac's theater district. The Strand is the one that came back from the dead.

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 · 2.9 km away

Pontiac Silverdome

1200 Featherstone Road · 3.3 km away

Chrysler World Headquarters and Technology Center

1000 Chrysler Drive · 5.2 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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