I can’t remember the first time I visited the Fine Arts Building in Chicago’s downtown, but I remember the distinct feeling hitting me as I crossed the threshold that I stepped outside of my own time into the aliveness of some space between eras. Pausing in the tall stone archways, I wasn’t sure if I was allowed inside. A guard with a face that suggested helpfulness asked if I was looking for the bookstore. My tote bag gave me away. Enchantment is something that can escape those who frequently mire themselves in the mechanics of making art, but when I talk to other creatives about their visits to this space, the word that comes up most often is “magical.” It isn’t a cliché. In the Fine Arts Building, a simple elevator ride is transformed into something between an adventure and an act of faith. The lifts are manually operated boxes of glass and steel, guided by the expert hands of some of the city’s last remaining elevator operators. Step outside the rattling box on any floor and you will find yourself moving through unspooling strands of creative energy. A cello wails down the hall as sheet music rustles in the folio of the opera singer waiting for the elevator. A body sails past the window of the dance studio where an Aikido lesson takes place. All the elements of theater—music, dance, costumes, and lighting—spill raw and unfinished from the studios into the halls. It is chaos. The Fine Arts Building is a stage where—as in all good theater—the chaos coalesces into a shape that may escape definition but can still be acutely felt.
Magical places attract special people, so it felt appropriate that The Stories Matter Foundation and Chicago Review of Books hosted their CHIRBy awards in the Fine Arts Building’s Curtiss Hall, bringing together Chicago’s literary community to celebrate some of the year’s best writing and the people who made it. It was while celebrating friends that I met Keir Graff, a charming writer with a face I recognized from the days he’d worked the register at the fantastic bookstore downstairs. He hooked me with a tale of murder and woe that unfolded not far from where we stood, knew a great deal about the bowels of the building, and when he told me he was working on a book about the Fine Arts Building—Chicago’s Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder—I knew I’d want to talk to him further. In the spring, I made my way to Keir’s studio, a brightly lit space overlooking the Venetian Court. As we sat to talk, as if on cue, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra set up in the studio across the way and a singer practiced her scales right above us.
Stephen Patrick Bell
This is a little different for me. I tend to focus on fiction, some creative nonfiction. But this is a very straightforward historical conversation that we’re about to have, and I’m kind of excited. We get to talk about this place where we met.
Keir Graff
Yeah, we met at Curtiss Hall. It’s different for me, too, because I usually write fiction.
Stephen Patrick Bell
That kind of begs the question, why did you decide to write a book about this building?
Keir Graff
It was not planned in any way. I was at a book release party for my friend Frank Sennett for his book, Shadow State, a couple years ago, and I ran into Brian Hieggelke, the publisher of Newcity, who I had written for when I was freelancing in the 90s into the early aughts. We were just catching up—he’s a long-time Printer’s Row denizen, he’s lived there for decades—and I said, Oh, you know, I’m near you now. I’ve got a studio in the Fine Arts Building. He just lit up and said, I love the Fine Arts Building and I’ve always wanted us to run something on it. Would you be interested in writing about the Fine Arts Building? I think I hedged a little bit because I hadn’t done any freelancing for so long. These days, all my projects are just book projects. But he invited me to a drink at the Palmer House. You know, when the publisher’s buying drinks, that’s great. So, I met him, we had a couple of Manhattans, and he sold me on it. He basically gave me carte blanche. I didn’t want to write twelve hundred words or something—I don’t know how to do that anymore. He said he was looking for more long form work. So I asked, How long? Like, five thousand words? No, longer. Ten thousand words? Sure. Eventually he said as long as you want, which, you know, nobody ever says that. So, I ended up writing an article that was nearly twenty-five thousand words. It was basically the whole issue of Newcity. It was the longest article they’d ever run, and they got a tremendous response from it. I heard from a lot of people who really loved it, and it was so fun to do, because it wasn’t just straight history. I’m not a historian and I think I’m a little worried about being found out. I definitely did my best with the research.
