Beer: Indy Pub Crawl

Indy Pub Crawl is a bi-annual pub crawl around downtown bars/restaurants. The organizers have apparently been doing this for 10 years! Their summer crawl will take place on Saturday, June 28th and the tentative schedule is:

11:30 The Living Room Lounge
12:10 The Elbow Room
12:50 The Front Page
1:30 Rathskeller
2:20 Bourbon Street (lunch stop)
3:10 AJ’s Lounge
4:00 Buggs Temple
4:50 Spencers Tavern
5:40 Baseys
6:30 The Dugout
7:10 Radio Radio
7:50 Mystery Stop
8:40 Subterra

The list isn't 100% confirmed yet, but given the distance between some of the locations (particularly Buggs->Spencers) they're going to have a bus. A small donation will be required to cover that cost. More information here.

Development: ZING!

First reported here back in October, it turns out that the name on the liquor license application for the former Payton's Place, Indiana Avenue Restaurant and Lounge, was just a placeholder. Instead, the new restaurant will be called 'Zing'. It will feature two floors of seating with an outdoor deck that will wrap around the point of the building at West St. and Indiana Ave. The owner is shooting for a July 1st opening and their goal is for the restaurant to be of "five star quality."

Taking a peak in the windows, the inside of the building is still very rough. It appears that they have completely gutted the building and many walls are still bare to the studs. My guess is they'll be hard-pressed to have this done in a little over two months. Here are some photos that show the status of the exterior of the building, which now features many more windows than in the past:
The last photo shows what appears to be a new doorway to the outdoor deck. Also, if you look closely at the sidewalk in front of the round planter, you can just make out a square. These squares indicate the areas where the deck supports will attach to the sidewalk. The deck will span the entire length of the building on the Indiana Ave. side and part of the North St. side (North St. is effectively a parking lot at this location). To see earlier photos of the exterior, click here, here and here.

Beer: Dark Lord Day

I attended my first Dark Lord Day on Saturday and I've got some bullet-point thoughts about the experience:

The Good:

• I got some Dark Lord!
• The line was mostly orderly. A little extreme drunkenness and some line-jumping here and there but luckily those two forces never butted heads.
  
• Oak Aged Dark Lord is delicious. And -- BONUS! -- it actually costs less than Dark Lord in the bottle. A 22oz bottle of Dark Lord was $15, or $0.68/oz. A 10oz sample of aged Dark Lord was $5, or $0.50/oz. You explain that one to me...
• We also sampled Flossmoor Station Pretty Big IPA, which is very, very good. I think it's a little misnamed though -- more like Almost DIPA! I'd never even heard of them before Saturday, so I look forward to checking them out in the future. Looking at a map, they're a little SW of Chicago, just a little off my regular route from Indy to my older brother in Evanston. I feel a side-trip in my future.
  

The Bad:

• A lot of people didn't get any Dark Lord. It seems from reports around the internet that if you weren't in line by 10 or 10:30am -- yes, 30 minutes before the doors even opened -- you were SOL. They ran out of Dark Lord sometime between 4 and 4:30pm.
  
• The line CRAWLED. It took us a little over two hours to move 200 feet. For my fellow geeks out there, that's 0.019 mph or about 20 inches/minute. Supposedly there were improvements made to the sales system this year, so they were either very ineffective or were simply overwhelmed by the increase in attendance this year.
  
• I forgot my camera. Good thing Mike and Matt have you covered.
  
• We made the decision in advance to not stay over in the Munster area on Saturday night. This required that one person in our group DD, which put a little bit of a damper on everyone's drinking. Getting the Dark Lord is great and all, but most of the fun of the event comes from sampling great exotic beers and carousing, so I regret not staying around. We won't be making that mistake again next year.

All in all, a very fun event. Our group declared the day a success, a "scouting trip" of sorts that should make us that much more prepared to enjoy the event next year.

Photos: Residences at 429 on the Park

Residences at 429 on the Park facts:

• Height: 9 stories, 124'
  
• Architect, 1924 (original 5-story structure): Rubush & Hunter
• Architect, 1987 (glass addition to the north): CSO Architects
  
• Architect, 2007 (4-story addition under construction): Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf
  
• New Residential Units: 22
• Current Owner: Stenz Corporation
  

Development: A Tale of Two Lighting Schemes

Now that construction on Lucas Oil Stadium itself is nearing completion, progress is beginning on the treatment of the land around the stadium. The designer of the lighting in the stadium parking lot must have been a little schizophrenic. First, we've got some nice, retro, human-scaled lights at the driveway entrances:

Then, literally steps away, we've got gigantic Lucas Oil Stadium-scaled lights (given the way things turned out on 38th St., at least the color matches!):

And finally, here's a shot of the sidewalk treatment along McCarty St.: