Bringing you up to speed on Your Windy City Guide

Loyal readers will note the absence of posting by your guide for Three Whole Weeks - an unforgivable eternity in the blog posting world.  We hope you can forgive us our transgression and hope to retain your loyal readership.

The reasons have been threefold:

1.  I have not had an original thought in my head for a solid two weeks out of the last three.  The heat of the Summer must have gotten to me.  Perhaps too strong a desire to go sailing rather than think about anything real estate related. 

2.  On a positive note, we have been crazy busy.  Listing like crazy.  Wrote some contracts.  Listed some more developments.  Not the thing to do in the lazy dog-days of summer.  On top of that, our Trusty Management Expert - Steve West - also got busy.  He took over the management of a 100 unit complex in Old Town which led to a 50 unit mid-rise in Old Town, and a couple more projects coming on line in the next few weeks.  Poor Steve, work is getting in the way of his summertime fun, too.

He'll have some excellent stories to tell from the Property Management side of the business soon, though. 

3.  I have contracted with a technologically superior web-guru to overhaul the www.darrowwest.com website AND this humble blog.  I thought the project would be completed by now, but each day brings a few new wrinkles to the plan.  Before another day went by, I thought I had better get back on the bandwagon before my dearest friends forgot I was here.  Or worse - started removing links.

 

But this week while driving home from my latest listing at 3753 West Dickens (single family home for $359,900) I drove past this odd sight on Palmer out by Kedzie.  How fun is this?!

Such a weird thing to see inside what appears to be quite an ordinary kiddie playground next door to a school.  It turns out to be the BARNET HODES Sculpture Garden. 

The centerpiece of the Logan Square Boys and Girls Club’s Barnet Hodes Sculpture Garden, this sculptural bench and fountain project holds the distinction of being the city’s first freestanding, community-built artwork-- a feat that involved the use of reinforced concrete, landscape design, and mechanical and electrical engineering. The undulating seats evoke the shapes of reclining figures: the glass mosaics in the fountain basin recall Taino designs and symbols. The form of the work was inspired by Pedro Silva’s Grant’s Tomb Mosaics (1972-1974) and Antonio Gaudi’s Güell Park ceramic-fragment-encrusted benches (1900-1914), as well as by the work of David Harding in Glenrothes, Scotland, who introduce the Chicago Mural Group to concrete as a community art medium in the 1970s.

Hey, I'll take any inspiration that comes my way these days.  Here's hoping you find me traveling off the beaten path more often in the coming days.