There’s contemporary research, there’s archival research, there’s different approaches. I talked to a lot of people, read a lot of old newspaper articles, read everything I could find that had been written on the Fine Arts Building. The thing that really unlocked it for me and made it an interesting project, was when Brian said he had something in mind like Joseph Mitchell McSorley’s stories for The New Yorker. I had only read a little bit of Mitchell, so I went and got the anthology of everything he’d ever written. Of course, I read the whole thing and was blown away. I loved it so much—this old-fashioned shoe leather reporter would just go talk to people and have these conversations. That encouraged me to have rambling conversations with people who work in the building and to include the building staff as a major part of the original article. The artists are serving part of the story, but the staff was super important too to everybody’s experience and they obviously keep the building running. One of my favorite parts was talking to Marcin Krol—the engineer, who is now the head engineer as his boss has retired—just taking me all over the building, from the bowels to the roof, explaining how the systems work and explaining the challenges of working with them. He’s an artist in his own right, piecing things together, studying and researching how this whole steam system works. The stories of this building are just endless. And, since I was given permission to just go anywhere, it became this massive, massive story.
So, the article came out and that was a lot of work. A magazine comes out once a month, and a couple months from now, people aren’t going to be talking about this anymore. So, I started passing it around to see if anybody might be interested in turning it into a book and several local publishers were interested. I was very fortunate. But Brian introduced me to people at Trope who had made a book of Sergio Mayora’s posters for Weeds Tavern. So there’s already this kind of connection between Newcity and Trope. I went to the launch party for the Weeds book, met the Trope folks, and just was blown away. A lot of people in publishing are very cagey and guarded. They’re afraid. They’re almost afraid of getting pitched, which I get because they’re pitched all the time. But [the Trope team] is a very different vibe. Sam Landers and Michelle Fitzgerald at Trope were both, tell us more, we’re very interested in this, this sounds cool. That deal came together very quickly, and they fast tracked the book, and the whole thing came together extraordinarily quickly.
Stephen Patrick Bell
We’ll get back to Marcin and all the delightful human texture we see towards the end of the book, but I’m curious: as a person who’s a tenant in the space, what was the most surprising thing that goes into keeping the building running?
Keir Graff
Wow. Well, the elevators. I knew that the elevators were ancient, and anybody who rides them can tell they’re ancient. Some people are afraid of them. When I went to the basement with Marcin and he showed me the spools that wind the cable for the elevators in the basement, and showed me the big electrodes that spark—you can see these big sparks—and he showed me the broomstick that they use to realign things, because, yeah, sometimes it gets out of whack, and they just hit it with the broomstick, because the broomstick is wood and won’t conduct electricity, so it’s safe to do… I just thought, gosh, it’s kind of amazing and probably a little shocking. Of course, that is one of the reasons they’re modernizing the elevator, sadly. The parts aren’t made for those anymore, and when they break, the guy who repairs them, I’m not even sure if he lives in Illinois.
Stephen Patrick Bell
How much longer do we have with the original elevators?
Keir Graff
Everybody was very cagey about it originally, even with me, maybe especially with me, because I’m going to blab about it. Then they originally thought it was going to be done, I think, the end of last year, which I never thought would happen. Because certain aspects of the building are landmarked, they can modernize the elevators for safety, but they have to maintain the original look and feel of the elevators. Historical preservation is just insanely complicated and expensive. I think we’re going to be able to ride at least one manually operated elevator for, I would guess, at least another year and a half. I wish they’d keep one forever, but I understand.
Stephen Patrick Bell
It’s silly that I’m already mourning them.
Keir Graff
Yes, you still have them.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Right. Going back a little bit, because it sounded like you were already a tenant when this article came about. What really drew you to this building?
Keir Graff
I had only been in it two times, maybe three before my friends opened the bookstore. Javier and Kristin Ramirez at Exile in Bookville are the reason I’m in this building. I’ve been friends with Javier for a pretty long time, and we had co-hosted Publishing Cocktails, this meetup, for about a dozen years. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend. We like bringing people together and we like publishing, so we had been doing Publishing Cocktails. Javier has worked at half the stores in the Chicago area. Kristin says it’s easier to count the stores he hasn’t worked at than the ones he has. Maybe not true now that all these new stores have opened, but at one point, it was probably true. Any time he was working at a store, I would visit him there and hang out a little bit if it wasn’t too far away. He’s worked in Winnetka, he’s worked in Oak Park, Lincoln Square, Near North Side—he’s been everywhere and I’ve followed him from store to store, and done events with him. He helped launch Madison Street Books and when he left he was looking to open a new store with Kristin. They were looking at other locations, and then the people from The Dial, the second-floor used bookshop here in the Fine Arts Building, approached them saying they were looking to sell. I was completely wrong. I thought it’d be a huge mistake. I said, a second-story bookstore? Nobody will find you! But they decided to take it on—this magical little space.
