Gourmet ghetto, here we come.

Since my office, despite it's diminutive size, is blessed with some of the few windows in the building, I have a pretty good vantage point on the street outside. Granted, my view is limited--if I crane my neck way way way to the left and stand on my toes, I can see the edge of the Sear's Tower. But generally speaking, I pretty much gaze at the parking lot and the gigantic brown dumpster. So I have a pretty good feeling for who comes in late to work regularly (I count myself in those numbers...) and what the schedule of the garbage collection is.

Over the top of the dumpster I saw just now a guy shamble past on the other side of the street that looks remarkably like a guy from our neighborhood that lives just a block down from us. This guy and his partner--we'll call them Ken and Keith, though I've never really gotten straight which one's Ken and which one's Keith--moved to Pilsen from Wicker Park a couple of years ago when the scene there in Wicker just got this side of too gentrified. So they sold their bungalow for a bundle and made south to Pilsen, where they renovated a cool old gym on our street and turned it into their house, with their used (online)book business somewhere in there too.

Anyway, I know all this because Ken/Keith is a nosy SOB, an Expert in neighborhood real estate (he apparently checks the realtor MLS listings every morning to see what in the hood has come on the market), and is ALWAYS AROUND. It seems like the main requirement for being a neighborhood character, apart from a goofy get-up, is a fair amount of time to loiter around. I guess if you run an online bookstore out of your house, you've got a fair amount of down time to ride your bike around in the alleys to nose around in other people's real estate doings. And you can't miss him. Imagine a chain-smoking guy in a grubby flapping trench coat, ratty blue jeans and black Converse with a long messy gray ponytail riding around on a rusty old-fashioned girl's bike, and you've pretty much got the picture.

So in our last conversation with Ken/Keith, Local Real-Estate Expert, we found out that we've made a tragic mistake in renovating our home by converting the first floor into a legit residence (formerly a commercial space). This is because our street, he says, is likely to become the next restaurant row right here in Pilsen. I'd say that the pizza joint on the corner and the hotdog cart parked across the street hardly qualify us as a candidate for the next gourmet ghetto. But hey, here's hoping. Maybe the forces of gentrification are about to bring restaurants in the droves to our street, and on this rare sighting outside the neighborhood, Ken/Keith was on his way to scope out the next great neighborhood.