Chicago House

The Warehouse opened in 1977 on Jefferson Street, in a west side industrial zone where the manufacturing jobs had already started bleeding out. Robert Williams brought Frankie Knuckles from New York to DJ there. Knuckles had turned down the same offer a year earlier, but came back after his friend Larry Levan, working the booth at the Continental Baths alongside him, passed on the gig himself. Knuckles later recalled that by then he'd already put five years into one New York club that went bankrupt, and if he was going to commit to another one, he wanted a stake in what was going on, not just a job. The Warehouse was a juice bar, not licensed for alcohol.

It ran Saturday nights into Sunday mornings, drawing crowds that peaked around 2,000 people: Black, Latino, mostly gay, mostly young. Chicago was a growing city, but its nightlife attitude was small-town. The North Side bars catered to a predominantly white gay audience and operated restricted door policies, 1% Black if you were lucky, as Knuckles recalled in 2011. The one Black gay bar operating at a commercial level was Our Den, later renamed Den One, on North Avenue in Old Town, a neighborhood that had been a hippie hangout and a red light district before it was anything else. DJ Charles Perkins put it plainly: 'Den One was it. That was the black bar in Chicago.'