Chicago's Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder

by Keir Graff

Let Keir Graff take you inside Chicago's Fine Arts Building - a building that hides worlds behind its doors.

Exploring the Fine Arts Building’s warren of hallways is like stepping into a time machine. It’s not a museum—it’s a place of work. The walls reverberate with timeless music. Sopranos soar up to the high notes as violin bows draw tunes from strings. Someone plays a piano so busily they must have twelve fingers. Dancers’ feet thud against wooden floors. A tuba burps out “Ride of the Valkyries” as the doors of the manually operated elevators provide percussive slams. And more quietly, behind closed doors, painters paint, writers write, and luthiers shave soft ribbons from billets of spruce.

In Chicago's Fine Arts Building, celebrated writer and Fine Arts Building tenant Keir Graff takes readers behind the scenes of this cultural hub. Initially conceived as a space for artists' studios, a home for the city's working artists, the building was an immediate success, but the Great Depression brought a long, slow decline to the building. Graff explores the building's history, its revitalization, and its cultural place in the city of Chicago. Featuring interviews with current tenants and access to the building's archives, including historical photos and artifacts, and a foreword by bestselling author Gillian Flynn, Chicago's Fine Arts Building sheds a new light on this storied building and its long history.

Other Chicago landmarks have more stunning architecture or are more perfectly restored, but none of them has aged so well—because in the Fine Arts Building, it’s the work that has been preserved. Two centuries have turned and its purpose remains the same: to provide artists and artisans space to pursue their callings, and community with other creatives, too, offering a living demonstration that something good happens when so many work so closely to each other. Which is not to say it’s always been easy. Whatever comes easily in the arts?

Genres: Nonfiction

184 pages, Hardcover

Published June 3, 2025

About the author

Keir Graff is the author of One Nation, Under God, My Fellow Americans, and, writing as Michael McCulloch, Cold Lessons. His short stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications. He lives in Chicago."

Reviews

[R.G. Ziemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure, it's a love letter to the Fine Arts Building from one of the biggest fans, but who doesn't love a Chicago jewel, however tarnished. Anything with that much use is going to look like it, and the Fine Arts BUilding is no exception. Graff, who has an office in the building, shares the history of this landmark on Michigan, along with lesser-known facts and figures--meaning, the personalities who have made it what we see today. He has a few good stories, too about the artists and artisans who have found their creative homes there--musicians, painters, designers, writers, and the many talented people who support the arts in myriad ways. Entertaining anecdotes, beautiful photographs, and a real gem of a book in itself.

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, perfectly paced, just the right amount of text to image, and is there a better subtitle on this planet?!

Recommend to all Chicagoans, but also to anyone with interest in architecture, the arts, the evolution of how art is both created and experienced, and artistic communities.

[Becky Shepkowski Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gorgeous book that is filled with the same interesting and beautiful details that adorn the covers. I’m especially excited to visit and explore the theater!