At the Fine Arts Building, an artist’s commune in the highrise time forgot

The Fine Arts Building, at 410 S. Michigan Ave., low on a street of tall, light on a block of heavy, peeks out between the Auditorium Theatre and the Chicago Club, an afterthought of a 160-foot stretch from Van Buren to Ida B. Wells Drive. It turns 125 years old this fall, and if you forgot its birthday, that makes sense. The Fine Arts Building is a place out of time, 10 stories of tenants who, in many ways, do not hew cleanly to 21st century Chicago. Yet the Fine Arts Building is also the start of contemporary Chicago. At street level, it is no longer as spectacular as when it was built in the late 1880s, yet inside, the mix of people who rent its studios remains nearly the same as 1889. Then: dollhouse makers. Now: puppet theater companies. Then: singing lessons. Now: singing lessons. “The Goldberg Variations” waft through walls. As does a two-minute speech from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And ripples of synthesizer.

The Fine Arts Building is a vertical art colony and a commune and a sanctuary and a crucible. It has witnessed premieres and stabbings and, because of the reality of creating art, more failure than anywhere in Chicago. It is home to ghosts, the legacy of Al Capone and a catalytic coming together of American modernism. It is past, present and future under one roof. Melissa Bradshaw, who teaches Chicago literature at Loyola University, sees it much the way poet Ezra Pound saw art-making itself in Chicago: as a meatpacker of sorts, hoarding cultural raw meat to be reworked, repacked, expelled.

On its ground floor, the Studebaker Theater reopened last year after a $3 million renovation and is the building’s anchor. But the floors above it are its soul, genteel Chicago meeting brash Chicago, unexpected yet unchanged, so unusual that, one day during my wanderings, I noted a studio rented by a lawyer who specialized in, lettering on the frosted door described, “aesthetic litigation.” That didn’t sound so strange in here.

The Fine Arts Building has been rented to Hungarian operas, Mikhail Baryshnikov, dentists, University of Chicago continuing education classes, the Church of Scientology and, whenever David Letterman did his show from Chicago, Stupid Pet Trick auditions. It’s held so many violin businesses, in both 1900 and today, that Jacob Harvey, the building’s artistic director, calls it “The Violin Mall of America.”

You think that’s random? Irving Pond, the architect who created Hull House, had a studio here; he was also the first member of the University of Michigan’s football team to get a touchdown — ever. You think that’s random? I knocked on the “aesthetic litigation” door and found instead an artist, Matt Bodett, whose work is centered on the theme of madness. He opened his door wider to let me in. I saw Bodett was repainting the Sistine Chapel across a wall.

“When I first started working here,” he said, “it took some time to get used to its dimly lit detective noir vibes, but I found in time an incredible cross-pollination of ideas. Some of the studios in here, you have no idea what is going on inside — only that something is.”

I knocked on random doors. I quietly poked open mail slots and spied. I learned that, like art itself, not everything in the Fine Arts Building always made a lot of sense. The aesthetic litigation thing? A joke. Decades ago someone painted “William Shatner School of Acting” on a door; another joke. It stayed like that for years. Why question it?

Climb into an elevator.

The elevators in the Fine Arts Building still have manual operators — at least until they’re phased out in a couple of years. One day I got in and was crowded by music students and instruments and a nervous-looking man. “Floor?” the operator asked him.

“I have an audition,” he said.

“For ‘Fiddler’ or ‘Polar Express’?” the operator clarified. Not that it matters here. Get off at any floor. Let’s stroll. If you have the time, stories, legacy and sweat are everywhere.

But start at the 10th floor. Start here because, unlike most buildings in downtown Chicago, you can just walk into the Fine Arts Building; you don’t need a security card or have to pass through a scanner. Also, start on 10 because there is morbid history here that speaks to the character of the place. In 1980, Chicago radio star Everett Clarke, then in his late 60s, was teaching yet another student in his studio. The student, Paul DeWitt, grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed Clarke. DeWitt was quickly caught — his name was on Clarke’s daybook — and found “guilty but mentally ill.” Psychiatrists testified that DeWitt thought Clarke was a Mafia don, out to hurt his career.

But the truly remarkable part is that Clarke, as he died, cried out for help, again and again, and no one came. Because Clarke’s school of drama was always full of shouting.

