23-05-2025
Chicago's former Wax Trax! Records building officially gets city landmark status
The Chicago City Council this week officially designated the former Wax Trax! Records building in Lincoln Park an official Chicago landmark.
The City Council approved the designation at its meeting on Wednesday.
The old Wax Trax! Records building is located at 2449 N. Lincoln Ave., about half a block northwest of the six-way intersection with Halsted Street and Fullerton Avenue in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The two-story Renaissance Revival-style building was constructed in the 1880s, the city said.
From 1978 until 1993, the building housed Wax Trax! Records. Founders Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher opened the first Wax Trax! store in Denver in 1975, and moved to Chicago and opened the Lincoln Park store three years later.
Wax Trax! stocked both new and used records and cassette tapes and later CDs and videos. The store opened in the era of disco, but its original focus was punk, post-punk, rockabilly, glam, English R&B, power pop, psychedelic and psychopop, mod, European synth pop, and new wave — to name a few, as listed in order in a summary to the city this past winter.
Soon enough, Nash and Flesher branched out from just running a record store and founded the Wax Trax! Records label. The first release on the label was a release by the Chicago punk group Strike Under in 1981, the summary noted.
The Wax Trax! store moved to 1657 N. Damen Ave. in Wicker Park in 1993. Jim Nash died in 1995, and the record store then closed the next year. Flesher died in 2010.
The building most recently housed the Lincoln Park Institute for Oral & Cosmetic Surgery.
Meanwhile, Jim Nash's daughter, Julia Nash, and her husband, Mark Skillicorn, resurrected the Wax Trax! label in 2014. They also led the push to preserve the original Wax Trax! home.
The landmark designation now in place protects all exterior elevations of the building, the city said.
Adam Harrington
Adam Harrington is a web producer at CBS Chicago, where he first arrived in January 2006.
contributed to this report.
