When John Edel first went to Bridgeport in 2001 to look at the old Lowe Brothers paint warehouse, it was surrounded by a few low brick buildings and lots of overgrown vacant lots filled with trash left by drive-by dumpers. A couple homeless guys were living in some steel containers out back, and a pack of dogs roamed the area. The warehouse’s owner, Tim Medema, told Edel that a year earlier one of the dogs had attacked a man and the man shot it. “Everyone was armed then,” he said. Edel later heard that the people in the city’s planning department called the neighborhood Little Beirut.
Edel walked around, taking it all in. He decided the building was just what he’d been looking for.
Edel still built real things–and sometimes wrecked them. For ten years running he hosted a party on the Fourth of July, inviting friends to bring old television sets, which he smashed to bits with some elaborate contraption he’d concocted. “I hate TV,” he says. One year he built a catapult, another year a 41-foot tower with a huge log that dropped on the TVs. “The best one was the eight-garage-door-spring-powered rail gun,” he says. “It was capable of hurling a late-60s console-style television at a slight arc off the second-floor deck. They flew about 22 feet off the ground over a span of 18 feet into a wall of 96 sharpened steel spikes, after which they’d crash to the ground. The TVs were on. They were fitted with a traveling extension cord, and sometimes we’d put fireworks in the back so they’d go off in midair.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Edel had been planning and saving for this project for years. He already had a name for his business–Bubbly Dynamics, in honor of nearby Bubbly Creek, the branch of the Chicago River into which the stockyards once dumped their offal. He even had a tenant lined up, a drywall distributor who was paying high rates to have his product unloaded from railroad cars on 47th Street and wanted to lease Edel’s entire first floor, where he could unload the drywall with his own crew. Edel decided to take the plunge.
Edel figured that buying and rehabbing the building would cost between $425,000 and $450,000. He planned to pay for the project using his savings, his salary, income from tenants, and the revolving line of credit he took out on his Logan Square two-flat, which he’d bought in 1997. He says he and his wife, Julie Dworkin, policy director at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, both live frugally: “The tenants pay the mortgage, and we don’t drive a car. Our biggest expense is food.” He knew money for the project would be tight, so it was going to be pretty much DIY. He’d work on it when he wasn’t at his day job, and Dworkin would help him when she could.
Edel made a deal with his college friend Matt Samsel, a cabinetmaker and carpenter who’d built everything from bathrooms to boats: Samsel would help out with the rehab in exchange for space for a workshop, though they didn’t bother to specify how much help or how much space. Edel describes Samsel as one of those hypercreative people who have a dozen clever ideas half-finished at any given time but who come through with a brilliant solution at the moment you most need it. “A good guy to have around,” he says.
