Newspaper ad for the 1917 propaganda film, “Who’s Your Neighbor.” When you’re done here, google it: pretty interesting stuff! Image: Wikipedia.
While I was away last year, singing in the pool at my rawther glamorous residence and getting pooped on by birds, a not-high-rise-but-higher-than-my-mid-rise condo building was going up kitty-corner from my building here in the South Loop. It was in the last stages of construction when I moved home; I would see the crane and the workers, the construction cones out in front of the main entrypoint.
Over the summer it was completed. You know how in Ghostbusters, when Zuul blasts away that chunk of the apartment building in Manhattan where Sigourney Weaver lives? There’s a chunk carved out of this building kind of like that, except that it’s on purpose and paid for by developers and they’ve put a garden in there! Or is it a park? It’s what cityfolk call “greenspace” and I have a great view of it from my windows! Way cool. Gardens come to me, baby.
There’s also a pool on the other side of this new building and I can see just a slice of it from my perch on the sixteenth floor. It looks like a great pool. I should try to make friends with someone over there so I can scope out what my windows look like while swimming.
What’s really fascinating is that for some months I looked over at a tall, dark, glass thing…and now there are people living there. I can see their glowing TV screens. Someone has a bright red couch and in the daytime, I can see it. I mean, it’s right over there, right there across the sky.
Who are they? Are they excited? No matter who they are or where they came from, they all have one thing in common: They just moved in.