Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

Detroit's theatre district keeps a 1925 movie palace working nights across from Comerica Park. The Fillmore Detroit at 2115 Woodward Avenue opened on October 29, 1925 as the State Theatre, a Renaissance Revival auditorium by C. Howard Crane - the architect of the neighboring Fox - tucked behind the twelve-story terra-cotta Francis Palms Building. The names cycled with the century: Palms-State from 1937, Palms from 1946, back to the State in 1982 - the year the building made the National Register of Historic Places - a spell as the Clubland dance hall from 1989 to 1991, and finally the Fillmore in 2007 when Live Nation folded the room into its national rebranding, reopening on June 13, 2007 with Fergie. The auditorium holds about 2,900 in its concert configuration - roughly 700 on a terraced cabaret-style main floor and 1,500 in the mezzanine and balcony, which retain their original theatre seating - with a Grand Lobby that remains one of Detroit's great interior spaces. Restoring the original grade and orchestra-level seats would push capacity to 3,000, but the flexible floor is the point: the room works as a general-admission rock hall, a seated theatre and a special-event space without touching the historic upper levels. The venue sits half a block from the Fox in the Grand Circus Park cluster that survived Detroit's downtown hollowing-out, and the State Bar & Grill at street level keeps the building open even when the auditorium is dark. The booking mix runs national tours across rock, hip-hop, metal and comedy, and the Detroit Music Awards have made the room their annual home each April - a fitting assignment for a house that has been in the entertainment business for a full century. A 2018 renovation refreshed the century-old plasterwork and infrastructure, and the marquee still reaches out over Woodward Avenue the way it did when the State opened - one of the last working links to the 1920s theatre row that once ran eight houses deep around Grand Circus Park.