Virginia Admiral, Composition, 1942 https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1134727

hello milwaukee and chicago

CORSICA.BMF

We’re thrilled to share some images of our coach house project with Here to Stay Community Land Trust! We are delighted to be a trusted partner, helping give this 1880s coach house new life as affordable duplex condos while preserving the details that make it unique.

Humanity's greatest invention is the pinball machine

I just looked it up: 90 feet is nine times higher than the Wright Brothers flew on their first flight.

The NPS-operated Wright Brothers National Memorial includes an impressive 90 foot tall monument constructed in the early 1930s on the site of the first controlled flight, plus a tiny public airstrip with no on-site staff or fuel. I arrived just in time to see one guy take off in his little Cessna.

This home, unmaintained for years and currently in demo court, is now for sale. It's one of the largest original Pullman rowhouses, an end unit with lots of windows, and one of only a few in the factory town to feature a three story tower on its facade. Asking $90K: www.redfin.com/IL/Chicago/1...

The thing that all #ShittyCameraChallenge contestants know—and which vanishingly few camera publications understand—is that any camera can yield interesting images if you work what it is instead of punishing it for what it is not, and if yours can't yield interesting images it might be a skill issue

Must be embarrassing to be the only corpse with a mausoleum in a cemetery of normal headstones

Holidays update: my parents have asked what 6-7 means

Anyone in the Chicago area want an air fryer, or know someone who does? A good model, I’m told, never even taken out of the box. (I won it.) It’s free for whomever wants to take it off my hands, you just need to come to Noble Square to pick it up. DM me. This HAS to be a good deal for someone!

On vacation somewhere warmer than home, which means the three cameras I brought are getting a lot of use

323 North Parkside Avenue

One edge of an Outer Banks flat top - a vernacular midcentury housing style originated by artist and developer Frank Stick in 1947. OBX flat tops are heavily indebted to other forms of coastal American architecture (with some variations), constructed of cement block and designed to passively cool.

Pittsburgh scenes - earlier today in Friendship and Bloomfield

mature camry no. 269

duck brick

Current status: inside an Edward Burtynsky photo

Just about every other Friday a bunch of nerds gather in the bowels of the City-County Building to do meticulous, line-by-line searches of handwritten records, documenting every racially restrictive covenant we can. Now more than ever, this is an extremely necessary & urgent work. Join us!

Paul Kirchner

Apartment entry mural

Made a Reddit account for the first time (don’t ask) and I didn’t realize their “verification” process is essentially forcing you to post insipid comments in r/dogs for a week until you accumulate enough magic beans to be considered real

mature camry no. 268

You'd think that my body would have a better way of dealing with anticipation of a big day that will require lots of energy than its longstanding strategy of refusing to sleep soundly and then forcing me awake early

RIP pink house, you will be missed

520 North Central Avenue

5937 West Midway Park

5817 West Midway Park

I've been busy all day, but I see that there's discussion of a Broadview zoning ordinance proposal that I think is being misinterpreted. The introduced proposal would seek to make detention facilities a special use in order to force proposals through extra steps, not to enable/speed their approval.

Happy to have a new full length album from The Gunshy at long last, and especially happy to read that it's the result of half a decade of sobriety for Matt Arbogast. Produced by Sean Bonnette!

My now highly topical Lost Treasures of Indiana book has a chapter about the Gary Bears that details the last time the Bears threatened to relocate to Northwest Indiana back in the 1990s.

5815 West Race Avenue

FYI Chicagoans, there’s a free newsstand of vintage issues of @theonion.com at Hubbard & Wells

Midcentury courtyard building with some neat entryways

Having trouble finding the right house

It makes no sense to repaint a stolen Divvy bike. A normal Divvy bike looks normal. A repainted Divvy bike looks stolen.

In case you still think that local police are going to stand up to federal immigration agents: A few of minutes ago CPD swooped in on a community caravan that was tailing CBP agents to honk horns and warn neighbors, blocking the caravan from following and giving agents a clean break from scrutiny.

mature camry no. 267

My neighbor Melvin primarily works in collage today, and his recent artistic output is mostly focused on themes of Black labor history, but he recently brought out some cityscape illustrations he created while living in Bronzeville in the '90s, near 44th & Calumet. I have this one in my home now.

citadel this, boeing that—where was this focus when the assyrian church of the east moved its patriarchal see from chicago to erbil?

I was very displeased to find out today that a local academic who I used to lightly collaborate with flared out after getting denied tenure a few years ago, and is now actively trying to become a nationally known anti-woke cause célèbre by insisting he was discriminated against for his whiteness.

The mirrored double two-flat is one of my favorite relatively uncommon Chicago vernacular built forms

Teamsters Local 705 just confirmed that Bovino went with armed CBP agents to a Mauser picket line in Chicago this morning and "interrogated and laughed at our members while they were on the picket line." These workers went on strike to demand protections for immigrant workers, among other things.

More from me in @blockclubchi.bsky.social. blockclubchicago.org/2025/12/14/a...

Niche Chicago politics post: Ald. Brendan Reilly is campaigning for County Board President on passing Chicago’s “bubble zone” ordinance, which protects patients seeking abortion care, except a woman alder sponsored that ordinance in 2009, and Reilly taking credit for it now is so very on brand.

I've now reached the ten-camera threshold here at home, running out of shelf space for them, which feels a bit silly when two of the cameras don't work and only three of them are any good.

Listening to the new @danielknoxmusic.bsky.social album the way it was meant to be heard

"While, DePaul does not have a specific policy prohibiting relationships between faculty and students when the student is enrolled in the faculty member’s course[...]." Saud v. DePaul University et al, No. 25-1034 (7th Cir., Oct. 8, 2025). Yo what the fuck DePaul