Dr.

Ana Croegaert
University of New Orleans, Anthropology
Vernacular Architecture Forum
Annual Meeting June 2015, Chicago
Panel: “Architectures of Enjoyment”

Move Your Body:

The Changing Warehouse and the Rise of House Music

Ohm
In 2007, the dance club “Ohm” was in full operation at the northeast corner of North
and Damen, on the “six corners” intersection directly across the street from Chicago’s
most famous “flat iron” building: the flatiron arts building. The club is located in the re-
branded and nearly completely gentrified “Wicker Park” part of West Town, and
clubgoers at this time are a mix of neighborhood residents including new arrivals, and
folks from other parts of the city.

After 1130PM on many weekend evenings, you could hear the pulsing bass-anchored
house beats of local DJ Andre Harris from outside of the club. In the house scene, Harris
was known for incorporating soul music and African rhythms in his sets, and like many
of Chicago’s house DJs, Harris had taken his sound international with gigs in the cities
of East Africa, Western Europe, and South America.

Clubgoers entered the building through the back alley entrance, off of Damen. If the
bouncers at the foot of the stairs considered you attractive and/or thought you looked
like you could dance—and it was early enough in the night—they might let you in
without charging the $20 cover. Once admitted, you ascended an enclosed two-story
staircase that brought you into the club—an expansive postindustrial space with a floor
plan that signaled the site’s former factory days. A raised loft space to your left
provided the night’s headlining DJ with a birds-eye view to the dance floor. Like the
factory floor manager who in previous decades used the perch to monitor the laboring
workers at manufacturing stations below, Harris could take inventory of the dancing
bodies beneath his turntables, and urge them collectively to “work your body” to the
rhythm of the music.

Thirty years earlier, and three miles south of Ohm, Bronx-transplant DJ Frankie
Knuckles (Frank Warren) was moving bodies to his blend of disco, older rhythm and
blues, and soul music records, interspersed with electric drum beats, and flutes and
whistles, in mixes that referenced gospel arrangements—creating a sound that soon
became known as “house”. Warren’s residency at The Warehouse in the West Loop

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lasted five years (1977-1982) until he moved north to open the Power Plant (1983-1986)
on Goose Island, just across the north Chicago River canal from the Near North Side.

In this paper, I consider these early years of the genre, and the development of house
music as a popular cultural form that draws explicitly on the built environment, in
particular the “warehouse”. This essay is part of a broader project centered on
neighborhood change through the lens of visual and expressive cultures, involving
fieldwork in Chicago and in New Orleans. As an anthropologist, I am interested in
understanding the mutually constitutive relationship between the built form, and
human social formations. I am at the beginning stages of this work, and my hope is that
you— as specialists in the architecture of the built form—will help me to think about
what archival materials and documents to consult in order to most fruitfully explore the
links between warehouses and house music.

I. Disco to House: from New York City to Chicago

While there are certainly different versions of the evolution of the House Music genre,
and MANY different sub-genre of the music: deep house, acid house, electro house,
euro house, and more—most practitioners and participants agree that Disco played a
key role in the initial stages of the form:

In the Disco scene of the late 1960s-mid 1970s, a DJ played full songs for people to dance
to, with little / no pause between tracks.

I.i Pre-house early 1970s

In the Bronx disco scene, DJ Frankie Knuckles (Frank Warren) learns his craft, DJ-ing at
dance clubs, notably at venues especially for gay men: such as the Continental Baths,
located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the Ansonia Hotel. Knuckles is among the
earliest experimenters with mixing: blending songs, records, electronic sounds in real-
time in order to create unique compositions that are especially attuned to how dancers
are responding—again, in real-time.

I.ii House I.0 mid-late 1970s

Knuckles is enticed to leave NYC and go to Chicago to be resident DJ of The Warehouse
where he hones his sound. The term “house music” is coined to refer to the music
Knuckles was creating in The Warehouse, a former factory site turned dance club in the
city’s River West neighborhood, catering to primarily black and latino gay men. (Stories
about Knuckles asking someone what is house music, and receiving reply “man thats
what you’re playing over at the Warehouse!”) [IMAGE 1. Frankie Knuckles, ne Frank

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Warren 1955-2014. Unsourced image, found on web. If you have information about this
image, please contact the author.]

—House late 1970s, above

description of mixing using
funk, soul, r&b, Philly
Sound,
DJs also already looking to
electronic and punk-new-
wave sounds coming out of
Europe—The Warehouse in
Leeds, UK opens 1979,
named for the Warehouse
Chicago.

