Guild Row

Beginning in 2016, Mike Healy, Jim Lasko and Elyse Agnello met around Jim’s kitchen table on Tuesday nights for nearly two years. They hosted local thinkers, tinkerers, bakers, bankers, entrepreneurs and makers until they came to see the contours of a unique place where craft and concern for the social good coalesced. Guild Row was born at the intersection of their experience: a building, designed by DAAM, an architecture and design firm founded by Agnello; filled with programming curated by Lasko who made his name as the director of Chicago’s renowned Redmoon Theater, a company committed to wild, participatory spectacles; and woven thoughtfully into a dynamic neighborhood under the guidance of Healy, an award winning urban planner regarded for his ability to distill complex problems to actionable steps. In August 2020, amid a global pandemic, Guild Row opened its doors, its founders believing that togetherness is an essential good, made more urgent by social distancing constraints. Today, Guild Row continues to build its community, project by project and Member by Member. Together.