Troy just sent me a news bulletin about a bunch of bodies being dug up from a pit in an Alsip cemetery. While running across dead bodies is hardly unusual in Cook Country, this seems somewhat different from the usual case – most of the time, the bodies found are bodies who weren’t moved along…
Tag: news
Return of the Shadow?
Back in November, we presented the now-famous Shadow Picture from the Florentine Ballroom, which has, thus far, held up to scrutiny. And this week, after months of inactivity (nothing’s active all time; places go in and out of active periods), the ballroom has seemed active again. We’ve heard footsteps in the room more than once,…
The Hand of Drywall Dave – Update!
This is the infamous “Devil’s Hand” at the Congress Hotel, which is visible through a hole in the wall in a back closet at the congress hotel. We found it on an investigation of the place back in 2006. We first blogged about it over a year ago. Since then, while we’ve joked that it…
Big Willie
The Guy From the Willis Co. Says People Can Call the Sears Tower ‘Big Willie’ if they want. I like to imagine he got the idea RIGHT HERE on the blog, which suggested that name the minute the news was announced. Surely we weren’t the ONLY ones to think of it, but I’ll just go…
Our Lady of the Underpass
A staple of our tours from Day 1 has been the infamous Virgin Mary Salt Stain – the salt stain on the underpass near Fullerton and Damen that some claimed was a visitation of the Virgin Mary, which they claimed it resembled. The traffic jams to see it died down a few weeks after it’s…
Leon Despres dies at 101
Former alderman Leon Despres as often the only alderman in town with enough guts to vote AGAINST Mayor Daley the First. For those who aren’t from Chicago, aldermen are like the mayors of neighborhoods. They’re about as well known for corruption as any other local politician, but Despres was the exception. When columnist Mike Royko…
KFC wants to fix Chicago potholes?
Folks, we do have a LOT of pot holes around here. Sometimes they’re pretty interesting for a historian – you can see layers of city history in them. Some go deep enough that you can see the bricks that used to pave the road (sometimes more than one layer of them) and the old streetcar…
In other news: The Sears / Willis Tower
So, it was announced yesterday that The Sears Tower will now be known as The Willis Tower. Can we at least call it Big Willie?