The arctic air that just moved through the area produced substantial lake-effect snow off the Great Lakes. But both Pennsylvania and Illinois got odd, rare streaks of snow in the vicinity of nuclear power plants: perhaps nuclear-tower snow or nuclear-cooling-pond snow. Read more
List Price: $1.89 million
Sale Price: $1.6 million
The Property: An Astor Street condominium that the interior designer and TV host Nate Berkus first put on the market in March 2011 was sold last Wednesday—just three days after the listing agent marked it as having a contract pending... Read more
List Price: $777,000
The Property: This house, in a part of Chicago called Wrightwood Neighbors, is a classic type of urban residence in its resemblance to a milk carton: tall and slender, with a peaked roof. And in this case, some of the contents are beyond their expiration date... Read more
List Price: $375,000
The Property: While working for two top Chicago architectural firms in the 1950s and ’60s, Gertrude Lempp Kerbis made contributions to design elements at O’Hare International Airport and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado. Today’s tour is at a building that was a benchmark project for her, one that she has said was among the first places where she worked on her own... Read more
One reason frequently given for the substantial drop in America's violent crime rate is lead abatement—a couple decades after it was removed from paint and gas, crime started downwards. But it's still out there, in houses and the soil of big cities, and the more we know about it, the lower the acceptable limits of lead get. Read more