Belle Isle Conservatory: Detroit's 1904 Glass Palace and the Park That Surrounds It

The Belle Isle Conservatory opened on August 18, 1904, three miles east of downtown Detroit on a 982-acre island in the Detroit River. Albert Kahn drew the plans when he was thirty-five, the same year he drew the Belle Isle Aquarium fifty yards away. The dome rises eighty-five feet above the palm house and encloses a volume of 100,601 cubic feet, the largest single span of glass Detroit had built to that date. The building stands at 42.3424 N, 82.9699 W, beside Inselruhe Avenue, and the city of Detroit still owns it under a thirty-year state lease signed October 1, 2013.

Kahn built the original frame from wood, then watched the wood rot for half a century. The city rebuilt the structure between 1952 and 1954 with aluminum mullions and resealed glass, and in 1953 the conservatory took the name of Anna Scripps Whitcomb, who had bequeathed her 600-plant orchid collection to Detroit on the condition the city house it properly. The collection grew. By the mid-1950s the conservatory held one of the largest municipally owned orchid holdings in the United States, swollen by rare cultivars that British growers had shipped across the Atlantic in 1940 and 1941 to keep them out of German bombs.

What Kahn drew, and why it looked like that

The conservatory belongs to Kahn's early City Beautiful period, when the young architect was still working through the Beaux-Arts vocabulary he had absorbed from his year of study in Europe. The building reads as a hub-and-wing plan: a central octagonal palm house under the dome, with show houses to either side. Kahn's neighbor on the island, the Belle Isle Aquarium, opened the same year and survives as Detroit's oldest continuously operating aquarium.

For a complete tour of the Kahn buildings still standing in Detroit, see our pages on the Fisher Building and the Cadillac Place. The Belle Isle pair anticipated the industrial cathedrals he would design twenty years later for Ford at the Rouge.

The Remick Band Shell and the 1940 question

A search for "Belle Isle theater built 1940" lands on the Remick Band Shell, named for Jerome H. Remick, the Detroit-based proprietor of the largest sheet-music publishing house in the United States. The current shell opened around 1950 at a cost of $150,000 and replaced an earlier bandstand that had hosted summer concerts since the late 1930s. The Remick shell drew crowds for symphony performances from 1950 through the early 1980s and still stands at the eastern end of the island near the Detroit Yacht Club.

If you are planning a portrait session that includes the band shell, see our portrait photography page for scheduling. Belle Isle requires a permit for commercial photography, available from the Department of Natural Resources.

A photographer's notes on light

The dome admits a clean overhead light that bounces off the palm-house tile floor and fills the volume with a soft, diffused glow no studio can imitate. Morning sessions, between nine and eleven, catch the sun on the eastern flank and throw long bars of light across the orchid-room benches. Late-afternoon sessions, after four, pick up warmer color through the western glass.

The cactus house, on the west wing, runs hot and dry, and the floor is concrete rather than tile. The fern house, on the east, runs cool and humid, and a tripod left for ten minutes will fog. The show house at the center handles seasonal displays.

To book a session at the conservatory or another Belle Isle location, visit our booking page or send a note through contact.