Because Chicago is so well known for its “Magnificent Mile” retail district—North Michigan Avenue between Oak Street and the Chicago River—it’s all too easy to overlook, or take for granted, the importance of what can be called the city’s cultural corridor: Michigan Avenue stretching south from the river to Roosevelt Road.
What an extraordinary array of arts institutions and attractions inhabit this one-and-a-half-mile strip! On the east side of the boulevard are Millennium Park and Grant Park, with their plazas and public artworks, such as Cloud Gate and Crown Fountain, as well as the Harris Theater, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, and the Art Institute of Chicago. And on the west side of Michigan Avenue are some of the city’s landmark arts venues, including the Chicago Cultural Center, the nation’s first free municipal cultural center (built in 1897 as the central public library); Symphony Center, home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (dating from 1904, extensively renovated in the 1990s); and the grand 1889 Auditorium Theatre. The Michigan cultural corridor also houses several smaller institutions, among them the American Writers Museum, the Design Museum of Chicago, and the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, as well as performing and visual arts spaces operated by Roosevelt University, DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago, and other schools.
And then there’s the Fine Arts Building, arguably the city’s premier commercial public multidisciplinary arts center. Founded in 1898, the ten-story venue—located at 410 S. Michigan (between Van Buren Street and Ida B. Wells Drive)—is home to the 650-seat Studebaker Theater as well as to dozens of shops and studios devoted to the arts. Under one roof are teachers of vocal and instrumental music, galleries and studios occupied by visual artists and craftspeople, the offices of arts organizations, and sellers of books, sheet music, and musical instruments.
Fine Arts Building 125th Anniversary Celebration
The Fine Arts Building (410 S. Michigan) presents two new historic exhibits: “Art Alone Endures” (on the founding and history of the building) and “Staging Ground” (on the building’s role in theater history), along with self-guided walking tours during regular open hours Mon-Fri 7 AM-10 PM, Sat 7 AM-9 PM, and Sun 9 AM-9 PM. Info about the exhibits at fineartsbuilding.com/windows-into-history; maps for the self-guided tours are available at fineartsbuilding.com/map.
Second Friday open studios (including demonstrations, gallery openings, and special performances) are free to attend the second Friday of every month 5-9 PM; fineartsbuilding.com/events/second-fridays.
On Fri 10/13, a special Second Friday anniversary celebration takes place throughout the Fine Arts Building, including a concert at 7:30 PM in the Studebaker Theater by Fine Arts tenant and concert pianist Yulia Lipmanovich. Free, but reservations strongly encouraged at fineartsbuilding.com/events/125.
To mark its milestone 125th anniversary, the Fine Arts Building hosts a free public celebration on Friday, October 13, from 5 to 9 PM—an expanded edition of its monthly “Second Friday” open house events. Buoyed by a proclamation from Mayor Brandon Johnson declaring the date as “Fine Arts Building Day in Chicago,” the event will feature family-friendly programming throughout the venue. Visitors can sample refreshments, enjoy performances and hands-on creative activities, and mingle with the artists and craftspeople who call the building their professional home. Participating tenants include the Chicago Human Rhythm Project dance and music school, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, the Jazz Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, Chicago Opera Theater, the 2nd Floor Art Gallery featuring artist Don Yang, and Exile in Bookville bookstore.
A high point of the evening will be a free concert in the Studebaker Theater by pianist Yulia Lipmanovich, who will recreate part of the original recital program that opened the Studebaker on September 28, 1898, when Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler performed Beethoven’s “Pathetique” sonata and selections by Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt. Lipmanovich is one of the many music teachers who operates a studio in the building, which from its opening has been one of the Chicago area’s premier locations for private lessons in vocal and instrumental music. (Full disclosure: I took piano lessons there as a child, and as a teenager I performed in Curtiss Hall with the Sulie and Pearl Harand youth theater.)
