Stony Island Arts Bank

The story

In 2012, the City of Chicago sold a decaying 1923 neoclassical bank on Stony Island Avenue to artist Theaster Gates for exactly one dollar. Designed by William Gibbons Uffendell, the former Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank had been abandoned since the 1980s, left to rot under roof leaks until three feet of standing rainwater filled the basement vault. To fund the rehab without corporate compromises, Gates salvaged ruined white marble slabs from the walls, sliced them into 100 pocket-sized blocks, stamped them as 'Bank Bonds,' and sold them at Art Basel for $5,000 apiece to Swiss collectors. You didn't hear it from us, but using European art capital to bail out South Side urban infrastructure is about as close as real estate gets to high-stakes performance art.

When the building reopened in October 2015, the vault stopped storing cash and started hoarding cultural survival. Inside, Gates assembled four massive, orphaned archives that institutional gatekeepers had neglected or overlooked: the complete 15,000-volume library of the Johnson Publishing Company (publishers of Ebony and Jet), complete with mid-century office furniture custom-designed by Arthur Elrod; house music pioneer Frankie Knuckles' personal collection of 5,000 vinyl records; 60,000 glass lantern slides discarded by the University of Chicago's art history department; and Edward J. Williams’s collection of 4,000 items of 'negrobilia'—racist household objects Williams spent three decades buying up specifically to yank them out of circulation.

What makes the space haunting isn't just the density of the collections, but how raw the building was left. Raw, peeling plaster coats the upper walls right next to immaculate floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, while a salvaged marble staircase stands like a monolith in the middle of the hall. Downstairs, the reading room doubles as a quiet lounge featuring Han Cha and Yunomi, where tea and cocktails are poured into handleless ceramic cups fired right down the street in Gates' studio. It’s an archival sanctuary where history isn't locked behind velvet ropes—it sits on open shelves waiting for you to pull up a seat.