Article: Frankie Knuckles's vinyl gets a permanent public home

Glad to hear this important collection has an accessible home.

 

"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."

(Via Frankie Knuckles's vinyl gets a permanent public home | Music Feature | Chicago Reader.)