This band shell on Belle Isle honors a Detroiter who built what was once the biggest music-publishing company on the planet, and for decades entertained thousands as the site of live music on the city’s island park..
For nearly a century, as far back as the 1880s, outdoor music concerts on Belle Isle were an annual rite of summer. The island would see a number of band stands and band shells over the years that would host everything from symphony orchestras to rock bands. The Remick would be the last to be built.
The maestro of Motown
Jerome Hosmer Remick Sr. was born Nov. 15, 1868, in the family home on the corner of Lafayette Boulevard and Shelby Street to James A. and Mary Hosmer Remick. He graduated from the Detroit Business University in 1887 and went to work the following year for his grandfather's lumber firm, Whitney & Remick. This grandfather, Royal Clark Remick, owned vast amounts of pine forests in Tuscola County and was among the early lumbermen that made a fortune harvesting Michigan's vast forests. Royal Remick was the first lumber baron to use steam in the logging industry, in 1877. Remick's father was also an executive there.
"Early association of his family with the lumber interests of Michigan and Mr. Remick's concern with the growing industries of Detroit ... and his great love of music have made his name well-known in the community," the Detroit Free Press wrote July 16, 1931.
In 1898, the music-loving Jerome Remick bought a 50 percent interest in the Whitney-Warner Publishing Co. of Detroit, and took over management of the business. Two years later, he bought out the other half. In 1904, the firm merged with a New York publishing company and became Shapiro, Remick & Co.
Just 11 months later, the firm was reorganized yet again, this time as the Jerome H. Remick & Co., with its namesake serving as president and general manager. The firm operated out of 1250 Library St. before outgrowing the building and moving to 457 W. Fort St. Around 1908, he set up the J.H. Remick Printing Co. as a subsidiary that printed the company's sheet music in-house.
Remick would turn the company into the world’s largest music publishing empire, with more than 60,000 pieces of music in its catalog. Among Remick’s best business moves was signing George Gershwin in 1914 to pen tunes for the company. Gershwin left in 1917.
Running a global publishing empire might be enough for most, but in 1914, Remick also became president and general manager of the Detroit Creamery Co. He would also serve as a director for a number of other Detroit firms, including the Graham-Paige Motors Corp., Detroit Savings Bank, Union Guardian Trust Co., and the Parke, Davis & Co.. He also served terms as president and vice president of the Detroit Symphony Society, and was said to be instrumental in attracting and paying for famed conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch to come to Detroit to lead the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. On top of all that, Remick was also a one-time part-owner of the Detroit Free Press.
But by 1928, Remick was having health issues and decided to sell his publishing business to Jerome Keit. Keit rebranded the firm as the Remick Corp., but the name would be short-lived, as he quickly flipped the firm to Warner Brothers. Upon the arrival of sound in motion pictures, the entertainment juggernaut decided it was easier to buy an established publishing house than to start from scratch, so it bought the world’s largest.
The following year, Remick tried an experiment that married his love of music with his dairy business.
"Quiet cows give more milk, and music keeps them quiet, so the cows at the Detroit Creamery farms on Gratiot Road near Mt. Clemens are getting radio concerts daily," the Detroit Free Press reported May 16, 1929. "The huge barns of the company have been fitted with loud speakers, and the radio is turned on at milking time, and the songs and music are kept going while the animals are being groomed."
Whether the experiment actually worked, well, Remick told the paper it was “a bit too early to say." The Detroit Creamery Co. would merge with National Dairy Products in 1929.
Remick succumbed to his undisclosed long-term illness on July 15, 1931, at his home in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich. He was just 62 years old. The following day, his death was front page news in the papers, with the Detroit Free Press even proclaiming him a "genius of business."
"Jerome H. Remick was one of the men who counted in Detroit," the Free Press wrote in an editorial the day after his death, paying its respects. "For 40 years, he contributed to the city's upbuilding and general good. He was intelligent, interested in its culture, its politics and its general progress. His business activities and connections were wide, and some of them were of a sort that touched the lives and interests of large numbers of people so that his name became one of the best-known names in Detroit, and through his music-publishing business, was coupled with that of the city all over the country."
A man like that deserved a memorial of some kind, and it just so happened that Belle Isle would soon find itself in need of a new band shell.
