Keir Graff had visited the Fine Arts Building a few times in the early aughts before he decided to take an office there three years ago. One of those visits was for a literary party held in the Venetian Court, the majestic atrium that stretches to the heavens from the fourth floor. “You look up and you see the Chicago sky, six stories above,” the local author recalls. “In this magical hidden space inside this beautiful building, I remember thinking, ‘Where am I?!’ ”
Graff was beginning to understand why the Chicago Tribune originally described it as a “magnificent palace” when the edifice first opened in 1885. Designed by Solon Spencer Beman, it served as the showroom for the Studebaker Carriage Company before the business moved. After a renovation that expanded the structure from eight floors to 10, it reopened in 1898 as “the first art colony of Chicago.” Among the many music teachers, theater companies, and literary groups, the storied list of artists-in-residence includes architect Frank Lloyd Wright, sculptor Lorado Taft, and illustrators W. W. Denslow (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and J.C. Leyendecker (The Saturday Evening Post cover artist).
Fast forward to 2021, when Graff’s friends Javier and Kristin Ramirez opened the doors to Exile in Bookville on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building. “I started spending a lot of time with them, helping out at first, unpacking books. I even worked the counter a few days,” he recalls. “And as you do, you have drinks after hours, and people from the building wander in and introduce themselves. More and more, I just started to understand what an amazing, remarkable, out-of-time place this is. Javier told me, ‘You should get a studio here.’”
The former executive editor of Booklist and author of 14 novels, Graff signed a lease in the spring of 2022 — putting him in exactly the right place at the right time. The Fine Arts Building would celebrate its 125th anniversary the following year, which prompted NewCity’s publisher to invite Graff to write about it. He spent most of that year researching the institution’s denizens and impressive legacy. The resulting piece, nearly 25,000 words long, ran in NewCity in November 2023. Now it’s evolved into Chicago’s Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder, a coffee-table history published by Trope, chock-full of fascinating anecdotes and striking photography. A book-launch event June 13 coincides with the June edition of the building’s Second Fridays, a monthly open-studio event.
Graff spoke to Chicago about some of the stories he uncovered for the book, and gave insight into how he approached it: “It’s like a Wes Anderson movie or a Richard Scarry book, where you cut away the fourth wall and look inside at all these different people doing different activities. Every studio is a world!” Here are five things we learned:
1There’s a Citizen Kane connection.
In 1926, Chicago’s mega-rich energy mogul Samuel Insull founded a theater company and leased the Studebaker for five years to indulge his wife, retired actress Gladys Wallis. It proved to be a disaster for the couple, both financially and reputationally — and ended up being retold through the veil of fiction in 1941’s Citizen Kane. (Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz had once been a drama critic assigned to review one of Wallis’s vanity projects.) “That was very much a surprise,” Graff says. “You know, a lot of these pieces were out there: People have written about Insull and about the origin of the character Susan from Citizen Kane. I might’ve been the first person to directly tie it to the Studebaker. That was fun, to put those pieces together.”
2The building helped pioneer storefront theater.
The building contains multiple venues that have served as theaters, concert halls, and cinemas over many decades. (Its crown jewel, the Studebaker Theater, reopened three years ago after a multimillion dollar renovation; it regularly hosts NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!) But perhaps the performance space with the longest legacy is the long-gone Little Theater, birthed in 1912 by Chicago native Ellen Van Volkenberg and her British playwright husband. Their tiny budget only allowed them to rent a long, narrow storage space on the fourth floor, which they converted into a venue with less than 100 seats. In its five years of existence, the Little Theater became the city’s best-known experimental company, exporting its shows and style from Boston to Seattle. (More bragging rights: In the program for a marionette show she produced, Van Volkenberg coined the word “puppeteer.”) “Nobody had seen anything quite like The Little Theater at the time,” Graff enthuses. “It’s a direct forerunner of Chicago storefront theater. Prior to this, theaters were these majestic palaces with proscenium arches. But this was the tiniest stage you can imagine in this little room. They used the limitations to their creative favor.”
3The building also birthed an influential literary magazine.
The “Little” name carried over to another early-20th century pioneer headquartered in the building. In 1914, Margaret Anderson founded The Little Review, an avant-garde literary magazine that she kept going for 15 years, with help from her lover Jane Heap. “That was a pleasure to dig into further,” Graff notes. “If people haven’t heard of The Little Review, this legendary publication was essential. It was the first U.S. publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published serially despite opposition,” which culminated in an obscenity trial. “She published T.S. Eliot; she published Ezra Pound. It was such a bohemian venture, always scraping for money. But it’s hard to think of too many more influential literary publications.”
4There’s a locked-room murder mystery.
Given the building’s very long history, it comes as no surprise that it’s the site of several violent tragedies. Perhaps the most notable is the 1980 murder of acting teacher Everett Clarke, stabbed to death with a pair of scissors by a mentally ill student who left the studio door locked from the inside and escaped by window ledge on the 10th floor. As it happens, a painter next door heard Clarke’s cries but presumed he was rehearsing a dramatic scene. Soon after, a pair of violin restorers saw the killer walking past their window. “Their response was rather subdued, almost dryly humorous: ‘Well, you don’t see that every day’,” Graff says. “But if you think about the building coming out of the 1970s, half-rented at the time, with lots of oddballs — well, they probably did see a lot of weird stuff. Certainly nobody would think, ‘Oh, that’s a murderer escaping.’”
5The lobby is named after its blue-collar gatekeeper.
In 1950, Irish immigrant Tommy Durkin, then in his late teens, began working as the building’s elevator operator. He became a beloved fixture during his 60-year tenure, hosting two annual parties in the basement: one for Christmas, the other for St. Patrick’s Day. (He cooked corned beef and cabbage on a hot plate in the boiler room.) Durkin was so revered by his work family, they renamed the lobby Durkin Hall — complete with a bronze plaque calling him “the Gate Keeper of the Fine Arts Building” — in 1998. “That’s one of the things that makes the building uniquely Chicago,” Graff says. “In the early years, the tone was very elegant and continental. In the shabby years, it becomes a Chicago building: more egalitarian, as artists and staff mingle convivially. And everybody, including the building owner, wanted to go to Tommy Durkin’s parties!”