Museum
Stony Island Arts Bank
Neoclassical granite bank temple, derelict for decades before its roofless ruin was rebuilt into a free arts and archive center.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago traces a granite bank building on South Stony Island Avenue through a string of failures: opened in 1923, folded in the Great Depression, passed through Southmoor State Bank and Guaranty Bank and Trust, then bought by the Nation of Islam in 1973. It lingers on the building's roofless decades after the doors locked around 1980, when Chicago rain and snow poured straight onto the empty banking hall for more than thirty years. Look for the Doric columns still standing over the marble floor.
This audio guide was created using AI.