So, when they were opening, I was visiting a lot. I was helping out. I even worked the counter a couple of days. They kept saying, you should get a studio in the building. I saw the appeal, but I was kind of like, yeah, I can write at home for free. But, it kind of worked on me. We just had so many fun evenings after the store closed, hanging out. It was like this magic of people stopping by. You’d ask, Oh, what does that guy do? Oh, he makes puppets. Or like, What does she do? She teaches dance. So many interesting people just pop in, and they were making friends with all these people in the building. I just kind of started feeling, I want to be a part of this. I suddenly started feeling like I was missing out, and I just wanted to be part of the community here. It’s true that even though I could write at home for free, I mean, I worked for nearly two decades at Booklist magazine, and I loved going to the office. I wasn’t one of those people who was like, I wish I could be fully remote. I liked having a work-from-home day, but I really preferred to be in the office and to work with people. This has ended up being kind of a happy medium for me. I have a nice place to work and write by myself, but I’ve got friends in the building. I’m meeting more people all the time. And there’s also just this kind of feeling of life around me. As you’ve already heard, you hear the music, it’s just quite random. You never know. Sometimes it’s a beautiful opera singer. Sometimes the kids bring their instruments in, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is right across the way. Sometimes it’s a vocal lesson next door. Sometimes it’s just some random thing you’re like, What? I didn’t know people played horns in there.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I love that sort of sense of not necessarily being directly engaged with the people around you but just being in the same space as them. This makes me wonder in what ways has your writing changed because you’re writing in this space?
Keir Graff
Well, I would say some things haven’t changed at all. I wrote my half of a thriller with my writing partner, Linda Joffe Hull. It’s a book that’s coming out next year called, I Did Not Kill My Husband. It’s a female-centered take on The Fugitive story with an influencer who escapes from prison and is on the run in the wilds of California. I would say writing that didn’t change at all. You know, I just came in and wrote in the mornings, as I always do, my mind was elsewhere, and I was doing the same kinds of things I do to kind of set the story appropriately. My mind was very far away from this building when I was working on that book. But in other ways, it’s changed. It’s affected my writing very literally and maybe very obviously. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, but I tend to be very influenced by the places where I’m working, like my book The Phantom Tower, a middle grade book that’s set in a building that I lived in until last year, a 1931 high rise on Lake Shore Drive. I literally set the story in that building, and I even used the floor plan of our condo as the home of the kids in the story. I like writing about places that I’m in, because it makes it really easy to imagine the story in that place. Actually, I have a middle grade mystery that’s on submission that is set in the Fine Arts Building about a kid who’s trying to solve the mystery of a stolen violin. There’s a half dozen violin dealers, luthiers, or repairers here. And it just kind of felt like, Well, that seems like a fun story to write. So, I guess, in addition to writing a book about the Fine Arts Building, I’ve set fiction here.
It’s been fun to collaborate with the people in this building, even just on promotional stuff for this book. Terry Maday made this amazing short movie. It was supposed to be a book trailer. I thought it was going to be a simple book trailer, and he made this beautiful short movie with some tenants in the building. There were three shooting days for this short film. I tagged along even for the stuff that I wasn’t involved with because it was just so fun to be present while Terry was working with the different artists and watch him coach them for the camera. It’s really important to me that this book shines a light on the building and the tenants. This building is amazing because of the 200-odd people who come here all the time to make their stuff and a lot of them are people I don’t even know yet. But, I love getting to know them. I’m a big networker so I always believe you just meet people and doors open, you know? And I feel like there are probably more doors that will open because of the people I’m meeting here who are engaged in very different disciplines from writing. There are only three writers in the building.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I was wondering how many other writers were here. So, in what ways does this building represent, or present to the world, the Chicago arts community at large?
Keir Graff
Yeah, interesting. There are a number of artist spaces, co-op working spaces, and arts incubators around Chicago. Obviously, the Chicago art scene is huge and amazing. I think that one of the things that makes this place special is the thing that made it special when it was opened in 1898 which is just the sheer density, because it’s so much bigger than like Tree Studios was at the time. Trope, my publisher, is now headquartered in the Kimball Art Center, and that’s a super cool thing with a lot of cool stuff—they’re next door to Kartemquin Films. Like, how cool is that? But, again, it’s not nearly the size of this. I do think that one of the things that makes this place different from some of those other spaces is that this is very much about the classic arts. There are, of course, exceptions, but so many of the artists who have made their home here, it feels to me like they’re doing these time-honored things like making violins and violas and cellos by hand, making puppets by hand. They’re teaching or learning, you know, to sing or to play an instrument, or things that effectively haven’t changed that much over time. You know, there’s a sheet music store here that probably doesn’t feel that different from the way it did when it opened in 1981. This building is very much a home for classical arts. I think there is room for people who want to do other things. During Open Studios, I remember walking into a studio, and it’s kind of like digital animation and it was like, Oh wow. So, there are people here like me with computers, but there are people with these hand tools that are unchanged from centuries ago.
Stephen Patrick Bell
How often do they have open studios?
Keir Graff
Every second Friday. Second Fridays is what they call it, and the book launch is going to be on Second Friday in June. I think that might make for kind of a chaotic book launch, but I think it will be great because people can, you know, explore and experience the building instead of just coming to a book event where I’m talking about it.
I’m hoping that the book is well received. I know there’s some tenants in this building who have been here for decades. I’ve met some of them, I know some of them, and some of these people I know feel a very understandable sense of ownership about the building. I’m kind of a newbie telling the story. The book, as you know, it’s 80% history, but we wanted to have a sampling of contemporary tenants, just to remind people the Fine Arts Building is a living building. I hope maybe there’s a follow up in my future, a few years down the road that’s just like either with new and different artist tenants, or maybe even a book that’s just all contemporary photos.
Stephen Patrick Bell
That was one of my favorite parts of the book actually, that moment where we see this space that we’ve been learning so much about still thriving as a living thing in this moment, full of people that are tangible and relatable. It was a nice moment to have that as the closing and then there you are in your suite at the very end.
Keir Graff
Tom Maday, the photographer, just blew me away. Tom is a founding partner of Trope and he still shoots for them on occasion. I have heard that he found the experience so inspiring that, though he had gotten rid of his studio, he decided he wanted a working space again, so he went into the Monadnock, another wonderful building that I’ve heard is pretty decently priced.
Tom just did such an amazing job on the photographs. I owe him and Trope so much for the visual design. That’s not my strength. Their skill allowed us to make sure that I didn’t write this history book that was just illustrated with scans of newspaper articles or whatever. There’s a lot of wonderful Chicago history that covers great facts and dates and places. It was really important to me not only to tell the story of the building, but to make it seem alive, approachable, and visitable. All these wonderful color photographs are so inviting. I have held one of the finished books and the quality is just unbelievable. They’re good at what they do at Trope.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The building’s list of past and present tenants is, like, incredible. Were there any that you personally felt connected to, that you were maybe writing towards, or that you were just happy to share space with?
Keir Graff
This building, when it opened as the Fine Arts Building—and still today—the majority of the tenants are music related. Those are probably some of the folks that I interact with least often, just by the nature of our schedules. When I’m on my way home, they’re coming to the building. So, those are folks that I haven’t connected with as much, although I did bring my guitar and I try to loosen up in the morning by singing a song or two. You asked about connection. Obviously, for me, Exile is such a huge tenant. I have a connection with them because we’re friends, because they sell books, and I write books, and I’m really a cheerleader for writers to come to the building. I want to build the literary footprint of this building. I mean, Gillian Flynn is now here. There’s another writer who’s, I believe, unpublished. The Little Review was founded in this building, which is an amazing legacy. And, Poetry was founded here. I feel like I want to encourage more wordsmiths to come here. I think my connection was more a sense of curiosity and wanting to explore, and having an article first and then a book gave me kind of carte blanche to meet people and find my way into the place. I mean, the best way to snoop around a place is to tell people you’re writing about it, because then, suddenly places that are off-limits become on-limits. I’ve made it up to the roof, and I’ve heard some harrowing stories from the engineers. The heating system went down one time when it was subzero temperatures. There’s no parapet on this roof. It just goes right off to the edge. The roof had iced over, and these guys are up there working, you know, in subzero temperatures. This was some years ago, and you know, they had to sand the roof so they didn’t go sliding off.
Stephen Patrick Bell
So, I know that you have something coming up called, I Did Not Kill My Husband. That brings to mind the Fine Arts Building murders. What was it like learning about those? I also come to this building fairly often, mostly because of the bookstore and events, and it never occurred to me that someone might have died here. What was researching that like for you?