Significantly, House music

developed as an electronic
music form, and thus, it is
dependent upon electricity.
Unlike, for example, my
current home of New
Orleans, where brass bands
lead collective dancing
Second Line celebrations
through the streets,
creating real-time parties,
House musicmakers need
an outlet—literally—in which to plug-in their primary instruments: turntables,
synthesizers, and electronic drum machines. These are the DJ’s tools for mixing sound
in order to make danceable rhythms. In house music, mixes are created by blending
elements of many different songs (a method often referred to as “sampling”) to create
extended playlists that keep people moving.

As a dance music form, House also requires open floor plans so that clubgoers may
move freely, assembling and disassembling in couple-form, and into improvisational
performative clusters (eg like those on Don Cornelius’ Chicago-based and nationally
syndicated dance-party television show Soul Train every Saturday morning on Channel
9, WGN 1971-2006).

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The 1970s post-industrial warehouse provided the ideal space for house music:
Warehouse spaces were equipped with industrial-load electric infrastructure and had an
open floor plan. Because of the original design, these spaces required little modification
to be converted to dance club venues. Given these features of the space, and the fact that
the high vacancy rate led to low rents, post-industrial warehouses were affordable sites
to situate a club that provided a quick and steady revenue stream. Thus, whereas many
of the NYC-based disco clubs were in former retail and hotel sites, it was in the
industrial warehouse in midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit where HOUSE
music formed.

II. 1970s Urban change in Chicago: from factory to the House that Jack Built

As THE national central hub for rail freight, Chicago in particular was a city replete
with factory warehouses located within and around the Loop as well as along the
railway corridors leading out of the city’s Loop to the north, south, and west. Yet by the
1960s, many of these warehouses had become vacant. These vacancies were the result of
an increasingly integrated and competitive global capitalist market, and attendant local
fallout, what David Ranney has described as “Global Decisions, Local Collisions”.
Ranney analyzes the divestment in domestic commodity production and increased
reliance on a low-wage service industry economy, and the impacts these shifts have had
on urban life in Chicago.

Yet, it was not only the pressure to engage in global competition by reducing labor costs
through the practice of off-shoring and outsourcing commodity production and
manufacturing industries that led to empty warehouses in Chicago (and in the rest of
the “rust belt”). Local racialized political economies of land-use in the city produced
warehouse vacancies prior to the 1970s and in fact preceded the global pressures to
compete. These abandoned sites were the result of post WWII development policies that
created corporate incentives to relocate production outside of the urban core, to the
suburbs that were integral to establishing the “Second Ghetto” (Hirsch).

The Chicago scene Knuckles entered in the late 1970s was fraught with racialized class
tensions as well as community-based social movements aimed at challenging such
inequities. These conflicts were marked a decade earlier by Martin Luther King Jr.’s
residency in a west side tenement as part of the Chicago Open Housing Movement’s
initiative to draw global attention to the city’s housing inequities, followed two years
later by riots in the same neighborhood, provoked by King’s assassination. By the time
Knuckles arrived in the late 1970s, federal legislation such as the Fair Housing Act
(1968) and Community Reinvestment Act (1977) had been established as efforts to

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address urban divestment and uneven development. In Chicago, community organizer
Saul Alinsky led an interracial coalition working across the city to address inequities at
the neighborhood and municipal level—coalitions that produced the first real challenge
to the Chicago Machine in the successful Harold Washington 1983 mayoral candidacy.
Simultaneous to this activism, white “ethnics” such as notorious city councilmember Ed
Vrdolyak held tight to the racialized privileges established in previous decades. Political
discourse was place-based and heavily charged against majority black neighborhoods in
the southeast “black belt” and westside Austin, and in majority Puerto Rican West
Town.

The River West neighborhood in which the Warehouse club stood (located exactly as it
sounds: west of the Chicago River, west of the Loop) was one of the formerly industrial
sections hit by the aforementioned patterns of core divestment. By the 1970s, the
neighborhood included numerous vacant structures and was at the intersection of the
inner-city’s majority black and latino neighborhoods. In addition to being easily
accessible for these residents, the Warehouse was also centrally located in terms of
transportation: it was adjacent to the 94-290 Interstate roadways, and to numerous
municipal and regional bus and train routes, not far from Lake-view / Roscoe Village’s
Boy’s Town, the historically gay section of the city.

According to
Warehouse lore, the
club was packed
with men from these
parts of the city on
any given night, and
in the early 1980s,
clubowner-operator
Robert Williams
doubled admission
fees in an attempt to
maximize profit. In
1983, the year of
Washington’s
election—signaling
the possibility of a
real transformation of the city’s racialized geographies—Knuckles left to establish a less
commercialized venue at the Power Plant, another vacant factory site located a mile
north on Goose Island. [Image 2. The Warehouse ca. late 1970s. Unsourced image found
on web. If you have information about this image, please contact the author.]

