“In the 1990s, a Chicago public library building that had sat unused for a decade got a second life. Or maybe, because of the traditions at the Old Town School of Folk Music, which took over the Art Deco building, it’s more accurate to say it got a Second Half.
“The building is now a fine place to watch live music — or make some. In the main auditorium, 450-seat Maurer Hall, nobody’s more than 45 feet from the stage, and over that stage hangs a mural from the WPA era.
“The Old Town School of Folk Music is a well-loved institution, not only as a concert venue but also as a place where people learn to make music.
“Its two buildings on opposite sides of Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Square — the former library, built in 1929 and our main focus in this segment, the other purpose-built for the music school in 2012 — are 10 miles and 67 years from the school’s origins in a family home on Lombard Avenue in Oak Park.
“But the hands-on, everybody-plays-music spirit that imbued those first meetings in Dawn and Nate Greening’s house is still alive in the Old Town School’s tradition called the Second Half, a daily jam session anyone can join.
“It’s a collegial community spirit that Dawn Greening described in a Chicago Tribune article in 1960, three years after she and Nate started what the paper called a ‘do it yourself family folk song fest’ with friends and the banjo player Frank Hamilton as teacher.
“Four decades passed before the school arrived on Lincoln Avenue. Greenberg, Hamilton and fellow folk musician Win Strake opened the school in December 1957 at 333 W. North Ave., in Old Town about a mile from the Gate of Horn nightclub, the epicenter of Chicago’s folk music scene at the time.
“The school left North Avenue in 1968. In moving to 909 W. Armitage Ave., the institution left the Old Town neighborhood but kept the name, which it still has more than half a century after leaving.
“In the mid-1990s, it was time to move again. A good opportunity was about 4 miles north, where a branch library had been empty for about a decade. Built in 1929 as the Hild branch, it had been put out of use by the 1985 opening of the Sulzer Regional Library, a block south.
“The library system said it was going to use this handsome Art Déco building for storage, but local residents and the alderman at the time, Eugene Schulter, were having none of that.
“‘It’s a lovely building,’ Schulter told the Tribune in 1996, ‘and our main goal was to retain it as public space.’
“And you can see why. The structure is an integral part of the streetscape in a walkable, vibrant commercial district, with restaurants, bars and stores in great old buildings, including Louis Sullivan’s gorgeous Krause Music Store less than a block away.
“The Old Town School reopened the former Hild Library building in September 1998. It was the building’s Second Half after originally opening in 1931. (The Armitage building is still part of the school, after its board in 2019 reversed a controversial plan to sell it.)
“Another Depression-era government program, the Works Progress Administration, is responsible for the mural that hangs over the stage. Francis Coan painted ‘The Children’s World,’ which depicts animal and human circus performers.” (Rodkin and Blomquist, WBEZ Chicago, 9/3/24)