GARFIELD RIDGE — What is that?
That's a thought that might cross your mind driving down the stretch of Central Avenue between Midway and Stevenson Expressway, where you'll find a swirly, red-and-orange-and-yellow sculpture topped with what looks like an airplane propeller and an abstract face with its tongue sticking out.
Some South Siders might call it a giant doohickey or a thingamajig. Others might not call it anything, apathetic or unaware the towering structure even exists.
But Mike Kuper calls it his finest art.
The 62-year-old welder and owner of K-3 Welding built and installed the sculpture — unofficially called "Windy City" — back in 1996. Since then, only one person has stopped to talk to him about it. All she wanted to do was thank Kuper for bringing good art to the South Side.
Though Kuper's company has done some big jobs in Chicago — like steel railings at Soldier Field and red boat cages at Chinatown's Ping Tom Park — the weld boss says he's most proud of "Windy City."
Its story began with a stroll through a scrap yard in Manitowoc, Wis. with his cousin, who owned the place. Kuper spotted what looked like an airplane propeller.
He looked at his cousin and asked, "What is that?"
It turned out to be an impeller — a rotating set of blades you'll find inside a jet engine.
"Cool," Kuper remembers saying, "I'm gonna make a table out of that."
Kuper had the glass and plans ready to make the table. Then someone brought a twisted trailer hitch into the shop. The busted hitch got Kuper's mind turning. He thought: I can put the impeller on top of something shaped like that and make a sculpture out of it.
So that's what he did. With the help of a friend, who has since died, Kuper drew up the plans with pencil and paper — the "old fashioned" way — and had a crew of guys build the structure in two sections.
After the sculpture was done, Kuper asked a structural engineer to explore if the sculpture could stand in strong winds: "He wrote up four pages of calculations that said it would hold up to wind," Kuper said.
That paperwork came in handy when Kuper went to install the sculpture in front of his late father's shop: A-1 Fasteners, at 4820 S. Central Ave. The building owner didn't want Kuper to put it up, worried the wind would topple the sculpture.
"I said, 'No, I have structural engineer-stamped drawings on this,'" Kuper recalls. "'This is the real deal.'"
So the sculpture went up and Kuper started thinking about selling it to one of the city's airports. He loved the story behind Meigs Field, the famed lakefront airport destroyed by bulldozers on the order of Mayor Richard M. Daley, an event later called the Meigs Massacre.
Kuper created the concept for a promotional photograph that a graphic designer — long before the ease of Adobe Photoshop — charged him $500 to make.
The photo shows the "Windy City" sculpture under a brilliant blue sky and in front of the airplanes of Midway Airport. Though he never sold the piece, worth about $40,000 by Kuper's estimate, a canvas reprint of the photo hangs above its creator's desk. It was a gift from his wife, who knows just how much the sculpture means to Kuper.
About a decade after the sculpture went up, it started to rust at the bottom. Kuper's guys cut off the bottom and started rebuilding, but the boss didn't like how it was going, so he had them weld pieces of metal along the sculpture's side "so it looks like it's growing up like a vine."
The spiral pieces almost make the sculpture look like it's on fire.
One of the welders asked Kuper, "Can we put a face on it?"
"I go, 'Yeah, go ahead,'" Kuper said.
Today, Kuper still admires his sculpture and the way the impeller spins at the top. "Have you been by here when it's windy out? That thing turns about a million miles an hour," Kuper said.
But would he sell it now? Absolutely.
"I'd have room for another sculpture," he said.
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