Vanity Ballroom
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The Vanity Ballroom was built in 1929 on Detroit’s northeast side at Newport and Jefferson and opened shortly after the stock market crashed. Despite the Depression, the Vanity was one of the most popular dance venues in town and a place generations of Detroiters went to hear live performances by Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Louis Prima, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey and Cab Calloway.
Such spectacular venues were popular places for Detroiters to go dance the night away and socialize. In its heyday, the Vanity hosted huge crowds – up to a 1,000 couples. Five nights a week, they danced to the big bands on the 5,000-square-foot maple dance floor where couples “floated” on springs that gave the floor bounce. Patrons - who paid 35 cents to get in - would enter from the first floor and ascend a grand main staircase before entering a ballroom that took them to a different time and place – an ancient Aztec temple.
In designing the Vanity, local architect Charles N. Agree worked an Aztec theme into the Art Deco style. The ballroom is filled with stepped archways, rich earth-toned colors and Aztec symbols, all inspired by pre-Columbian archaeological discoveries of the time. Stylized Indian heads, stepped-brick archways and green-glazed tiles hovered over the dancers’ heads. The outside of the building is faced with orange brick with stone and tile ornamentation.
It had two long bars, an enormous cloakroom, a soda fountain (it did not sell alcohol, instead offering ginger ale and juices for 10 cents), a set of 15-inch speakers from the ceiling, a bandstand and a revolving chandelier with light-reflecting mirrors. Everything from the light fixtures to the curtain behind the stage had a Mayan-inspired design. The latter featured a scene of Chichen Itza temples.
During the 1930s and early ‘40s, the ballroom held theme nights. Wednesdays and Thursdays were “stag nights,” for example. It was run by Edward J. Strata for 30 years,
“In the 1940s and early ‘50s the cost of musicians started going up so that the era of the big bands was over,” he told the Free Press in 1964. “And, too, the taste of young people has changed so drastically that they just want rock ‘n’ roll and won’t support a big ballroom anymore.”
The Vanity is for all intents and purposes the sister of Agree’s Grande Ballroom on the West Side. Like the Grande, the ballroom is on the second floor. Below are five commercial shop spaces. At one time there was a Cunningham’s drug store on the corner, Friedberg’s jewelry store, a Harry Suffrin’s, Burns Shoes and other familiar names. But the deterioration of the Jefferson-Chalmers area knocked them all out in the 1970s.
With the decline of big band, the Vanity ran into problems and closed in 1958. It would later reopen as a concert venue in 1964, opening once a week or so. It was in this incarnation that it would play host to Detroit acts such as the MC5, The Stooges, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes and others that also frequented the Grande. The Velvet Underground was booked to play the Vanity on June 18, 1971, and again Sept. 3. Yet, much like its sister the Grande (which closed in 1972), the Vanity could not survive the decline of garage rock and the decline of Detroit post-1967 riot.
In 1980, twin brothers Ronald and Donald Murphy bought the Vanity. The Claude Neon Tubelite hadn’t worked for years. The balconies under the windows were gone. The five storefronts were vacant. But the ballroom floor and its booths were in surprisingly good shape considering the landmark had been wide-open to vagrants for several years before they bought it. The floor was in reasonable shape but suffering from water damage here and there from a leaky roof. There was no parking lot as the Vanity’s customers came mostly by streetcar during its glory days. The neighborhood was less than desirable and rundown. The ballroom reopened in 1983 but closed the following year.
In late 1986, the Vanity was resurrected in an attempt to become a Caribbean-style entertainment hangout. The ballroom became the home base for Hugh Borde’s Trinidad Tripoli Streel Band on Friday nights. Promoter Arzal Smith said he hoped to branch out into big band music, progressive rock and jazz. On Dec. 12, 1987, a birthday party was held at the Vanity for the MC5's former frontman, Rob Tyner. But the venue continued to struggle as the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood did and soon closed for good.
As testament to the Vanity’s architectural and cultural importance, the ballroom was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Nov. 12, 1982. It is not considered such by the state of Michigan.
Today, the Vanity is hurting yet salvageable. It remains the last intact ballroom of Detroit’s great dance halls of the big band era of the early 1930s and late 1940s. It has largely been spared the ravages of scrappers and vandals, though its walls have crumbled in places, there is water damage in places and some of its paint has lost its luster. Its dance floor is mostly intact other than some buckled floorboards. Still, most of its ornate Aztec features remain. Its towering outdoor marquee, which had become rusted and worn, was removed in the early 1990s. Some of its architectural details were chiseled off and stolen.
It is owned by City Council also-ran Leroy Burgess, a Realtor who runs Burgess Realty of Detroit. He has said he envisions it being resurrected to its past glory, though there are no concrete plans in place.
In May 2008, the Vanity was included on a Preservation Detroit list of 10 endangered Detroit buildings.