Concerts on Belle Isle
The City’s parks department had been sponsoring concerts on Belle Isle since at least 1882, usually dozens of them each year. The Commissioners of Parks & Boulevards wrote in its annual report for 1904-05 that “the music furnished in the different parks is no longer considered a luxury, but is looked upon by the people as a necessity, and on a summer evening, the canal on Belle Isle park, which the band pavilion spans, might be likened to the canals of Venice, the exception being that canoes instead of gondolas are used, while the shores of the canal within hearing of the music are a surging mass of humanity.”
Early concerts on the island were held in simple structures, but in 1902, a pagoda-like structure was built over the Loop Canal near the old Belle Isle Casino. As the city’s fortunes and population continued into the 1920s, plans were presented for a new band shell with a rounded design to be built along a canal, near the present-day site of the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon.
This new band shell was dedicated July 12, 1925, with a concert before an estimated 25,000 people. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra would frequently perform on the stage, and its concerts would be broadcast from the island over the airwaves. But by 1935, just 10 years after it had opened, it was determined that the band shell was deteriorating. Nevertheless, the concerts at the shell continued until it was finally condemned in 1941 after being deemed unsound. Joseph P. Wolff, the City’s building safety commissioner, said things were so bad, the vibrations from the tympani and bass drums “might bring it down.” The band shell would be removed the following year, but the stage was left until a replacement could be built. Because of World War II, it would be a couple of years before that would happen.
A new home for the band to play on
Following the war, the Department of Parks & Recreation requested in 1945 a $100,000 appropriation (about $1.8 million in 2026 value, when adjusted for inflation) for a new band shell, one large enough to accommodate 300 people at a time. That request would be approved by the Common Council in April 1946 (as would $40,000 for a band shell and comfort station at Palmer Park), but musicians would be stuck with that rundown stage for a few more years, though sometimes they performed instead in an area known as “the Belle Isle Music Grove.”
By November 1946, the project had reached the blueprint stage. The band shell was designed by Raymond G. Jepson, an architectural engineer in the City of Detroit's Engineering Department, with input from the City’s Parks & Recreation Department. It would be located about 80 feet east of what was left of the old band shell. The new venue would be 95 feet wide and 32 feet deep, and its stage could comfortably accommodate 80 musicians (a significant decrease from the 300 touted earlier). The building, the portion behind the shell, had a library for musical scores to be kept, lockers for instruments, the director's office, storage rooms, and bathrooms and dressing room for musicians.
The front of the stage originally featured a dedication plaque saluting Jerome Remick. This plaque, which has been broken, originally read: "Erected by the City of Detroit. In memory of Jerome Hosmer Remick. He bound our hearts together with the songs he fostered and with the ability, energy and affection which he devoted to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra."
It is unclear whether the shell was named in Remick’s honor because his family gave money for the effort, or just on merit alone. The newspapers of the time didn’t specify, and given how charitable donations seldom escaped mention, it’s likely it was the latter.
Considering that the City designed the band shell in-house, the new venue was pretty cutting edge for the time. Its lighting was recessed in the roof in a way that provided light for the performers without blinding the audience. The Free Press marveled July 2, 1950, that "the cantilever sounding board involves the use of a new principle of acoustics, projecting the music in equal volume to all sections of the audience."
The contract to build the band shell went to the William Esslinger Construction Co,. and it was built of reinforced concrete with decorative limestone trim. Its final cost would come in over-budget, at $160,000, or about $2.2 million in 2026, accounting for inflation.
It was dedicated on July 13, 1950, with a performance by the Belle Isle Concert Band, directed by Leonard B. Smith. Among the numbers performed were one of Smith's own compositions, "Belle Isle March." The dedication coincided with the 10th annual Old Timers' Day on Belle Isle, which saw an old-time baseball game between the Belle Isle Tigers and the Detroit Old Time Base Ball Players Association, old-time dancing, and a concert at the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon, amid other activities.
"Music lovers jammed the seats in front of the shell to hear speeches by participants," the Free Press wrote the next day. "The big shell proved to be an almost perfect acoustical instrument during (its) first concert."
The Remick shell would be the primary home of Smith and the Belle Isle Concert Band, which he founded in 1946. (The band would later be renamed the Detroit Concert Band.) Their concerts often included Sousa marches, as Smith was one of the famed composer’s biggest fans. Smith, incidentally, had been the principal trumpet player for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) and also played the trumpet call used on "The Lone Ranger" radio program. Smith’s troupe would entertain audiences at the Remick shell into the mid-1970s.
