A living tribute to the silent era
Originally, the Heights Theater had a small Robert Morton pipe organ installed in 1927, but this organ was removed in 1936 when the theater was remodeled, and silent films had gone out of style. The original organ chamber is to the left of the screen and houses the main chamber of the current organ. The current organ began its life in 1929 as the WCCO studio organ, back in the days when WCCO had studios located in the old Nicollet hotel at Washington and Hennepin Ave in downtown Minneapolis. At the time it was a 3 manual instrument with 12 ranks of pipes. In the 1960s the Wurlitzer was sold to a private collector and eventually purchased by the Land O’ Lakes Theatre Organ Society in 1998. Soon after, a deal was struck to install the organ at the Heights Theater, thus making the Heights the first movie theater to have a functioning pipe organ since the Downtown Minneapolis Radio City Theater closed its doors in 1958.
The organ currently has 16 sets of pipes (known as ranks) and boasts a glockenspiel, xylophone, chimes, piano, and marimba, as well as an assortment of rhythm percussions and original theater pipe organ sound effects such as train whistle, bell, birds, and so forth. The organ's voices include Tuba, Trumpet, Post horn (the loudest stop), strings clarinet, and a variety of other organ voices to fill out the ensemble.