I asked Erica Berger, proprietor of Berger Realty Group, which acquired the building in 2005, why her company has chosen to invest in elevating the venue’s profile as an arts center rather than converting it to other uses. Her response was a refreshing change from the cries of “OMG THEATER IS DYING!” we’ve been hearing lately:
“My father taught me the power of restoring and maintaining old buildings, and he was always in love with the Fine Arts Building,” Berger said in an email. “He and Berger Realty Group started experimenting in the Studebaker Theater in 2016, and saw a real desire from presenting groups and performers to reactivate the space. In 2019, we had a very meaningful potential tenant in public media approach us—dear to both my father and me—and we decided to go for the full renovation. Admittedly, we didn’t know the full extent of what we were getting into.”
Without operating under the auspices of a governmental entity or educational institution, the Fine Arts Building lives up to its brand as “Chicago’s cultural hub”: a thriving center for artists and arts students in all disciplines. It’s also a space of enormous historic significance: for more than a century, the building has embodied Chicago’s identity as the United States’s midcontinental cultural capital.
Not bad for a building that began life in 1885 as the home of the Studebaker Carriage Company’s buggy factory. (Founded in 1852 as a blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana, the Studebaker family firm began manufacturing horse-drawn wagons—filling orders for the Union army during the Civil War—and then added carriages to their output before eventually transitioning to automobiles.) The Studebaker building, which opened in 1887, was designed by architect Solon S. Beman, a New Yorker who had moved to Chicago in 1879 to create the houses of Pullman, a small company town just south of Chicago that was built for workers in George Pullman’s railroad-car factory. (The town was annexed by Chicago in 1899 and is now an official national historical park.) Beman designed the structure’s facade in the Romanesque style, prominently employing rounded arches and large windows in the lower floors, which were originally used as showrooms for carriages.
Within a decade, business was so good that the Studebakers decided to move into a larger plant. Fortunately, they decided to retain ownership of the Michigan Avenue building and hired Beman to renovate it. His changes added two upper floors, creating the ten-story edifice that stands today. The renamed Fine Arts Building opened in 1898 under the management of Charles Curtiss, a music-business entrepreneur and friend of the Studebaker family. Curtiss—whose legacy is honored in the top-floor concert space, Curtiss Hall—envisioned the repurposed venue not just for musical performances, but for all the arts. The Fine Arts Building—designated as a historic Chicago landmark in 1978—has been a center of theater, music, dance, the visual and plastic arts, and literature ever since.
Located where the Studebaker Carriage Company’s carriage showroom once sat, the Studebaker Theater opened as a venue for classical music, opera, vaudeville, and “legit” theater. (In 1910, legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt starred there in one of her several American “farewell tours.”) In 1917, the venue underwent a major reconstruction—though the original 1898 ceiling survived and endures to this day. In the 1930s and ’40s it hosted celebrity tours by such stars as Ethel Barrymore in Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green and Mae West in her own play Catherine Was Great.
In the 1950s, after serving briefly as a studio for NBC, it was home to the short-lived Studebaker Theatre Company led by producer Bernard Sahlins, later cofounder and longtime producer of the Second City comedy theater. Productions by Sahlins’s company included André Gide’s The Immoralist with Geraldine Page and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with the young Mike Nichols. The Studebaker returned to hosting touring productions throughout the 1960s and ’70s, such as the Chicago premiere of Harold Pinter’s controversial The Homecoming, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company with American guest star Carolyn Jones (of TV’s The Addams Family), the Chicago premiere of Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking gay drama The Boys in the Band (which appeared at the Studebaker as part of the national tour of the 1968 off-Broadway hit), as well as the 1972 Chicago premiere of Godspell starring rising young Chicago performer Joe Mantegna.
In 1982, the Studebaker was converted into the multiplex Fine Arts movie theaters. But after the cinemas closed in 2000, the space sat empty until 2014, when the building’s new—and current—owners, Berger Realty, undertook a restoration. After hosting occasional live performances for five years, the Studebaker underwent a major renovation that included the installation of new seating and state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems. Since reopening last year, the theater has featured performances by Chicago Opera Theater, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, and Chicago Repertory Ballet, as well as recent runs of the musicals Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical and Skates. National Public Radio’s popular comedy news quiz show Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, hosted by Peter Sagal with Bill Kurtis, is recorded there on most Thursday nights. Upcoming productions at the Studebaker include a Porchlight Music Theatre concert version of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George next May.
