Stony Island Arts Bank

I’ve never lived in Chicago – never taken the L to work, never looked for an apartment in Lincoln Park, never considered the city’s famously frosty climate when buying a winter coat. But my job creates shadow cities – second centers of gravity around which my world revolves for as long as client relationships last. For years, Kraft was my primary client, which meant Chicago was that city for me.

Between 2012 and 2015, I’d fly there near-weekly. I’d stay at the Palomar and ride hotel-branded bikes around River North. I’d stay at the Chicago Athletic Association and drink my morning coffee on the steps of the Art Institute. I’d stay at Soho House and queue for Girl and the Goat in its early can’t-get-a-seat-before-10pm days.

But even when I changed jobs and left Kraft behind, I didn’t sever ties with Chicago. It’s one of America’s capitals of consumer research: the citizens of its suburbs uncannily representative of the country as a whole. If you want to know whether your ad for ice cream or air freshener or fabric softener will resonate with Americans, just ask 12 stay-at-home-Moms from Skokie. So I still spend more than my fair share of time behind focus group glass, longingly overlooking the Magnificent Mile as I take notes and debate the finer points of product portrayal.

But for the dozens of trips I’ve made to Chicago, it turns out my immersion into the life of the city has been quite uneven. I have what my co-worker and native Chicagoan Steve calls square-mile knowledge – knowledge limited to the core of the city that contains the Bean, deep dish, and department stores, but is light on local culture.

So when I last visited the city a few months ago, I aimed to change that. I skipped Logan Square and wandered Avondale instead; traded Wicker Park for Ukrainian Village, and ventured south to see Bronzeville’s renowned Victorian architecture. And then I went further south still, to Stony Island Arts Bank in Jackson Park.

Of all the things I’ve seen in Chicago, the Arts Bank is the best by a mile. Built in 1923 and abandoned since the 80s, the former savings and loan bank was slated for demolition in 2012, when visual artist and University of Chicago professor Theaster Gates bought it from the city of Chicago for $1. $1! Gates spent years slowly renovating and restoring the space, funding it with the proceeds from art he made using found objects within the bank. Last year, it reopened to the public. Spaces that once housed offices, financial records, and rooms full of filing cabinets are now home to thousands of fascinating cultural artifacts, 95% of which are by or about people of color. Those artifacts include every issue of Jet and Ebony ever published, the complete record collection of house DJ Frankie Knuckles, 60,000 glass lantern slides from various city universities, the research library of the former Johnson Publishing Company, and the deconstructed gazebo where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed, flown in from Cleveland at the behest of his mother. It’s also the headquarters of Gates’ Rebuild Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to “rebuild the cultural foundations of underinvested neighborhoods and incite movements of community revitalization that are culture based, artist led, neighborhood driven.”

Once a week, the Arts Bank opens its unmarked, foreboding exterior and offers tours of its highly-‘grammable interior to gawking tourists, locals, and gawking tourists trying to pass themselves off as locals. The tours are at noon on Sundays, and as I approached the building, I was caught in a throng of well-dressed worshippers from a church down the street. When I broke away to swing open the Arts Bank’s heavy iron doors, one churchgoer shouted out at me “That place is something else!”

It sure is. Gates’ space is expansive, eclectic, gorgeous and makes you wonder what incredible treasures may lay within the disused buildings I don’t think twice about when I walk past them. It’s an incredible achievement. And it spurred a wave of research and reading that’s slowly but surely transforming my knowledge of Chicago from square-mile to whole-city.