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player ready...On Milwaukee Avenue a block north of North Avenue, Ken Byrdy has pretty much proved the truth to the old axiom “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Byrdy himself is sort of a testament to the oddly resourceful way people use (and reuse) the city to make a living.
Behind a chain-link fence at 1702 N. Lincoln Ave., in front of an old, converted truck garage, Byrdy has a yard full of what most casual passersby would quite comfortably call junk:
Weathered old planting urns, bright red plastic letters ripped from storefronts, heaps of old limestone building fronts.
Beyond this assembled debris, over his building’s front door is the sign bearing the name of his business, “Ziggurat,” taken from an ancient style of Mesopotamian architecture.
Byrdy is a recycler of sorts, salvaging and selling the vision and handiwork of long-gone and mostly forgotten craftsmen.
Inside the building’s 10,000 square feet, he’s amassed an orderly jumble of would-be refuse salvaged from wrecking balls and trash bins:
Stained-glass windows, ornamental iron, carved wooden and stone fireplace mantles, church statuary, building columns, archways, entryways, columns. bookcases, theater seats, entire saloon bars and backbars, doorknobs and crystal chandeliers and much, much more.
“Nobody needs any of this stuff,” says Byrdy, 43, a rangy ex-house painting and renovation contractor.
His candor isn’t meant to denigrate his customers.
“New homes have nothing in them but featureless drywall, and the exteriors are pretty plain and uninteresting, too,” he says.
“The people who come in here are looking to put something into their homes or businesses that’s old, that will fill their space with character and personality.”
Byrdy spends part of every week choosing a section of the city to ramble around, looking for places ready for the wrecking crew.
“It all starts with the roof,” he says. “If you see an interesting building that is empty and the roof is sagging, it is going to be a hopeless mess inside, with nothing left to be done to tear it down.”
Byrdy will make a bid to the wrecking contractor, offering to pull out the salvageable architectural details before the building is flattened.
One of several architectural salvager/dealers in the city, he sometimes gets calls from wreckers alerting him to treasures about to go into the trash. Often he is called in by savvy rehabbing homeowners who don’t like the original Victorian splendor of their house. They realize others will pay lots of cash for what they no longer want.
One of the piles of terra cotta refuse in front of his shop happens to be a fairly ornate, carved limestone 15-foot wide, 21-foot tall archway. Until a couple of months ago, for more than a hundred years it graced the front of a South Side apartment building that is by now gone and replaced by a parking lot.
Now it is safe behind Byrdy’s fence, and he has put a $5,000 price tag on it. Who will buy it and what they will use it for remains to be seen, he says.
He’s got huge terra cotta pieces that once ornamented grand old movie palaces now gone: stone heads from the South Side’s State Theater, plaques and fountains from the Devon and Southtown Theaters. Good, anecdotal pieces, Byrdy figures, for somebody to stick in a back-yard garden to brag about where it came from.
He displays exquisite items such as iron work from the Rookery Building elevators, stained glass and a theater seat from Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater. He’s got offbeat pieces, like whimsical elephant lobby seats out of the Oriental Theater.
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“It’s satisfying,” says Byrdy. “These are things that were going to the dump until we jumped in and busted knuckles getting to it first. We bring it here, fix it up, and someday somebody will walk in and say `That’s exactly what I need for my back yard,’ or `That’s what I need to decorate my restaurant.’ “