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III. Power Plant
When I recently interviewed DJ Jesse de la Pena about his early history with house
music, he recalled that most of his friends thought he was from the west side, even
though his family lived far south. This was because he spent most of his time on the
west side where he could be around other kids who wanted to breakdance and mix
music. Jesse describes himself as a kid who “wasn’t really into books”—he liked to
make things with his hands, and needed to move his body—to be active and not sitting
at a desk all day long. When I asked him if he’d ever made it to the Warehouse on
Jefferson, he replied that he hadn’t, but that he and his friends would go to the Power
Plant and stand outside just to hear the music.

At this point in the interview, I had to laugh, because this is EXACTLY what my friend
Emily and I used to do in the mid-1980s, although while Jesse was coming from the
South Side, we’d be heading to the Plant from the opposite direction on the north side.
We would get dressed in stone-washed jeans, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and tees,
white socks and Keds sneakers. I had an asymmetrical haircut, and Emily used a curling
iron to sculpt her relaxer-straightened hair into a perfectly rounded shoulder-length bob
with bangs. Then we’d head to our friend Jenny’s house to apply lavender eyeshadow,
blue eyeliner, and frosted pink lipstick (because our parents didn’t let us wear makeup,
and Jenny lived with her mom who was never home to monitor us). At some point
during the day we would arrange a ride south from an older friend or sibling, most
often from Emily’s older sister Margaret, over whom Emily held a continuously
replenished repository of secrets she could threaten to reveal to their mother at any
given moment.

Together, Jesse and I remembered the gritty streetscape, full of other ‘tweeners who had
come from around the city and suburbs to listen to the dance music emanating from the
three-story club. (We didn’t have fake IDs, and Illinois had recently changed the
drinking age from 19 to 21, making it more difficult to pass as older than we were). It
wasn’t until the early 1990s that I was old enough to legally enter the city’s dance clubs.
While house music and the club tell coming-of-age in the 1980s stories for Jesse and I,
what did the genre and the club represent to the mostly black and latino men—many
who also were gay or queer identified—who frequented the Warehouse and the Power
Plant during those early years? Did they view it as a safe haven—as a space where they
could express and celebrate their sexuality? (Rivera-Servera 2004, Hunter 2010)

IV. The House That Jack Built: Conclusions / Ruminations

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Here I have provided a brief sketch of the development of House music in 1970s
Chicago. By tracing Frankie Knuckles’ move from New York discos to establish House
music in Chicago, I have situated the genre within the urban social lives of gay men,
especially African-American and Latino gay men (Chauncey 1994, Hunter 2010, Rivera-
Servera 2004). Further, in delineating the phenomenon of vacant industrial warehouses
in the city, I have located the evolution of the genre within a set of capitalist-intensive
and racially coded approaches to urban planning and development in the city
(Guglielmo 2003, Hirsch 1992, Zukin 1991). In so doing, I hope to have laid the
groundwork for further elaboration of the genre’s history through interviews and
archival research centered on questions that include—but are not limited to:

1)Given what we know about processes of neighborhood change that lead to

gentrification in late twentieth century U.S. cities, how does following the place-based
shifts in House music challenge or reinforce existing approaches to urban development?

For example, if we follow House Music across the three post-industrial club sites
mentioned in this essay:

1)The Warehouse in 1977 West Loop

2)The Power Plant in 1983 Goose Island
3)Ohm in 2007 and 2015 Wicker Park [IMAGES 3 AND 4. Ohm website 2014. Note the
professional dancers, heteronormative modes of presentation and performance, no
reference to House]

We need only to look

at the club names
and accompanying
images to posit that
representational
space (Lefebvre
1974) has shifted
from industrial
references to space:
Warehouse; Power
Plant, to the leisure
practices associated
with the “glamour
sectors” (Hunter
2010:167) of the

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“new economy” (Lloyd 2010[2007], Zukin 1991, Florida 1990): In addition to Ohm the
dance club, there are numerous yoga studio spaces in Wicker Park/West Town.

If the genre is being gentrified along with the gentrification of the built environment,
what does this tell us about the working lives of House DJs, music producers, and club
promoters?

