As the Brown Line elevated train makes its way from Chicago Avenue, to areas north, it makes a slight curve and runs parallel to Orleans Street. Once, a long, long, long time ago, my father’s moving company was located on Orleans Street. Once, a long, long long time ago, the Brown Line was called something else. The city was a different, grimier place back then. The Cabrini-Green Housing Projects stood within camera shot of this particular image…just to the right. For those familiar with the sitcom Good Times, you’re vaguely familiar with the hosing project in question. The Evans family lived (fictitiously, of course) in one of Chicago’s more colorful and—in later days—dangerous failures. (Housing projects were gated communities of a sort: the very architecture provided a psychological wall that isolated the residents from the rest of the city.) Despite what Hollywood had to say about the life and times of the Evans family, Cabrini-Green existed without a laugh track and happy endings. The opening shot of that particular sitcom featured a view of the building in which the sitcom action allegedly took place. Once upon a time, a long, long, long time ago, my father worked within walking distance of that building. The housing projects are gone now and their populations have been dispersed: most families have been moved out to the suburbs, and the projects themselves, are torn down. Much of Orleans Street has changed. It’s expensive and pretends to embrace multiculturalism. Well…it embraces Anglicized multiculturalism, and it is—admittedly—raw material for another Chicago-based sitcom, with a catchy title and infectiously singable theme song. The old site of my father’s truck yard and office looks disturbingly the same (though also much, much cleaner) and numerous other familiar spots remain. The building looming in this photograph is, however, new. I have no idea what it’s called, but it is, as we say in Chicago, a bit ‘un. It is, as is common to the gentrified area of Chicago, an expensive one, too. Despite that, I kinda like it. Almost. Maybe I just like the cute thang that lives in the building next to it. Or maybe it’s sentimentality. This building stands where, once, moving trucks dripped various lubricants and coolants into dirty beds of gravel. There was no truck yard there at the time, but on occasion, one truck or another would find itself parked there, while driver and crew dined on oily, fried stuff from a nearby place specializing in food-flavored cholesterol. It’s odd to think that a condo stack grew from that, and it makes me shudder at the thought of what my sprout from a particular truck-yard farther south in the city. I took this photo last week, just outside of my work-place. There was something about that building, and the blur of a train heading…thataway, and so I captured it. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.