Weird Wicker Park

With an Urban Outfitters and a Levi’s store recently moved in and cool-coffeehouse Filter moved out, the once artist-friendly Wicker Park might seem inevitably tipping towards the sanitized yuppification of its neighbor, Lincoln Park. However there are bits of offbeat weirdness to be experienced, from the screen print vendors who set up shop on the sidewalk (literally) to the bemusing Animal Collective-esque hippyish folk band that randomly sets up on the corner of North and Milwaukee, along with strange window displays and interesting grafiti. Here’s a bunch of photos I took of places and things in the neighborhood that are amusing and offbeat. My picks are after the jump and there’s a link at the end to the full collection.

A closeup of the posters on a boarded up former Pizza Hut

A lamp at a furniture store

Ragstock on Milwaukee Avenue

Sign outside pawn shop on Milwaukee Avenue

Vivisected stairway on Milwaukee Avenue

Former Burger King sign on Milwaukee Avenue

London-style phone booth outside of a condo building, serving as callbox to the apartments upstairs on Milwaukee Avenue

Grapefruit graffiti on Milwaukee Avenue

I’m surprised that this has worked…

…because the same technique has failed further down the street. Me, I would have slapped a poster over the “Not” to encourage more people to add to the poster collection

Next to the door of a building on North Avenue someone has made a little outdoor gallery of Priority Mail tagger stickers

Yes, that’s a bowl o’ babies in the window for a home furnishings store on Milwaukee Avenue

The locked gates outside of a botanica

Part of a mural on a dry cleaner’s building. Judging from the look on that bee’s face that must be some “special” smoke.

And my absolute favorite, forever engraved in concrete on St. Paul Avenue

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