When the clothing business folded, an Anglican priest saw what the building could become. Father Trevor Huddleston, the white English clergyman who had made himself the implacable conscience of apartheid Johannesburg, wanted a home where Black musicians could rehearse and perform free of the regime's suffocating restrictions. Money raised at a 1955 farewell concert in his honor, held next door at the Bantu Men's Social Centre, allowed the Union of South African Artists, founded in 1952 by Ian Bernhardt, to take a lease. By 1957 the building housed the African Music and Drama Association. Shops occupied the ground floor, a rehearsal stage sat on the first, and practice rooms and workshops filled the floors above. The open factory plan, meant for sewing machines, turned out to be perfect for making art.

The building's defining triumph was conceived in its rooms. King Kong, billed as an all-African jazz opera, opened on 2 February 1959 at the University of the Witwatersrand's Great Hall and became an instant sensation. Composed by Todd Matshikiza, it told the story of the heavyweight boxer Ezekiel Dhlamini, who fought under the name King Kong, a township hero whose triumphs in the ring gave way to a violent and tragic end. The production was a rarity in apartheid South Africa: a Black cast and creative team making serious, ambitious art for audiences that crossed the color line to see it. The show launched careers that would soon belong to the world. King Kong went on to London's West End, and the singer who fronted it, Miriam Makeba, would carry South African song onto international stages while living in exile, becoming a global voice against the very system that had tried to confine her. The musical proved that work made in a Johannesburg garment factory by Black artists the state worked to silence could command the world's attention.

On any given day you might have collided with greatness in the corridors. The pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand. The alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, often called the father of South African jazz. The trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, both barely out of their teens. Singers Dolly Rathebe, Thandi Klaasen, and Letta Mbulu. Saxophonist Ntemi Piliso and the African Jazz Pioneers. Theater lived here too: the African Music and Drama Association staged plays by Gibson Kente and, later, the searing anti-apartheid drama The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Many of these artists would be driven into exile by the apartheid state, scattering South African jazz across the globe and carrying Dorkay House with them wherever they played.

There is a quieter story folded into these walls. Nelson and Winnie Mandela are said to have met at Dorkay House, two figures who would help shape a nation crossing paths in a building dedicated to another kind of freedom. The place mattered because, in a city carved up by the pass laws and the rigid geography of apartheid, it was one of the few rooms where Black creativity could breathe and Black and white artists could work side by side. Time was not always kind to it. When parts of the building were converted to residential flats, the first-floor rehearsal stage where King Kong took shape was torn out, and the daily roar of jam sessions faded into memory. In 1989 the singer Queeneth Ndaba formed the Dorkay House Trust to fight for its survival. The building is now recognized as a heritage resource, not for its architecture, which is plain, but for what happened inside it. This was where a silenced music found its voice, and where a generation of artists learned that the regime could ban their movements but not their sound.