The DSO also played to large crowds at the Remick each summer from the 1950s into the mid-1970s. However, changing tastes by that era led to the orchestral performances on Belle Isle to come to an end. Instead, the Remick began to host rock shows, including one particularly memorable event just as the Summer of Love was kicking off.
When love turns to hate
On April 30, 1967, the Remick would host an event called the Love-In Detroit, featuring the legendary Motor City rockers The MC5, as well as Billy C & the Sunshine, and the Seventh Seal. The event was organized by counter-culture icon John Sinclair’s Detroit Artist Workshop and Trans Love Energies - which the Free Press called a "far-out organization. Reports varied, but the event attracted somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 so-called “flower children” and “squares” - as well as a biker gang.
The Free Press covered the love-in on its front page the following day, writing, "Detroit's hippy (sic) community - in beards, beads, flowers and most everything else that fits the loose definition of the word attire - gathered to demonstrate affection for mankind in general and themselves in particular. They sang, danced, climbed on the roofs of buildings, ate, drank, skipped rope and gave away things like balloons and flowers and candy."
Some attendees slid down the back of the Remick or tossed bottles around, but the police let them be. Someone drove one of the Parks & Recreation Department’s small bulldozers into one of Belle Isle’s canals. A couple of youths ripped apart a tree (one hippie was overheard saying, “I don’t dig that.”) As things started to get a bit sketchy, police asked one of the bands to stop playing, but the band continued - “and so did the drinking,” the Free Press reported May 2, 1967. The “Trans-Love Psychedelic Ranger Patrol” attempted to keep things groovy, but they would be no match for the Outlaw Club motorcycle gang that showed up.
Armed with chains and clubs, the bikers antagonized the hippies, and met their peace and love with "a beer-squirting fight and a round of 'Sieg heils' designed to blow the citizens' minds," the Free Press wrote May 1, 1967. And then, “after a day of everybody being lovable, the mood changed at 7 p.m., when a policeman arrested a motorcyclist for reckless driving near the (Remick). In minutes, the area was transformed into a battlefield."
Bikers and some of the love-in attendees turned on the police, pelting them with rocks, bottles and bricks, and the love-in devolved into an all-out drunken brawl. Police called in the mounted unit, the riot squad and the Tactical Mobile Unit - what one would call a SWAT team today - to break things up, with 150 to 200 cops responding to the scene. As police shut the island and sought to restore calm on the island, unrest broke out on the other side of the Douglas MacArthur Bridge at East Jefferson and East Grand Boulevard. Rioters broke windows and plate-glass doors at neighborhood shops and damaged a squad car and other vehicles. In the end, only 18 people and a police horse were injured, and there were only 10 arrests.
"We gave the straight people - the regular public - the chance to get together and love each other," the then-25-year-old Sinclair told the Free Press for a May 2, 1967, article. "I hoped it would work, but it doesn't. I'm not prepared to do anything like this again. We originally intended it for ourselves. Then the gawkers and drinkers came in and spoiled it. Hell, you can go to a bar and do what they did."
Restoring the Remick
For two decades, the Remick shell served as one of Belle Isle's premier summer attractions, but that would come to an end in 1980. The stage and shell were left to rot, and the grass where tens of thousands used to plop down for a concert was paved over for parking.
In 2007, siblings Johnny Washington III and Karinda Washington set out to restore the shell and reopen it for concerts. Though enlisting the support of the Detroit Department of Recreation and volunteers from Wayne State University and the University of Minnesota, they weren’t able to get it back in performance shape. They did clean out two locker rooms and a pair of bathrooms, plus a rehearsal room.
A nonprofit called the Music On Belle Isle Group (or MObig) was formed in 2017 to pick up that torch and restore the Remick and bring summer concerts back to Belle Isle. MObig announced Jan. 5, 2026, that it had secured funding for architectural planning, and is working with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Belle Isle Conservancy to make that a reality. The DNR engaged the architectural firm G.H. Forbes of suburban Royal Oak, Mich., to do an assessment of the shell and plot out a course to reopening it. MObig has raised more than $250,000 as of July 2026 for the effort.