THE BESTEST ROOFTOP IN TOWN

In the years 1987-1991 I lived at a rather unimposing yellow brick building on the northwest corner of Damen and Thomas streets. It was actually numbered 1100 North Damen, and during the height of its party sponsoring days it became known affectionately as "The 1100 Club". There were a lot of great aspects to that apartment (wooden floors, radiator heat, 3 decent sized bedrooms, a hallway that seemed to go forever), but by far the greatest of these was the amazing rooftop access up the back stairway. It was just a typical Chicago beveled black tar deal, but it offered one of the most amazing vistas available in all of Wicker Park. Nighttime, daytime, it didn't matter -- the view was astounding 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I loved it so much that I wrote a bunch of my first film around it, starting the film with a handheld walkabout shot that captured the whole 360° of eye-popping splendor in a nearly continuous take.

But the best time I ever had up there by far is one day when me and my friend Terry went up with a surprisingly loud boom box and started blaring out our favorite records. To our delight, we discovered that when we pointed the speakers down toward the street, the acoustics of the surrounding buildings were such that the sound would bounce down and sound to passerbys like it was coming from somewhere behind them. They seemed confused and bewildered with THE CARPENTERS coming from everywhere and nowhere around them, but when we put on SUCKDOG's first album Drugs Are Nice, everyone down below seemed downright terrified. It was the best example of music terrorism I've ever seen.

A few years after moving to Detroit and finishing the "1100 Club" film (which came to be called Truth, Beauty, Strangeness and Charm), I showed it at one of the weekly open 16mm film screenings that used to be every Sunday at Delilah's (a hip bar on Lincoln near Diversey). About 5 minutes into the film there was a screech of delight from Delilah's owner Mike Miller, and he came up to me and asked where I had done the filming. When I answered that it was nearly entirely shot at 1100 N. Damen, he looked at me with wide-open eyes and declared, "That's where I live. I KNEW I recognized that rooftop." Turns out he lived (and still lives, I believe) in the apartment right above my old one. There's nothing more Chicago than to bond with someone over something as mundane as a rooftop.

- Russ Forster