from “le détroit” · the strait
The Masonic Temple, 100 years old on November 25, 2026, was days from a tax sale in 2013 when an usher's son paid the bill without giving his name.
Jack White came back to the Masonic Temple stage on April 8, 2022, the sold-out first night of his Supply Chain Issues tour, in his hometown. He brought Olivia Jean out for a duet of the White Stripes' Hotel Yorba, introduced her as his girlfriend, presented a ring and asked her to marry him. A small group, including his mother, Jean's father and an officiant, quickly gathered on stage to make the marriage official.
His mother knew the building. The Temple had given her a job as a theater usher when she was struggling to find work.
In April 2013 the building owed Wayne County back taxes for 2010 through 2012, and it was days from a tax sale. A 14-story building that fills a whole block, with more than 1,000 rooms and a theater the Rolling Stones and the Who had played, was headed for the auction block. Then, at the end of May, someone paid the bill without giving a name.
The name came out in June 2013. Jack White, who grew up in Detroit and had played the Temple with the White Stripes, had paid the $142,000 bill, the entire 2010 to 2012 delinquency. "Jack's donation could not have come at a better time and we are eternally grateful to him for it," Roger Sobran, president of the Detroit Masonic Temple Association, said that June. The association renamed its 1,586-seat Cathedral Theater the Jack White Theater the same month, and the room has carried his name since.
The Masonic Temple turns 100 on November 25, 2026. Detroit's Masons dedicated it on Temple Street on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1926, and 87 years later the building owed three years of back taxes and was days from a tax sale. The Masons had moved into a temple on Lafayette Boulevard in 1896 and outgrown it by 1908. A 1920 campaign raised $2.5 million in subscriptions, and on Thanksgiving Day 1920 they turned the first sod on what was then Bagg Street, with a crowd filling Cass Park to watch. They laid the first stone on September 18, 1922.
George D. Mason drew them 1,037 rooms: a 4,404-seat theater, two ballrooms, a chapel, a pool and 16 bowling lanes. The 14-story tower of Indiana limestone rose 210 feet, joined to a 10-story Shrine Club and an auditorium building. The job took 3.85 million bricks and 16 million pounds of steel.
The Temple says it has held the title of largest Masonic temple in the world since 1939, when Chicago's Masonic Temple was torn down. Since then Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Iggy Pop and the White Stripes have all played the Detroit stages, by the Temple's own count.
The main theater opened first, on February 22, 1926, with a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert, and on Thanksgiving Day thousands gathered while the Grand Lodge of Michigan consecrated the rooms. The money was gone before the third theater, up on the seventh floor, was finished. It never got its seats.
Photo: Turning the sod for the new Masonic Temple at Cass Park, Thanksgiving Day 1920, Spencer & Wyckoff panoramic photograph, Library of Congress, public domain
One dispatch a week. No tracking, no filler. Free, always.