Sherman Plaza update

Not that this has anything to do with my life, but I think this is an ugly piece of shit. It's ugly in its construction phase and it will be even uglier when it's done and Evanston is renamed East Las Vegas. OK, I am really excited about Ann Taylor Loft - we could really use one. But I'd pick Osco over ATL any day ( in this particular case, that abbr. stands for Ann Taylor Loft, not Hartsfield-Jackson).

Why I don't like this building:

1. Skyscrapers were meant to be tall, not fat. I wouldn't mind a wide residential base and then a tall slender tower, maybe even up to 4oo ft, where they would be able to preserve the same number of units. Just as long as there are no balconies. Evanston would never approve anything over 300 feet though, since they scaled down the Optima on Elgin Road from 36 floors to 16 floors, resulting in the unusual circumstance of a high-rise having width>height, creating an unsightly vantage point for anyone walking west on Clark Street. It's sort of like this, except with more glass.

2. What is it with the rounded balconies?

3. This is sort of related to point #1, but I don't understand why it needs to be L-shaped. It's not a casino. On the plus side, pretty much everyone (on the upper levels, at least) will have a lake view or downtown-Chicago view, with the exception of the unfortunate souls whose condos face west.

Here are photos I took today while heading down to EPD:

These apartments here are the ones with the lake views:


The east elevation, facing Sherman Avenue (probably why it's called Sherman Plaza).
They recently started putting the brick facing on the retail/garage portion that faces Davis Street:

I haven't updated this joint in a while. Let's go over what happened while I was doing something else:

I spent a lot of time in New York City, in the second half of August and the first two weeks of September, hanging out with a young woman that I know from Northwestern. She graduated this year and was new in the city. The first time we met there, which was probably the 13th of August, we walked across Greenwich Village and later went to Brooklyn to check out the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, which was too far of a commute from midtown Manhattan for her to live in. In the evening, we went to a party in a warehouse in DUMBO where I had 4 Red Stripes and was, as a result, drunk. I did not get back to Stamford until around 2 AM.

Long story short, we spent a lot of time together during the next month, going to movies, different neighborhoods in New York including Alphabet City and Roosevelt Island, Hoboken, my gallery show, a MoMA design store reception, an opening reception at a restaurant in the Greenwich Village where we ran into the senior editor of the magazine I was interning in at the time. We ate in Little Italy, pre-gamed a meeting with my bosses by having Mint Juleps at For Employees Only in West Village, had mojitos at the Lazy Catfish in Williamsburg, and passed around a bottle of Maker's Mark whiskey in her new apartment in Yorkville. I fell in love with the woman. After I came to Evanston I began to miss her. I told her on AIM that I loved her. Now we're no longer on speaking terms.

Yeah, it's not such a great story and I sprinkled it with too many proper nouns. Right now I am working on a paper about Rolls-Royce for a class about the history of capitalism. Peace out.