Music history just found a spectacular new home in the desert. The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix is now displaying the historic console of the Chicago Stadium pipe organ, a legendary instrument that roared through 65 years of American sports history, on public view for the first time in more than 30 years.
The massive red-and-gold console stands in MIM’s United States/Canada Gallery, where guests can stand right beside it and imagine the thunder it once produced. Originally installed in Chicago Stadium in 1929, it was the first organ ever built for a sports arena, and the largest ever constructed by the Maxcy-Barton Organ Co., with six manuals and more than 800 stop tabs controlling 51 ranks of pipes. Millions of fans heard it at Chicago Bulls basketball games, Blackhawks hockey games, and boxing matches, and its overwhelming volume helped earn the stadium the nickname ‘the Madhouse on Madison.’ Legend even says longtime organist Al Melgard once quelled a riot simply by leaning on the manuals and stunning the crowd with a deafening chord.
The console was gifted to MIM by the Maloof Foundation in memory of Phillip F. Maloof, and it anchors a gallery already full of musical treasures. As MIM curator Rich Walter puts it, this is an instrument that millions of people heard without ever quite realizing what they were hearing.
Come stand where sports history meets music history, only at the world’s only global musical instrument museum.
Photo: Musical Instrument Museum (MIM)
