About nine years ago, Mario Luna got a call from his mother. She’d been doing some spring cleaning in her home in Pilsen—the same house where he’d grown up—and she’d found a shoebox that clearly belonged to him. It held a stack of “pluggers,” which is what people in the local house-music scene called show flyers during the culture’s infancy. She wanted to toss them. Luna thought better of it.

  • A crowd recording of Ron Hardy DJing at the Muzic Box in 1985

DJ and historian Duane Powell recognizes the need to celebrate these spaces. For the past four years, he’s been part of the team behind the Chicago Black Social Culture Map, which documents important venues and performance spaces from the early Great Migration era in the 1910s and ’20s till the end of the 20th century. And the rise of house provides a distinct challenge. “When house was king, it existed ev-ery-where,” Powell says. “I remember so many spaces that I was in that just wasn’t even around long.”

Chicago House Music Conference Featuring five overlapping panel discussions and workshops, including “The Anatomy of a Groove: House in Borrowed Spaces” with DJ Duane Powell, Silver Room owner Eric Williams, Warehouse and Muzic Box founder Robert Williams, and others. Thu 5/23, 6 PM-9 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, free, all ages

Chicago House Music Festival Featuring one stage of music on Friday and five stages on Saturday, with performances and workshops by Gene Hunt, Mark Grusane, the Era Footwork Crew, Gant-Man, Moodymann, Mr. A.L.I. & Carla Prather, Rae Chardonnay, Boogie McClarin, and many more. Fri 5/24, 6:30 PM-9 PM, and Sat 5/25, 2 PM-9 PM, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, free, all ages

The Chicago House Music Conference and Festival is late to the party, given that house has been important not just in Chicago but around the world for more than 30 years. Though it does recognize the music as specifically Chicagoan, it leans hard on the boom years of the 80s—on Friday, May 24, for instance, DCASE presents pioneering 80s producer Chip E. with the Chicago House Music Award. Fortunately, many festival performers who started back then have never stopped producing new work, and the bill also includes several acts that have taken house in radically new directions since the 90s, such as juke producer Gant-Man and footwork crew the Era. The one part of the culture that’s inarguably doing worse now than it was in the golden age is its infrastructure—actual physical rooms devoted to live house music. Because house was everywhere in the 80s, I wanted to learn more about some of the lesser-known places that helped build it into the cultural juggernaut it remains today. With Beyond Heaven, I saw a chance.

Cast of characters

GRAND MANOR 5436 S. Archer, burned down

Pluggers in Beyond Heaven advertise appearances here by the original Hot Mix 5, Steve “Silk” Hurley, Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez, and Trax Records artist Jesse Velez.

Mickey Oliver Guys would rent that out—I think they’d, like, wrassle with each other to get that place rented out, because it always seemed to draw a good crowd based on where it was located.

Frankie Rodriguez When you get done working, you step down and you’re in the middle of two, three hundred people talking to you. And if you suck, they let you know. That’s another thing too; if you were a little off, or you played a song that didn’t work out really well, they would let you know pretty quick. You can see that reaction there.