From the Brown Line platform at Irving Park you can see what looks like a field house or maybe even a hangar, a tall, window-filled building with an unusual shape. I’d always wondered what it was, and during the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s annual architecture tour, Open House Chicago, I got to find out. At 4025 N. Ravenswood, it’s a former billboard factory that’s now been repurposed into the Ravenswood Event Center. See for yourself below, where there are also peeks at some other sites.
This foyer isn’t really what I’d expect of a factory, would you?
But it’s the atrium that’s really stunning.
Photographer Logan Javage, meanwhile, was hitting another place with an elaborate foyer: the Tribune Tower, which may soon be on the market.
He also went behind the scenes at Goose Island Brewery’s barrel warehouse, at 1800 W. Fulton.
And while on Goose Island, he checked out the fabrication studio Chicago Scenic Studios, at 1315 N. Branch, a 160,000-square-foot space that got its start in 1978 making sets and the like for off-Loop theater.
Chicago Scenic Studios supplies things like the Blackhawks helmets worn by the Art Institute lions when the Hawks were in the Stanley Cup. Hopefully a pair of lionsize Cubs caps is on order.