The Fine Arts Building is also uniquely reflective of Chicago’s history as a center of both commerce and culture. Among those who occupied studios in the building during its early years were architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who not only maintained an office there but designed several interior spaces; commercial artist J.C. Leyendecker, the gay German immigrant who helped define America’s idealized image of elegant yet rugged masculinity with his “Arrow Collar Man” shirt ads; sculptor Lorado Taft; political cartoonist John T. McCutcheon; and artist William Wallace Denslow, famed for his original illustrations for Chicago writer L. Frank Baum’s 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The building is also identified by some as the birthplace of the “Little Theatre” movement that paved the way for American regional theater in the 20th century. In 1912, the Chicago Little Theatre opened in a converted storage area at the rear of the fourth floor under the leadership of Chicago actress Ellen Van Volkenburg and her British-born husband, playwright-director Maurice Browne. Over a five-year period, the Little Theatre offered productions of plays by George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, W.B. Yeats, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen—radical writers of the modern drama—as well as an acclaimed staging of Euripides’s tragedy The Trojan Women, which went on tour.
The company closed in 1917, burdened with financial debt as its already small audience dwindled further with the onset of World War I. But the Chicago Little Theatre left a lasting legacy as an early pioneer in America’s “art theater” movement that paved the way for such companies as the fabled Provincetown Players (founded in 1915 in Provincetown, Massachusetts), which launched the career of playwright Eugene O’Neill, among others.
As scholar Shannon Epplett notes in his essay “All Passes – Art Alone Endures”—published in the 2021 Northwestern University Press anthology Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance—“the Chicago Little Theatre created the template for Off-Loop theater production through their use of converted space and their innovation in terms of production design within the confines of their small space and budget.” Adds Epplett: “A new approach to theater production emerged amid the marble tile and art nouveau embellishments of the Fine Arts Building, an approach that influenced a nationwide Little Theatre movement but also became the prototype for alternative theater production in Chicago.”
The Chicago Little Theatre also inspired the creation of the Little Room, a social organization of artists and art supporters who met regularly for parties and performances at the Fine Arts Building. The club’s members included Jane Addams, cofounder of Hull House, and Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine—still publishing today—which introduced readers to the work of Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, and others. The building is also the original home of one of the world’s most influential literary publications, the avant-garde Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and her lover, Jane Heap. Founded in 1914, the magazine published work by anarchist Emma Goldman and poet Ezra Pound before relocating to New York City and eventually Paris; it’s best remembered for introducing American readers to James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel Ulysses, which was partly serialized in its pages—until Anderson and Heap were found guilty of distributing obscene materials through the U.S. mail in a landmark trial.
All this history and much more is chronicled in depth through exhibits and plaques throughout the building, which can be visited during the October 13 event—or any time.
In 2021, Berger Realty Group hired Jacob Harvey—the onetime producing artistic director for the Greenhouse Theater Center and then a producer for Cirque du Soleil in California—to come back to Chicago as the building’s managing artistic director.
“When I got involved in the day-to-day of the project in 2020, I spent months talking to friends in the theater world, and quickly realized that we needed to treat the theater as a fully operable business,” Erica Berger explained in her email. “This made sense not only from the business perspective, but from the cultural perspective, as we had to reimagine where we would fit in the Chicago theater world. Jacob and I have both lived in Chicago, LA, and New York, so I was happy to hire someone who spoke the same cultural languages, per se.
“Jacob and his team, and the renewed building management team, have done an incredible job at bringing the building to a new life by honoring the past, present, and future. It feels like a living and breathing museum and cultural space, which speaks to me personally as an artist and traveler. I understand the capacity for these shared spaces to connect people and energy, and am proud of what we have done and will continue to do with the Fine Arts Building. . . . How lucky are we that we have such an iconic and beautiful old building that we can maintain and continue to operate? Who knows what the future will bring, but 125 is feeling very good.”