The sounds inside the Fine Arts Building are the first things you notice. Baritones and sopranos, fluid sprints of piano and mournful washes of violas, all mashing and twisting up stairwells until you don’t know what floor originates what sound. Violence is not typical: In 1933, a 22-year-old drama student also stabbed a teacher here then slit his own wrists. (Both survived.) In 1991, a secretary was shot five times on the fifth floor after a boyfriend chased her into a bathroom stall. (She also survived.)

But that’s the life of a 125-year-old building, particularly one this transformative.

On the 10th floor, in 2023, you will find Bein & Fushi, one of most elite dealers of priceless musical instruments in the world, its regulars including Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman; a large recital space overlooking Lake Michigan and the Stradivari Society. You will find John K. Becker & Co., restorer of violins, where the offices smell sweet of wood and restoration is performed with a microscope originally made for brain surgery. Luthiers, who build and restore string instruments, hustle by in the dark hallway, wrapped in aprons.

That’s 2023. In the building’s initial decades, the 10th floor held the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, who retreated here for a time after he became a pariah in Oak Park; he had left his wife and kids and vanished to Europe with a mistress. He also designed several spaces within the building, including a bookstore and an art gallery. Among Wright’s neighbors: William Wallace Denslow, who was approached by Chicago writer L. Frank Baum and here created the original illustrations for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Sculptor Lorado Taft — perhaps best known for “Fountain of the Great Lakes” outside the Art Institute — had a studio here until his work grew too large. Harriet Monroe published the first years of Poetry magazine on 10, and the long-running Caxton Club was headquartered on 10. As was the studio of Chicago Tribune political cartoonist John McCutcheon (who, again, random, also oversaw the creation of the Brookfield Zoo and was president of the Chicago Zoological Society for 27 years).

And that’s just 10.

If we cared only about the Fine Arts Building because of its famous legacy, we could go on and on. A young Laurie Anderson studied violin here. As did Andrew Bird. David Mamet learned to play piano here, critic Margo Jefferson took dance lessons. When Charlie Watts was in town with the Rolling Stones, he would visit Frank’s Drum Shop here. When Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead is in Chicago, he always stops at Performers Music on the ninth floor, Chicago’s oldest still-operating sheet music store. Artists Cafe, the first floor diner that closed in 2019, would advertise itself as the egalitarian Midwest restaurant of choice for both Rudolf Nureyev and Mike Ditka.

Just last month, Chicago-based novelist and screenwriter Gillian Flynn started renting a studio in the building, partly to work on the follow-up to “Gone Girl,” partly to just get out.

“It was time for me to put on actual clothes again,” she said. “I have been working forever in my basement and I went to the Fine Arts Building for an event and was struck by its beauty. I’d never been there. It has this great sense of place. Regardless of how celebrated some of its tenants have been, it vibrates with the endeavor of everyone who ever created there. I mean, you enter beneath words carved over the front doors: ‘All passes — art alone endures.’ You don’t want to Google cats after that. You want to work.”

Let’s stand outside the Fine Arts Building. Give yourself distance. Notice red granite and gray limestone, the Romanesque columns. Notice long windows that stretch from the second to fourth floors, and how advertisements in ground-floor windows where Artists Cafe sat for 60 years look tacky. Notice the sandwich board advertising Exile in Bookville on the second floor, one of the city’s best new bookstores.

On the second floor, stroll past Exile toward the studio next door selling glass paperweights. L.H. Selman Fine Glass Paperweights has been here 14 years. Owner Benjamin Clark represents every major paperweight artist in the world. “It just felt right to be here,” he said of the Fine Arts Building. Rents — which start about $600 a month — are low for Michigan Avenue. Eclecticism is expected.

There’s a talent agent in the building. There was a combination violinist/hypnotist. There is a combination conflict negotiator/bonsai collector on the fourth floor. There used to be a couple who were former Polish freedom fighters whose business was the monastic art of Scriptorium Benedictine art, or hand-lettering onto parchment scrolls; their clients included the Vatican and Richard Nixon.

Lee Newcomer, a thin older man with white hair, is the owner of the sheet music store. It opened in 1981 using money from the sale of his late father’s house in Cleveland. “I knew nothing of this place, except it was personal for an office building. There was no security but the elevator operators were a line of defense. They knew everyone. No one said what floor they were going. They just knew.”

“I used to think of this building as Green Acres,” said Matthew Tolzmann, a full-time violin photographer for Bein & Fushi. “The elevator operators alone become a layer of social structure. It’ll be weird to hit a button to get your floor, like everyone in the world.”

