To Delia Falconer:
You are quite right and my apologies--The Ford Americana shrine *is*
Greenfield Village, and it is located in Dearborn, MI.  I conflated the two.
 
On another point, I don't know if this example ravels off of this particular
thread, but at the end of the SCS Conference in LA a couple of years ago,
some of us took a tour--hosted by the LA Conservancy--of the old LA Theater
District on Broadway.
 
It was remarkable to see so many shrines of film viewing within a few blocks
of each other, even though many were closed (and we could't go in--rats!),
some had been converted to other uses, some were showing Spanish-language
films, and a few were showing first-run films.  There was one of the original
nickelodeons in LA cheek by jowl with one of the first glamor theaters.
There was the first theater ever wired for sound (to show THE JAZZ SINGER).
There was the theater made of pre-fab materials that Charlie Chaplin had
built just so he would have a place to show CITY LIGHTS since no one had
wanted to gamble on a silent film(!).  The jewel of the tour was the original
flagship theater of United Artists, which had been completely cleaned and
restored, with carved wooden railings, a balcony that had been discovered and
reopened, and the original murals restored, depicting the founders of UA
in various poses--Chaplin as the Little Tramp, of course; Griffith and
Billy Bitzer behind a camera; Pickford in her long curls; and many scens of
Fairbanks as the Thief of Bagdad, Robin Hood, etc.  Ironically, this theater
is now functioning as a church, headed by a charismatic preacher who looks
like the aged Sterling Hayden and who was the subject of a short film by
Werner Herzog (THE WRATH OF GOD?).
 
One other site on the tour was a cafeteria--an amazing piece of kitsch
architecture with a redwood tree in the middle and a waterfall in the back.  It
 had been opened as a "pay what you can afford" place and turned a profit.
According to the tour guide, the restaurant owner was also a civic crusader
who helped to clean up the hideously corrupt LA police dept. and might have
been the model for Chandler's Philip Marlowe.
 
An exhilerating experience, that made me forgive all the bad impressions
I'd gotten of LA on a previous visit.  I just hope that the wrecker's ball,
riots and earthquakes have continued to spare this district and that more
of these gems can be restored some day.
 
--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN