The New and Improved PFG

I'd like to say that life, while generous at times, has not been kind to me lately. Too much focus on the tangled webs of my emotional state and not enough time in the day for much else. If it isn't school, it's work or home life that prevents me from concentrating on the blog and doing the one thing I love to do most, write great posts. I'm not sure when that will change but hopefully soon, because my updates are sporadic at best and a lot less than my normal pace. I thought I was doing all right at least until a dear friend of mind pointed out that he thought there was nothing spectacular or even worth noting in my post on the PFG Warehouse. He wasn't wowed by the ad and he didn't think it was vintage-y or even interesting enough. He described PFG as standing for "Pathetic Fatuitous Garishness." The good ole dictionary under Microsoft Word defines fatuitous as "a lack of intelligence or thought combined with complacency." I guess he was trying to tell me something using the fanciest language he could think up even if the fancy language is English. It's not that my post was terrible, according to him, it is good enough to land a job writing about advertising in Crain's Chicago Business. Thank you, Craig, for giving me that dose of constructive criticism I needed to wake me up. Pretty fucking great, right?

Wait a minute! So THAT'S what PFG stood for. The addled mystery of an obscure electronic store of 1985 has indeed been solved, so perhaps we can finally move on to real Chicago retail.

Here we have a 1950 photo of the Goldblatt's located at Madison and Pulaski with a massive and awesome looking pylon. This is courtesy of an article titled "Bringing Downtown to the Neighborhoods" by Richard Longstreth which appeared in the journal Buildings and Landscapes back in 2007. I have an awesome collection of photos from this great article and a fantastic set of stories. More to come soon. Now that IS PFG! The second rendition, of course.