| Skip Story - See Photos NOW! There is an interesting story behind the Melrose Loft. Once it was known as the MotorHome Loft. Once it was known as a bank. It went belly-up in the 1929 stock market crash. It spent some time as a shoe storage and as a photography studio. Audrey Rodriguez and Tina Bestman invited me to stay at the loft when the lease was up on my place in Evanston, and I didn't want to sign up for another lease, knowing I'd leave Chicago soon for the mountains. Tina was the bass player in Pound of Flesh, until moving to New Orleans with Audrey this Fall. We met working together at Helix Photo in Chicago - source of various other life dramas for a circle of friends and lovers who all happened to be intelligent, like photography, music and motorcycles and who all worked there in the mid 90s (and many of whom still keep in touch). Guess slave labor was a bonding experience for us all. But that's another story..... Several bands and artists, including MotorHome, had made this funky loft their home over the years. Oh the drama that loft had seen.....wild sex, arguments, breakups, creative freaks and creative streaks. The loft had ghosts. Tina had heard a loud boom, and then seen 2 people running out of the bottom of the floor, where a staircase used to be, and out the wall, where a door used to be. Darryl had seen a person standing with a clipboard near the fire escape door. When he tried to speak to the man, the man vanished. I stayed there alone for a month, as the last person to occupy the loft, but I didn't see any ghosts. I also didn't sleep in the rooms that were said to give off the 'bad vibes'. There were many layers of paint, peeling and leaking walls and ceilings, a strange black fungus growing in parts of the loft, cool mosiac tile patterns on the counters and in the floor of the shower. The shower was a step-up plywood model, and artistically drained 'uphill' so that you had to sweep it with a broom each time you decided to wash. It also was a good place to wash off your mountain bike, after riding through a Chicago mudstorm. The idea to strip back some of the walls to the original brick was a slight err in judgement, though it looked cool. It was a battle to keep any of your belongings from being covered in brick dust that had jumped ship. It had 4 big bedrooms. By the time I lived there, one was a practice room for Pound of Flesh and one was used to refinish furniture. It was close to the Ravenswood el, great cheap sushi, Mexican burrito houses that stayed open late, and the Dub-L-Dog stand, so how could you refuse the opportunity to stay at a place like that? While other people paid outrageously jacked up rents in the Belmont/Ashland area, we paid the cheapest rent I'd had in years, in a place 4 times the size of anything you could find in that area anymore. Sadly, with our leaving, the Loft O'Drama is no more......the owner, of course, wants to re-hab it and divide it up into loft apartments, with, I am certain, the requisite 2x3 foot cement hanging 'balcony' big enough for a mini hibachi and one plastic chair. You know, the design that seems destined to kill their owners in the not-distant future, when the cheap cement and steel start to rot from the acid rain..... To honor the loft, and for me to bid Chicago a farewell, we decided to have a party like no other, and invited past roommates and their bands back for a last night of debauchery. It was a success. The PHOTOS |