Spotlight On . . . Blue Hydrangea

I lived on the corner of Winthrop and Berwyn in Chicago for four years. I loved (love) that loud little corner, marked by the roaring El and impossibly, the even louder Foster bus, which clogs up traffic on Berwyn as it uses the choked up little street to turn around and head back west on Foster.

The corner's marked by yuppies and blue collar folks and those less fortunate than that; it's marked by neighbors and friends and the children and the elderly and by people who care and by people who don't, who are just up to no good. It's like life in that way, real life, not the sanitized version that appears on TV and in so many over-gentrified neighborhoods.



And physically, the corner reflects the diversity, one point has Ollie's Tavern* and the apartments above it, the others host a converted condo building, a coin laundry and a little white house that's hanging on for dear life but that's constantly being surveyed, the last kid to be picked, not realizing until much later that not being chosen has its rewards.

The shops lining Berwyn were unremarkable when I moved in, but that changed pretty dramatically with the appearance of a great little coffee shop, Pause, and a spectacular flower shop (if such a generic term can accurately describe it) offering high-end floral design and operating next to an old fashioned barber and a little resale shop and an empty storefront, all co-mingling and looking a lot like the neighborhood.

Blue Hydrangea is always evolving; the visionary behind it, Dan, has created a space that's ethereal, white, mesmerizing, futuristic. I said before, in design, avoiding the trends means looking to the future or looking to the past. Dan's one of the guys that looks to the future (I called them savants in an earlier column, but Dan's very well-rounded).





Every time I think the space is nearly perfect, he makes a change. Is the space evolving or is it Intelligent Design? That's the question I want answered. But I'll bet Dan can't even answer that one. It's too much to contemplate, to big a question to tackle. We're unable to comprehend the creative forces that we channel or that we experience when we create or even just exist in a space like Blue Hydrangea.

Check him out; I recommend you place an order, pick a price and trust him and his artistic vision. I've never been disappointed, whether the result be a single unusual flower or fifteen individual square vases for a Christmas table setting.



*What happened to all the Chicago taverns? They were on every corner. They're where stuff gets talked about, where revolution ferments - we NEED the taverns.