Keir Graff
It’s interesting. There’s a lot of misinformation and confused information and stories that get blended together. A lot of tenants have little pieces of these stories and honestly, I wish I had more time to untangle them even more. While it’s not a true crime book, I did feel like it was part of the story, because so many people had told me particularly about the murder on the tenth floor. I just started digging around and trying to separate fact from fiction, and trying to untangle the stories. Some of the tenants love the salaciousness of it. A lot of people like true crime, and some people don’t. I talked to one tenant who didn’t want the word murder associated with the Fine Arts Building. I very much respect anybody whose point of view is that murders are not entertainment. I don’t believe it’s entertainment, but it is history, and it is part of this building’s story. I used to feel, when I was looking into the stuff, well, any building that’s been around more than 125 years has probably had its share of tragedies, but I sort of suspect that the Fine Arts Building has had more than its share. I was trying to puzzle through why that might be, and I think that part of the reason might be just the nature of the tenants. You know, I’m not saying that artists are more prone to murder, but I will say that there have been some eccentric people here over the years. It’s an unusual mix. It’s not people coming to punch a time clock. It’s people who are sometimes wildly creative. The building is open into the evening, and some artists tell me that they pull all-nighters when they’re working on a project or something. So, there’s access, there’s longevity, and then there’s just like a wild profusion of people coming to this building. I think that all those together somehow explain why there have been so many tragic deaths in this building. The one that I write about in the book is the most documented. There are some really sad stories that I didn’t go into because it just felt too traumatic. There was a janitor who was shot in the basement in what was billed as a robbery by the press, but there was money in his wallet when he was found, and I could find almost nothing about that, which is so shocking.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Where do you think that you see the building going in the next 10 years?
Keir Graff
I would say that the next 10 years, things feel very promising. As I say in the book, this building is not an arts colony—it’s been mislabeled many times—it is a for-profit enterprise that has been graced by some owners who lavished it with care and attention. Tom Graham and Bob Berger, both, during their long stewardship of the building, committed to making it and keeping it an artist’s space. Erica Berger, the new owner, has very much carried on her father’s tradition. Even more, she has really put her money where her mouth is, and has pumped millions of dollars into this building, which is just a gift, not only to the tenants, but to the city of Chicago. She’s young and she seems to be absolutely committed to this building, and in love with this building, as much as her father was. So, as much as we depend on the largesse of the owners, I think the future is bright. She really cares about it.
When I moved in, it was so quiet here. It felt a little spooky at times, because people were not fully back after COVID. In the few short years that I’ve been here, it’s gotten busier and busier and busier. Second Fridays have become a lot more happening, they’re really fun to go to. The Studebaker, I think that’s a key, key aspect of it. The Studebaker is so busy now, they have so much going on, and they’re booking it with such a wild profusion of different kinds of events that I think that makes it a unique theatrical space in Chicago. It’s not just plays, it’s not just musicals, it’s not just WBEZ shows, it’s not just burlesque. You know, they’ve had all these things, and I think that makes it super special. They’ve done a lot of work on the Artists Cafe space, and I know that they’re committed to bringing a food tenant back. When that happens, I think that’s going to be the last big piece. Once you can come in and have a cup of coffee, breakfast, lunch, or a drink, or dinner—if they can find that right tenant, I think that’s going to be the last piece, because then, you can come in for a meal, go to your show in the Studebaker, then browse in the halls. That will make it feel like the building has really come back to life.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Because your bar has inspired me, I’m wondering, if the Fine Arts Building could have a signature cocktail, what would it be?
Keir Graff
I used to write a column years ago called Designated Drinker. Our house cocktail is just a Manhattan, but that feels very inappropriate. It is really one of the greatest cocktails of all time, and yet it’s named after the wrong city, unfortunately. One of my favorite discoveries of the last half dozen years is the obituary cocktail, which is a gin-based cocktail. It’s kind of like a martini, but it’s got a little dash of absinthe. It’s really crisp and clean and refreshing and kind of not known enough. “Obituary” seems wrong in a way, but I’m thinking this is a building that had its obituary written multiple times over the years and has been reborn again and again and still survives today. So maybe that’s appropriate in some way.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I like that, and I have to try one.
Keir Graff
I wish I had the ingredients here. I’d whip one up for you. If we can find ourselves at a bar, I will happily order one for you.
NONFICTION
Chicago’s Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder
By Keir Graff
Trope Publishing
Published June 3, 2025
