Wuerth Theater

According to an August 5, 2010, article in the Ypsilanti Courier, the Wuerth Theatre closed in 1959, and the auditorium was subsequently demolished to make room for a parking lot. The surviving street-front commercial building dates from 1896. The theater, originally the Ypsilanti Opera House, was built that year to replace an earlier opera house on the same site which had been utterly destroyed by a tornado in 1893.

This theater was apparently known as the Forum only briefly. The April 2, 1918, issue of the Michigan Film Review ran an item saying that Mr. A.W. Rennie was now operating the Ypsilanti Opera House as a full-time movie theater. The January 15 issue of the same publication had said that the Opera House was showing movies two or three nights a week, and presenting stage productions the rest of the time. Then the April 9, 1918, issue of the Review mentioned Mr. Rennie as manager of the Forum Theatre in Ypsilanti. I haven’t found the name Forum used prior to that date, nor the name Opera House used after that date.