55th Street oddity

Despite variable weather, I took a cross-city bike ride on Memorial Day, starting from my Rogers Park home and eventually arriving at the Midway Airport Orange Line station around sunset. In between, I beheld many wonders and made great discoveries. Oh, wait'll you see this crazy Midcentury church I found!

But that will have to wait on better photographs; daylight was already fading by that point. Today, we have a somewhat more mundane discovery: some typical 1960s apartments, on Komensky Avenue at 55th Street. Ordinary stuff, right?



Wrong! Look at the stairwell facade, above the door. Normally this portion of the facade has a glass block window wall, usually with a couple of vents. More decorative/funky versions have my beloved colored glass block, or even colored plastic panels for a low-budget stained glass effect. But instead, this little row of buildings got...



...sculpture! Bas relief carvings, probably in limestone, on a background of stone panels.



We've got a nude, bald man playing a flute, and a running guy with a winged helmet. Some sort of mythological theme? That theory gets obliterated by the third relief, a butterfly.



And just to throw more confusion onto the fire...



...the fourth one isn't an image at all, but a sort of compass points cross.

Nearby, I also found another pair of apartments with an extra-heavy dose of colored glass block. Lovely!