It’s all done now but the voting.

Update: After a speech by Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who hailed the building “where Black and Brown Chicagoans celebrated life and love and the birth of house music, a genre that has taken over the globe,” Mayor Brandon Johnson asked the full Chicago City Council if any househeads also wished to speak. The designation passed. The Warehouse is now a Chicago landmark.

This afternoon, Chicago’s aldermen approved landmark status for the building at 206 S. Jefferson St, home of a legendary nightclub in house music history: The Warehouse.

The City of Chicago’s official communications channels had already trumpeted the landmark designation ahead of this afternoon’s approval.

On Tuesday, the Zoning Committee of the Chicago City Council approved the designation for the building where Robert Williams established The Warehouse, soon to be joined by a DJ and fellow New Yorker named Frankie Knuckles.

Veteran Sun-Times reporter Fran Spielman credits new committee chairman and 35th Ward Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa for pushing the designation through his committee and toward the City Council vote in her extensive coverage of the committee vote in today’s Chicago Sun-Times:

“As a proud gay man and as a Chicagoan, house music is very near and dear to my heart. House music is one of the many gifts that Chicago has given to the world,” Ramirez-Rosa told his colleagues. “It was born at the Warehouse with DJ’s like Frankie Knuckles. Openly gay men, lesbian women, queer people, trans people who were expressing resilience in the face of hostility and hate. Who refused to be put down and who chose instead to celebrate love and life.”

 

The designation also enjoyed the support of Alderman Bill Conway, whose ward includes 206 S. Jefferson, and Alderman Water Burnett who told the council he partied at The Warehouse and called Frankie Knuckles a “good friend.”

After unanimous approval by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in April, observers predicted the landmark designation was on a fast track. (And for dealing with City Hall, two months is pretty fast.)

The City Council was still in session and the vote had not yet taken place when the official City of Chicago twitter account anticipated the landmark designation’s approval in posting the following:

5 Mag has extensively covered the landmark campaign, which progressed with incredible speed from the interests of several West Loop activists and was given momentum when Preservation Chicago named the building at 206 S. Jefferson as one of their “most endangered” buildings and locations of historical significance in Chicago. The campaign was supported by the Frankie Knuckles Foundation and fans worldwide via a petition orchestrated by Preservation Chicago and which gathered nearly 15,000 signatures within weeks.

There is also a story on both the uniqueness of the movement (few nightclubs of significance from the last 30 years have been preserved in any form, either in Chicago or worldwide) and how its lessons can be applied to house music and LGBTQ+ landmarks in your town in the latest issue of 5 Mag, out now.

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