Walk north on Peoria Street from Fulton on a weekday afternoon and you'll pass condo lobbies, a design showroom or two, and enough scaffolding to remind you this block has been under some form of renovation for most of the last decade. Ten years ago, walking the same stretch meant something different. It meant passing Threewalls, then one of the city's most important spaces for emerging artists, and knowing that within a few blocks you'd hit at least four or five more galleries before you ran out of afternoon.
That version of Peoria Street didn't survive the neighborhood's own success. This week, a piece of it comes back, and this time it's not renting month to month.
The Block That Emptied Out
As Chicago Magazine reported, Threewalls closed its Peoria Street space in 2016 after twelve years as a home base for the city's emerging-artist exhibitions. Around the same time, the cluster of galleries known locally as the Taxi Cab spaces, Western Exhibitions, Document, and Volume Gallery, left their shared building on Washington Boulevard and relocated to West Town. A fourth tenant, the project space Paris London Hong Kong, closed outright. By the time the dust settled, the number of commercial galleries in the immediate area had roughly cut in half.
The gallerist who stayed longest put the tension plainly at the time. Jefferson Goddard, founder of Aspect/Ratio and the last gallery standing in the old Threewalls building, told Chicago Magazine that "the people who come to the West Loop for $15 cocktails should also see some art." It read as a plea more than a boast. Rising rents tied to the neighborhood's restaurant and residential boom had made gallery-scale square footage a hard sell next to a steakhouse or a loft conversion, and by 2018 even the Chicago Artists Coalition, the nonprofit that had anchored the scene from a Carpenter Street building, was packing up for cheaper space in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor.
The galleries that remained, Kavi Gupta among them, kept the West Loop in the conversation. But the district lost its critical mass, the thing that let you walk five or six spaces in a single afternoon without doubling back to the Loop or crossing into West Town. What Peoria Street had was scattered survivors. What it lacked was an anchor.
What Moves Back In This Week
Chicago Exhibition Week runs September 14 through 20 this year, its fourth edition and its longest by a wide margin. What launched in 2023 as a three-day weekend has stretched into a full seven days, now spanning more than 70 galleries and art spaces across the city, according to Hoodline. Last year's edition, still branded as a weekend event, drew roughly 10,000 attendees over three days across more than 50 participating spaces. The jump to a full week this year, according to founder Abby Pucker, came from festival-goers missing overlapping shows when everything was crammed into 72 hours.
The bigger story for this specific block is what's arriving alongside the event rather than for it. Gertie, the civic and cultural agency behind Chicago Exhibition Week, has opened a permanent headquarters at 400 N. Peoria Street. That address sits inside the same corridor that lost Threewalls, a few doors from where Aspect/Ratio held on after everyone else left. Gertie describes the space as a year-round hub built to house institutional exhibitions, commercial gallery collaborations, and an artist residency program under one roof, not a pop-up timed to festival week and gone by Labor Day.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. As Axios reported, Pucker framed the broader goal as building relationships with collectors over time rather than chasing a single weekend of foot traffic, describing the aim as reaching "people who might be collecting 10 years from now."
A gallery district built around collectors ten years out doesn't work as a rotating cast of weekend tenants. It needs an address that's still there in October.
What's Actually On View
If you're picking two or three stops rather than trying to cover all 70-plus locations, a few are worth building an afternoon around.
- Corbett vs. Dempsey is presenting work by the late artist Pope.L centered on his experimental band, a rare chance to see a side of his practice that rarely gets gallery space.
- GRAY is showing a monumental wooden relief sculpture by Jaume Plensa, in the same space that hosted Theaster Gates's OH, YOU'VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY last year.
- 82 Nights Only* opens at the Gertie Hub on September 16 and runs through December 13, a nearly thirteen-week series built around where art and comedy overlap, structured as a rotating set of artworks, performances, and screenings rather than a single fixed show. It's open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., meaning it's the one stop on this list you can still catch long after exhibition week wraps.
Chicago Exhibition Week also runs a passport-stamp system this year. Collect enough stamps at participating galleries and you get free admission to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Driehaus Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, a small incentive that turns an afternoon of gallery hopping into a ticket for a museum visit later in the month.
Why Permanent Beats Pop-Up
A festival weekend asks a neighborhood for one thing: foot traffic for three days. A permanent hub asks for something closer to what Threewalls and the Taxi Cab galleries used to provide, a reason to walk this block on an ordinary Tuesday in November, not just during a designated art week. The 82 Nights Only* run through mid-December is the clearest evidence of that shift. It's programmed to outlast the week that introduced it, on a stretch of Peoria Street that spent the better part of a decade without a comparable draw.
None of this erases what left in 2016. Threewalls never came back, and the Taxi Cab galleries built their new footing in West Town rather than returning west. But the corridor that Goddard once described as full of $15-cocktail crowds with nowhere to see art now has an institution betting its year-round programming on that exact block.
A Walk Worth Taking This Week
For anyone already living in the neighborhood, the practical version of this story is simple. The Morgan Street Green and Pink Line stop puts you two blocks from the Gertie Hub on Peoria Street. Randolph Restaurant Row is close enough that a gallery stop and dinner reservation fit into the same evening without much extra walking. If you're only doing one thing this week, Wednesday through Sunday at the Gertie Hub gets you the current 82 Nights Only* installment and a look at the space itself, the kind of building you'll likely be walking past for years rather than for one September. For the rest of Chicago Exhibition Week's 70-plus locations, including Corbett vs. Dempsey and GRAY, the event's passport map is the easiest way to plan a route beyond this one block.
The neighborhood's restaurant scene earned Peoria Street its reputation over the last fifteen years. This week, for the first time since 2016, its art scene has an address to match it.
If you're weighing a move to the West Loop, or trying to understand how a block like this one shapes what a home nearby is worth, Meridian Chicago can walk you through it block by block. Let's work together.
