Posts Tagged ‘Chris LaFortune’
Suburban chickens April 24th, 2009
At 9 A.M. today I was in a warm room, quiet except for the soft groans that come from someone getting a kick-ass massage. Forty five minutes later I was chasing a pair of hens around a backyard in Oak Park. When I came across an item in an email this week from the Green Community Center about a resident who raises chickens in her backyard I was sold. My love of the bizarre, needs no documentation. I was expecting more than two chickens, to be honest, but then reality sets in and the Village of Oak Park allows two fowl per backyard. The owner, Helen Standen, declined to be photographed. So Poppy and Magnolia became my stars. This is shaping up to be a fad, or a trend, or whatever. There are many websites, Backyard Chickens, Urban Chickens, and even a good blog about one in Chicago. Most days my job rocks.
So I totally want some chickens now. My cats would *love* them.
4/24/09 OAK PARK, IL Helen Standen's chickens Poppy and Magnolia run around her backyard where she raises them at her Oak Park home on Friday, April 24, 2009. Standen harvests the eggs daily and build her own coop. (Rob Hart/Staff Photographer)
excerpt from Chris LaFortune’s story:
Perhaps this comes as a surprise, but Helen Standen doesn’t mind that people call her the chicken lady.
“I home school, too,” the Oak Park resident said. “I’m used to being different.”
Standen grew up just outside of Cleveland on 12 acres of land. Her parents owned goats, pigs, other farm animals, but they weren’t really farmers.
Standen’s father traveled a lot for work, her mother was an avid gardener and canner.
“Looking back now that I’m grown up as a parent with kids, I don’t know how my parents did it,” Standen said.
So she’s quite content with just the two chickens that she owns and keeps in her Oak Park backyard. Poppy and Magnolia, two ISA Browns, have a coop in the back of Standen’s yard, a structure she built.
“It’s great for the soul to produce stuff, to make stuff,” Standen said. “It doesn’t have to be of professional quality.”
The Standens first owned chickens in 2004. They’ve lost a few over the years to various mishaps, and the current pair came in last year.
4/24/09 OAK PARK, IL Helen Standen's chickens Poppy and Magnolia run around her backyard where she raises them at her Oak Park home on Friday, April 24, 2009. Standen harvests the eggs daily and build her own coop. (Rob Hart/Staff Photographer)
4/24/09 OAK PARK, IL Helen Standen with one of the two chickens she raises in the backyard of her Oak Park home on Friday, April 24, 2009. Standen harvests the eggs daily and build her own coop. (Rob Hart/Staff Photographer)
My favorite reporter and partner-in-crime on the Oak Park 365 blog, Chris LaFortune.
Staff Writer Chris LaFortune holds a chicken in Helen Standen's backyard in Oak Park, IL.
Tags: chickens, Chris LaFortune, Helen Standen, Oak Park, Rob Hart, urban chicken
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Worn Out sole March 18th, 2009
To get to Antonio Munoz’s shoe repair shop, customers have to step down a set of concrete stairs into the basement of the Oak Park Avenue retail building he’s set up in.
A little bell at the door rings as people step into Tony’s Shoe Clinic, 115 N. Oak Park Ave., a small space that smells of leather and shoe polish. There’s a whirring noise in the store: Munoz’s mechanical sander, constantly on.
Munoz can be found before the sander, grinding away at the bottom of a pair of shoes, preparing to replace their soles.
Behind Munoz is his workbench, a pile of adhesive clumped up on the table, easy access when he needs to glue on new heels or those replacement soles he’s preparing.
Two metal stands are off to one side with fittings Munoz can place the shoes on when he needs to hammer new heels into place. Next to his sander is a press to push shoe leather into place.
Munoz has plenty of work, from adjustments people want done to newly purchased shoes to major renovation of pieces of leather that are shoes only in name.
Thirty years ago, when he started in Oak Park, there were 10 shoe repairmen in town, he said. Now, he’s the last, putting in 15-hour work days.
“I come over here at 6 o’clock in the morning and I go at 9:30 in the night, every day,” Munoz said. “When you like the job … you stay here. If you don’t like the job, it’s boring in one day, boring in one hour.”
And he likes the work, repairing not just shoes, but purses, luggage, belts, jackets. As he says, Munoz can fix just about anything with leather.
Munoz has spent 43 years in the business, he said, starting in Mexico. When he was younger, he needed work.
“One guy said, go there, they’ll find you a job there,” Munoz said. He went into shoe repair and never left.
Not only does Munoz take the jobs that walk in the door, he said, but also takes overflow work from other repairmen who don’t have time.
“It’s too expensive for new (shoes) right now,” he said. “Five years ago, it was … cheaper.” – Chris LaFortune
Tags: Chris LaFortune, Economy, Oak Park, Oak Park 365, Rob Hart, Tony's Shoe Clinic
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