Bob Berger, the late owner of Berger Realty Group, bought the 200,000-square-foot building for $10.4 million in 2005. He had longed to own it and loved it the way it was, said Erica Berger, his daughter, who owns the building now. Still, they have a hard time finding people who can repair manual elevators now. But Harvey, the artistic director, doesn’t expect more to change. “The more you dig into its history, the more you want to leave it as is,” he said. “My objective was, how do you bring in new people into a living museum? It’s a commercial piece of real estate, yet, every owner, for 125 years, allowed it to stay this art space — and they didn’t have to. Think about it. I am managing artistic director of what is essentially an office building.”

Get off at the fourth floor. Pass the studio that specializes in actor headshots, pass the Chicago Opera Theater auditioning singers, walk down the long hallway — you expect Sam Spade or a gun moll to be coming the other way. Single light bulb fixtures cast shadows. Natural light from the Venetian outdoor court vanishes as the day goes on. Black wooden columns gather a soft glow. Keep walking through the wooden doorway at the end. You’re in the studio of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. A century ago, for five short years, this space was the Little Theater. Chicago had seen off-Loop theater before; Hull House staged shows as early as 1901. But the Chicago Little Theatre, all 91 seats, was different.

“They were doing Shaw and Strindberg and Yeats plays before anyone else was doing them in the United States,” said Blair Thomas, founder of the puppet company. “They had a performance space only 14 feet wide and 10 feet tall, yet they were so important.”

The Little Theatre was founded by Maurice Browne, an Englishman, and Michigan native Ellen Van Volkenburg. They met on vacation in Italy, married and settled in Chicago. She had a desire to be on stage and had relatives with money, but not enough for the Studebaker Theater. So they opened in this smaller space, never intended as a theater. The result was a brief, influential sunburst that was the catalyst for Chicago storefront theaters.

“That theater is why I’m here,” Thomas said. “It’s a romantic notion. Van Volkenburg used puppets. She coined the word ‘puppeteer’! Right here! I like to know I’m in that same space, so indicative of modernism. Is there anything like this building anywhere?”

There’s someone painting a Sistine Chapel, I said.

“Well, that sounds like a rumor,” he said. “But this is a building of dreamers.”

On the seventh floor, there is a dealer of piccolos, an illustrator, an architect, an Indian dance company. There is a bulletin board with a flyer that a writer posted seeking cast members for the “avant-garde opera I am going to finish.” Also, there is Larry Snider, international photographer. His studio has a fireplace and overlooks Michigan Avenue and feels thick with artifacts from his travels. “I moved in 20 years ago,” he said. “I was a lawyer at Mayer Brown and they have mandatory retirement. My wife is a designer, so we got a brochure in the mail about the Fine Arts renting studios. I liked the looks.”

He is surrounded by his photos and a habit for collecting taxidermy — turtles, birds, a raven, a horse skull. “There isn’t much of a market for what I sell, but I am looking for a profit if you happened to talk to the IRS. I am hoping for a profit one day, but look, it’s comfortable here, and it’s charming, and every once in a while, I do sell something.”

Again, rent is reasonable. The building, with 110 tenants, has a waitlist for new ones. Occupancy has fluctuated with the decade and ownership, but there are always some who will not leave. One vocal instructor taught here long after she got old and lost her eyesight. George Perlman, a violin instructor, taught in a corner studio on the sixth floor for 70-plus years, until his death at 103 in 2000. The Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, the Fine Arts Building’s oldest current tenant, has been a fixture since 1960.

On the sixth floor, there is a yoga studio and several visual artists, like Ann Pickett, who started a gallery here in 2021 after leaving Virginia for Chicago. She’s now familiar with the rhythms of the place: the pianist who plays for hours without a pause, the opera singers who stroll through, the artists who come at night after day jobs, the kids with the CYSO who flood through on weekends carrying black instrument cases strapped to their backs. Depending on the time and day, “the vibe can be completely different,” she said.

Compared with much of downtown Chicago office space — empty at night, crickets on weekends, divided by cubicle farms and professional sterility — the Fine Arts Building is “quite holistic,” according to Stanley Smith, owner of Oak Street Design, which creates window displays for many Michigan Avenue stores and downtown hotels. He occupies the space held for much of the 20th century by George Perlman. Continuity is there, but what’s been changing, several tenants said, was the feeling of a community interacting.

