Leaving Lill
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Cohen eventually moved on; he’s now executive director of the Citizens Utility Board. Robbins became Lill Street’s longtime executive director. He sold the clay company in 1986 and bought out the two outside investors in the building ten years ago. Under him the Lill Street Art Center, as it’s now called, has grown to house three gallery spaces, ten classrooms, and 40 artists in a warren of 25 studios. It offers 125 classes a week, serves up to 3,000 people each year, and has an international reputation as an urban ceramics center. Its nonprofit educational arm (formalized in 1989) makes the courses and facilities available to anyone who can’t pay. Two years ago the center became an affiliate of DePaul University. “It was as much about the community and education as it was about art,” Robbins says of Lill Street’s original mission. But the community has changed. Lill Street is lined with half-million-dollar town homes now, parking is so scarce the art center just paved over its small front parkway to accommodate a few more cars, and the center is bursting at its seams. As soon as he can manage it, Robbins will separate the Lill Street Art Center from Lill Street.
Like the Old Town School of Folk Music, Robbins says, the art center will build a core of participants in its new neighborhood. He notes that people from Lincoln Park have moved north and west in droves. The reaction of artists we talked with, who pay $100 to $300 monthly for studios, was mixed. A move would be inconvenient, some noted. There’d be heavy supplies to transport and wasted downtime; kilns might get cranky. For some it would be farther to travel. They wondered if rent would go up in the new space. And the spirit of this place that’s been their vessel for 26 years might get left behind, no more separable from these walls than the line left by the potter’s thumb on a lump of spinning clay. But no one said a move from Lill Street would keep them away.
Can We Laugh Now?