2) If we look to the earlier lyrics that were the center of House Music Mixes, we
encounter numerous metaphors for the dancing body that make use of work,
movement, and collective imagery:

“in the beginning, there was jack, and jack had a groove, and from this groove came the
groove of all grooves. and while one day viciously throwing down on his box, jack
boldly declared, let there be house, and house music was born. i am, you see, i am the
creator, and this is my house, and in my house there is only house music. but i am not
so selfish, because once you've entered my house, it then becomes our house and our
house music... and you see no one man owns house because house music is a universal
language spoke and understood by all. you see, house is a feeling that no one can
understand really, unless you're deep into the vibe of house. house is an uncontrollable
desire to jack your body and as i told ya before this is our house, and our house music
and every house you understand there is a keeper and in this house the keeper is jack.
now some of you might wonder, who is jack, and what is it that jack does? jack is the
one who gives you the power to jack your body. jack is the one who gives you the
power to do the snake. jack is the one who give you the key to the wiggly worm. jack is
the one who learns you how you walk your body jack is the one that can bring nations
and nations of all jackers together under one house. you may be black, you may be
white, you may be jew, or gentile, it don't make a difference in our house, and this is
fresh.

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Move your body

jack your body

work your body

the roof is on fire….

The legacy of House has been recently celebrated in the new “House Legacy Project:
Move Your Body” retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, and in numerous events
paying tribute to Frankie Knuckles who passed away suddenly in spring of 2014.
Electronic music DJs like Danger Mouse collect millions playing to large audiences in
the festival circuit such as Lollapalooza and Coachella, further popularizing the genre.
At the same time, the music has arguably left all explicit traces to the original incubator
of the genre: the post-industrial warehouse space. Does this new generation of DJs
know the history of who laid the groundwork for the music they create now? What do
the varieties of answers to this question tell us about the reworking of inequalities in the
city? Whose spatializing practices transform places? Whose endure over time? (Lefebvre
1994, de Certeau 1984).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIDpkhfx4nY
(1:—) Chuck Roberts words acapella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-zpk6UNV4
(6:03) Rhythm Controll My House Dub Mix [great example of EDM] (1987)

3) Finally, if we return to Jesse’s and my autoethnographies of House Music, we see

illustrations of identity and subject formations that unsettle the clearly demarcated
racial divisions sought by Vrdoylak, and other members of the urban white ethnic
“Silent Majority”.

Jesse is latino with light skin—the guy looks like Louis CK—and identifies as
heterosexual. I am a white woman with a mixed-race son and prefer not to declare a
sexual identity. As adolescents, and into our adulthood, we sought out the spaces first
established by non-white, non-heterosexual men in order to explore and express our
own non-conformity and to develop our own ethical approaches to social conduct and
cultural practices. While the Power Plant was accessible to us, it was not walkable: it
took lots of planning for us to get our fifteen year old selves from the South side and the
North side over to Goose Island—and we couldn’t even get inside! Likewise, DJs

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coming out of African-American households, like Knuckles, describe House as a space
where they could experiment with the new wave sounds of the predominantly white
punk new wave scene.

If we look to “the nightly round” (Hunter 2010) of househeads, what sort of social
networks might we find? How do these social networks sit with the “revanchist”
approach to urban living (Smith 1996)? Do they complicate revanchism and yuppie,
buppie, and hipster-spurred neighborhood change?

What would Jack say?

Jack would say use the groove. werk your body. move your body. dance.

[IMAGE 5. The “Warehouse” today. 206 S. Jefferson]

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[IMAGES 6 AND 7. Property Ledger from 1910, shows factory designation]

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works cited

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Chauncey, G. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay
Male World, 1890-1940. New York, NY: Basic Books.

De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.

Grams, Diane M. 2013. Freedom and Cultural Consciousness: Black Working-Class

Parades in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Journal of Urban Affairs 35(5):501-529.

—2010. Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago. Chicago: University of
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Guglielmo, T. 2003. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago,
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Hanhardt, C. 2013. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence.
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Harvey, David. 1990. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical
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Hirsch, Arnold and Logdson, Joseph (Eds.). 1992 Creole New Orleans: Race and
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Hunter, M.A. 2010. The Nightly Round: Space, Social Capital, and Urban Black
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Lefebvre, Henri. 1992. The Production of Space. Blackwell: Malden, MA.

Lloyd, Richard. 2010[2006]. Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City.
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Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 2007[1987]. Urban Fortunes: The Political
Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Ranney, David. 2002. Global Decisions, Local Collisions: urban life in the new world
order. Temple University Press: Philadelphia, PA.

Rivera-Servera, Ramon H. 2004. Choreographies of Resistance: Latino/a Queer Dance

the Utopian Performative. Modern Drama 47(2):269-289.

Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.
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Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

—1991. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disneyworld. Berkeley, CA: University

of California Press.

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