The building’s first decades were defined by community, Harvey said, and it’s something he wants to build again. When the Fine Arts Building was still new, occupants flitted between studios, sharing ideas and resources. The Little Room, started by painter Ralph Clarkson soon after he became one of the first tenants, was a gathering spot for radical Chicago, circa 1900: Little Review publisher Margaret Anderson, Poetry publisher Harriet Monroe, Denslow, McCutcheon, naturalist-acting pioneer Anna Morgan. Clubs and associations became ubiquitous. A list of tenants in the first decades includes: The World Federalist Association, the birth of Alliance Française de Chicago, the Catholic Women’s League, Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, the Chicago Literary Club, the Chicago Kindergarten Association, the Wednesday Club, the Thursday Club and a number of early women’s societies, including the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association.

Not that everyone liked each other.

In 1906, after illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and colleagues painted the winking classical murals that still greet you on the tenth floor, the Chicago Women’s Club complained to the Chicago Tribune of half-naked figures splashed across this castle of good taste. Leyendecker, who later became synonymous with the Saturday Evening Post and early 20th century advertising, replied that the murals would remain — “with or without consent.” After all, the Fine Arts Building meant to drag modernism into the 20th century.

The third floor is sleepy. It’s a nice spot to reflect. The Fine Arts Building was initially the Studebaker Building. It was built in 1885 by the Studebaker company of South Bend, Indiana, to sell horse-drawn carriages. Its architect, Solon Beman, had designed the community of Pullman and Chicago’s Grand Central Station (demolished in 1971) and many homes in what is now the South Loop. Studebaker, which had its showroom where the Studebaker Theater is now, was so successful here they outgrew it and moved to a larger space on Wabash.

But since they owned 410 S. Michigan, they needed a purpose.

Charles C. Curtiss, a music business executive and son of James Curtiss, former two-term Chicago mayor, proposed a vertical art incubator, a hub of culture on a stretch of Michigan already home to a nascent Art Institute and Auditorium Theatre. Plus, the city wanted to keep the artists who lingered in the Midwest after the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Curtiss added two floors to the eight-story Studebaker, and by 1901, a newly christened Fine Arts Building was a hive of new ideas — valued at a whopping $4 million.

The Tribune, not short on puffery, called it as significant as the Arc de Triomphe.

Yet, by 1915, its tenants, being artists, proved transient, and Studebaker sold it to the estate of energy magnate C.A. Chapin for $3 million. Two decades later it was foreclosed on and sold to Northwestern Mutual Life of Milwaukee, which, less than a decade after that, flipped it to Abraham Teitelbaum — Al Capone’s lawyer. Shocker: Teitelbaum was allergic to federal taxes, and by the early 1950s, he sold the property to cover debts. More foreclosures came, along with fears the building would be demolished or its mission abandoned. (The Tribune described the need to save the Fine Arts Building as no less than “a test of civilization.”) It was bought by Arnold Schwartz, a Chicago paint manufacturer, who died soon after. The building went to his wife, Dora. Former and current tenants describe things getting ugly. Filthy walls, worse bathrooms, basement water pumps and electrical generators that were run using idling lawnmowers. Although the building became a city landmark in 1978, Dora fought the designation, knowing it would bring restrictions. Occupancy sank below 50%.

By 1979, Tom Graham, an artist who worked for the First National Bank of Chicago, along with a few investors, bought it for just $1 million. Tom and his wife, Mary, now retired in Evanston, had met in the building, where they had painting studios. Tom’s tenure was beloved by tenants, who note now, with a laugh, how laissez-faire he was, for good and bad. “Tom saw the place as a character,” Mary said, “and he didn’t want that character to ever change.” By the time he sold the building about two decades later, occupancy was close to full.

The fifth floor is musical. Not by design. The whole place, in a sense, is musical. The Jazz Institute of Chicago has been here since it was founded in 1969. Long arts-and-crafts benches in the halls cradle hopeful musicians waiting to be called for auditions. Russian émigrés run piano students through suites, and flute repair technicians hunch beneath craned lamps. Then there’s William Harris Lee & Co., which holds much of this floor and an adjoining annex. They make violins and violas, from scratch, in long quiet workshops broken by sounds of strings tuning and wood sanding. They have built their business here since 1978.

