Photojournalist Jon Randolph takes us into a firm that boasts it has more than a million balloons in its warehouse. MK Brody Company has been selling novelties and party tchochkes since 1911. The company moved to the wholesale market district west of the Loop in 1960, when the area was a gritty, tough spot populated by men walking around wearing blood-soaked aprons.
The district, surrounding the CTA Green Line elevated tracks between Halsted Street and Ogden Avenue, still is home to meat, seafood, and floral wholesalers,
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but chic restaurants and clubs now dot the landscape there. And, of course, the area was granted its holy imprimatur when Oprah Winfrey opened her Harpo Studios on Washington Boulevard.
Brody sells everything from champagne glasses to breast cancer awareness pink ribbons to hand fans with Barack Obama's image emblazoned on them. But after the company bought out the giant 800-4-Balloons outfit in 2005, its business, well, soared.
See you here next Friday for another glimpse of Chicago brought to us by Jon Randolph. See you here tomorrow for more of Benny Jay, Big Mike Glab, and those all-too-rare Letters From Milo.
