One Man Buys Abandoned Building for $1, Transforms it into a Grand Cultural Center

The Stony Island State Savings Bank located in Chicago has been abandoned for at least 30 years. It was up for demolition when Theaster Gates, an installation artist, chanced upon it in 2012. He bought it from the city for $1 and decided to bring its glory back.

Completed in 1923, the 20,000-square-foot building boasts of American neo-classical architecture with its massive facade and tall pillars. Once the center for the city's bustling economy, the bank suffered along with the Great Depression and never recovered, completely shutting down in the 1980s.

Upon Gates' purchase, years of neglect and deterioration were apparent, especially in its interiors. According to Architectural Record, the skylights were completely eroded, and the building was flooded with rainwater inside. Snow and water damage destroyed the interior's plasters, which resulted into a major rust problem.

Gates is no stranger to re-building projects. He has been resuscitating old homes and vacant buildings since 2010 with his non-profit organization, Rebuild Foundation. Gates equipped his foundation to raise funds from private sectors. His vision, though, was not to make a single profit from the undertaking. Instead, he aimed to give the building back to the community once finished.

"The 17 developers who tried to rehab the building prior to me all failed because they had one thing in mind: How do we make this building make money?" Gates told Architectural Record. "That will never work in black and brown communities. There needs to be another end game, another upside that has nothing to do with economics."

According to Chicagoist, Gates reached a total of $4.5 million in donations for the ambitious project. With the fund, he set out to transform the derelict building into a cultural center where everyone--income level aside--can have free access to art.

He told Fast Co. Design, "Architecture becomes a complex envelope that can carry both the high and the low, the international and the very local, the rich and the poor," Gates says. "Only when those things start to conflate in really beautiful ways can we have a redemptive architecture."

The artist erected new walls and installed new electrical wiring, but preserved the rusted vaults, cracked plaster moldings, and some walls with blistered paint as a reminder of the building's past. He finished the project this month and opened it to the public last Oct. 3.

The basement was transformed into a music venue, where thousands of vinyl records are housed for visitors' perusal. The ground floor is now a bar and art gallery, and the second floor is a massive library where the entire Johnson Publishing Company archive is displayed.

The finished product, now called the "Stony Island Arts Bank," aims to be the neighborhood's living room, where local residents can gather to exhibit art, host workshops, and conduct film showings. It is open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11am to 6pm.