On the third floor of the Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank Building, a 17,000-square-foot neoclassical edifice in South Shore, roughly 5,000 vinyl records sit on rows of shelves salvaged from a defunct hardware store. There’s not much about the collection that suggests a museum, but these records are a cultural treasure far more valuable than the music in their grooves—their presence here, in the newly christened Stony Island Arts Bank, is intended to preserve them and make them accessible to the public. They belonged to the late Francis Nicholls, better known as Frankie Knuckles, who died at age 59 on March 31, 2014. Beginning with a late-70s gig DJing at short-lived West Loop nightclub the Warehouse, which gave house music its name, Frankie spun ecstatic live sets that would define the genre for decades—a genre that’s reshaped dance and pop music perhaps more profoundly than any other.
While he was alive, Frankie spent some time thinking about what would become of his records after his death. Entertainment attorney Randy Crumpton, who represents Frankie’s estate and helped establish the foundation, brought up the subject after Frankie’s diabetes forced him to miss a performance at Green Dolphin Street in July 2008. “The car pulled up with him in it, and the car pulled off with him in it—he was so ill he was not able to come in to spin that night,” Crumpton says. “That just made me start thinking, ‘God forbid, something happens, we need to archive this history. We need to be able to tell the history of house music—and he being the godfather, what better way than through him.’”
The Rebuild Foundation has been renovating the Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank Building for the past year, after placing it on the National Register of Historic Places in December 2013. Frankie’s records made the move to their new home earlier this year, and they share a room with a trove of racist memorabilia from collectors Edward J. and Ana J. Williams. “This is the most secure space in the building,” says Kate Hadley Toftness, Rebuild’s manager of archival collections and public engagement. “We really wanted to make sure that we were good stewards of the collection and that we’d be able to protect it and to keep it in good shape.”
The records are organized in what Toftness describes as a hybrid system. The part of the collection that appeared to be already archived is arranged alphabetically by artist and grouped into one of ten genres; the rest is divided into 30 small numbered batches, which correspond to the traveling cases Frankie kept them in. “Some of them were clearly just packed for storage, but others retain this feeling of having been packed for some kind of gig,” she says. “In order to look at that more closely, we’ve preserved which records were in which boxes to see that proximity between them, and how they might’ve been mixed.”
Minett believes the collection can abet Rebuild’s mission to engage creatively with people in the neighborhood. “For it to be in that community, for people to be able to see and listen to his stuff, and for people to see his legacy be idolized like that, can inspire so many people. I know it inspired me,” he says. “It could ignite a positive revolution for new artists who are exposed, who get to engage in that collection to make positive music like Frankie Knuckles did.”
Sat 10/3, 5-8 PM Stony Island Arts Bank 6760 S. Stony Island All ages Free