“It can feel magical, " said owner Bill Harris Lee. “There are times of day you open a window and a soprano is screeching; other times, strings and pianos waft in from all over.” That said, he’s had plumbing issues; for a while, he said, their wooden floor sank. But there are no plans to leave. He likes owner Erica Berger and believes she has a vision for the future. As for her father, Bob Berger, who bought the building in 2005 for $10.4 million and died a couple of years ago — not a fan. Bob Berger — who once sued his own adult children for not helping the family business — sued Harris over a tax-related clause in his lease decades of owners had ignored. (They eventually settled.)

“Still, I’m a lifer,” Harris Lee said. “I leave, I’m dead. Besides, is any building perfect?”

On the eighth floor, one day when I visited, it was so warm that architect William Murphy worked in a T-shirt and shorts. His studio was a cauldron. The building, for the most part, has no central air conditioning. And the heat in winter gets so hot, Murphy said, “I wear T-shirts year-round.” Still, he cannot imagine leaving the building either.

One tenant told me, between the drone of violins and the off-kilter knocking of the pipes in winter, the building sounds like a Velvet Underground album. He said it with pride. Madalyne Maxwell, CYSO director of operations, negotiated HVAC units into its lease, “yet with 130 students going at instruments on weekends, it can smell special.” And yet, Maxwell also met her husband in the building, and CYSO has stayed here 63 years.

Its future looks literary. On the second floor, Javier Ramirez and Kristin Gilbert, of Exile in Bookville, have been hitting up bookish Chicago and urging them to form a kind of writer’s colony here. Keir Graff, a novelist of adult and young adult titles who also writes with James Patterson, moved in last year. Gillian Flynn recently arrived. The literary history is a lure. On the ninth floor, Margaret Anderson started The Little Review magazine, which first published many authors synonymous with the 20th century, including Ben Hecht and Sherwood Anderson. She also used the magazine for the American debut of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” publishing it in serial form even though the book had been banned for obscenity; eventually, in New York, she was arrested.

Despite giving air to modernism and progressive arts, the Fine Arts Building took its name seriously and was a bastion of classicism. The conservative Dial magazine, publishing in the building, detested the avant-garde writing of Poetry, also in the building. Building managers walked its hallways, snapping at music students for whistling. As late as the 1990s, Tom Graham refused to rent a studio to anyone playing rock music.

That brings us to our final stop, the ground floor.

The centerpiece is the Studebaker Theater. After its renovation was completed last year, it became the Chicago home of NPR’s “Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me.” It once sat 1,550. It now seats 600. Next door is the less finished Carriage Theater, but owner Erica Berger said work stalled — live theater isn’t doing well, why add to the misery? Similarly, she wants a restaurant in the old cafe and keeps hearing from restaurant owners that South Michigan doesn’t work for them.

But even purgatories echo.

For 19 years, the Studebaker held the four-screen Fine Arts Theater cinema, until it closed in 2000. Before that, from 1933 to 1971, it was World Playhouse, one of the first theaters to show foreign films in Chicago. It debuted Godard and Bergman, and was often harassed — especially during the Red Scare — by police trying to enforce the Chicago Motion Picture Censorship Ordinance. Keeping with decades of Fine Arts tenants who pushed back at convention, the theater owners eventually sued the city for violating First Amendment rights. Their lawyer, civil rights legend Elmer Gertz, brought the case to the Supreme Court, which decided rights were indeed violated. The fallout pulled the teeth out of local censorship boards, but the World Playhouse was in decline. By the time it closed, it was showing X-rated films.

The Fine Arts Building, despite all of that, is the same.

How many places in Chicago haven’t changed very much in 125 years? How much of anything that’s 125 years old even exists in this city? On Oct. 13, when the Studebaker celebrates this anniversary, Yulia Lipmanovich, who has taught piano in the building for 17 years, will perform the same works by Liszt and Chopin that were played at the first Studebaker event, Sept. 28, 1898. Lipmanovich began her career in Moscow. She taught at the Boston Conservatory. Her goal, she said, had always been to have her own school, in this place, in a studio looking out on Lake Michigan. It’s what she has. At night, she hears musicians who rehearse for hours without break. She doesn’t feel safe walking around here at night. And weekdays, buses honk along Michigan Avenue. But Sunday mornings, she practices, framed in the window. She feels part of a community. “Actually, more of a continuity. And yet, I am my own institution.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com