![]() ![]() He was right and by building his theater it gave Detroit a new sense of confidence. Read more: Detroit slowly climbs back up on its feet He was not from the city, but knew that it needed anchor institutions to lure people and other businesses. Many thought he was either crazy or delusional. It was among these bleak circumstances that DiChiera decided to found an opera company. A huge city of 140 square miles (370 square kilometers) made for two million with all the accompanying infrastructure was left to rot. Public transport is spotty and the population has fallen from a high of 1.85 million in 1950 to around 670,000 today. The average household income is now just over $26,000. Detroit's decades of dreaming and invention seemed over. After that the city was just a place to work and leave. Deadly riots in 1967 in which 2,500 stores were looted or burned were the final straw. "His legacy can be seen in Detroit's thriving artistic community, which has been a key component of the city's revival."ĭetroit has been on a downward spiral for decades and anyone who could or could afford it left the city for the suburbs. ![]() "He had an unwavering belief in the role not only of opera in the city, but of the arts as a whole," Salvador Salort-Pons, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, told DW. Detroit, still lots of room to grow Image: picture-alliance/Oliver Lang But he was indeed the one who willed one of the city's most important cultural intuitions into being. David DiChiera, who died on Tuesday at his home, only saw opportunity and hardly anyone had such a lasting impact on Detroit like the unlikely music impresario with no business management or finance training. One man didn't see any contraction in brining grand opera to this hopeless area in a declining industrial town. RESTAURANTS BY THE DETROIT OPERA HOUSE MOVIEThree decades ago the neighborhood was run down with hardly any life and what is now the opera house was an old abandoned 3,500-seat movie palace from 1922 with holes in the roof and water in the orchestra pit. Today the Detroit Opera House is a glorious theater and has a $15 million (€12.7 million) yearly budget and sits in the middle of the city's entertainment district with theaters, two new major league sports stadiums, a YMCA and restaurants. And it was an unassuming musicologist who planted the seeds and made a city blossom. But it was opera, another much older sound that saved the city. It's famous for Motown - Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5 - techno and the incomparable Aretha Franklin. Music has always been an integral part of Detroit. ![]()
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