Go Inside Chicago’s Fine Arts Building

Ronnie Frey’s self-guided tour of the Fine Arts Building walks you through the Michigan Ave. structure’s history, defining characteristics, and the studios of its most famous tenants. Check it out here.

By Dave Lifton (@daveeatschicago)

In 1885, the Studebaker Carriage Company decided to build a new headquarters that would put its assembly facility and sales floor under one roof. Studebaker hired Solon S. Beman, the architect who built Pullman earlier in the decade, to design the building at what is now 410 S. Michigan Ave. His idea was to have the carriages assembled on the top four floors and displayed and sold in showrooms on the bottom four.  

Made of granite and limestone, with five bays of huge arched windows in the middle, the Chicago Tribune called the Studebaker Carriage Factory and Repository a “Magnificent Palace… a lasting ornament as beautiful and as artistic as the Arc de Triomphe or the Column Vendome.”

Within a decade, however, Studebaker had outgrown its facility, and moved into a new, larger building a few blocks away. Rather than sell it off, Charles Curtiss suggested turning it into a home for the city’s artistic community. It made perfect sense, given that the Art Institute of Chicago was only a few blocks north on Michigan and the Auditorium Theatre, the home of the Chicago Symphony, was next door.

Beman’s new design removed the turreted top story and replaced it with three more to bring the total to 10, with an assembly hall at the top (now named after Curtiss). For the interior, he turned the ground floor into two music halls and retail spaces, added extra soundproofing to the music studios and cut out the center of the top six floors to create the Venetian Court, a skylit atrium with sculptures. Completed in 11 months at a cost of $600,000, the newly christened Fine Arts Building opened in October 1898. 

It was a hit, and the Fine Arts Building would be home to the studios of some of the city’s major artists, including Joseph and Frank Leyendecker, who went on to create many famous magazine covers and advertisements; Lorado Taft, a sculptor whose local works include Fountain of Time on the Midway Plaisance and the Spirit of the Great Lakes fountain in the South Garden at the Art Institute of Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright had his studio there for a few years upon returning to Chicago in 1910, as did William Denslow, who illustrated L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

In 1912, the Chicago Little Theater opened. A 91-seat venue on the fourth floor, it staged works by such names as Oscar Wilde and August Strindberg. The small space forced innovation in all aspects of production, and spearheaded a movement in major cities across the country before closing in 1917.

The building also housed women-led progressive social clubs. Fortnightly of Chicago, whose membership included Jane Addams and Bertha Palmer, occupied space before moving to the Gold Coast, so did the Cordon Club, Chicago Women’s Club, and the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association.

The Theaters

The sole acknowledgement of the Fine Arts Building’s original purpose is the Studebaker Theater on the ground floor. The 1,550-seat hall opened with a piano recital by Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler. Over the next 50 years, it went on to host everything from opera to vaudeville, including a sold-out, two-week residency by French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1910. In 1917 the Shubert Organization engaged Andrew Rebori to renovate the theater, removing everything except the ceiling, which remains to this day.

The second theater started out as University Hall and went through several names before acquiring the name World Playhouse in 1933. With a capacity of 750, it was used for performances and films, eventually becoming Chicago’s first foreign and art film theater before closing in 1972.

Ten years later, both theaters were converted into a four-screen multiplex dedicated to art and independent films. But that was short-lived, closing in 2000. Both were renovated in 2014, and the Studebaker received another upgrading that modernized its production capabilities in 2021-22. The popular NPR program Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me is recorded there most Thursdays.

Over the years, the Fine Arts Building has retained its purpose. In addition to housing studios for artists and musicians, it also houses the offices of local cultural institutions like the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, and the Chicago Conservatory of Music.

Stop by on the second Friday of every month from 5-9 p.m., when the studios are open to visitors. While there, go to the top floor and see the murals that were painted by tenants (at the request of the Leyendecker Brothers) or browse the selection at Exile in Bookville, one of the city’s best independent book shops, on the second floor.

Throughout its entire history, one thing has remained constant. The Fine Arts Building has the last manually operated elevators in Chicago, and the lobby is named in memory of Tommy Durkin, who ran one for many years. In 2023 it was announced that the elevators would be modernized due to the increased difficulty and cost involved in maintaining them. The project was expected to be completed by mid-2025; however, construction delays have pushed the project back to the end of 2026.