![]() The sturdy, low-slung brick and limestone factories that sprouted up along the railroad (now Metra’s UP-North line) churned out everything from steel to ice cream to billboards to musical instruments to film projectors and more. ![]() The Ravenswood Industrial Corridor has a history of manufacturing that dates back to the 1800s. Printing equipment of various sizes from a.favorite designs, Ork Printing, Starshaped Press and Vida Sacic. “When the press is running, it’s not quiet,” she said. But they do need the appropriate zoning, concrete floors to support their presses, ventilation, sturdy electrical wiring, preferably natural light and it helps to have neighbors who aren’t bothered by noise and rumbling, Favorite said. ![]() Printers don’t require (and usually can’t afford) a lot of space-1,000 square feet will do. That’s when printers discover that industrial buildings are scarce in Chicago and those that do exist are “gigantic,” said Favorite. The tipping point between hobbyist and entrepreneur usually occurs around the time a printer graduates to a two-thousand-pound press, and the search is on for a studio. Printers attracted to the manual format typically get their start by working out of a basement or garage using a press roughly the size of a stand mixer. Once we know it sells, we print 400-800 per run.”Ī post shared by a.mber favorite on at 10:29am PDT Size m atters “Most cards we print in quantities of 200 to test out. “When my super powers kick in, I have done about 2,800 impression in one day,” said Amber Favorite, owner and founder of a. Obviously, the scale of printing taking place on Ravenswood can’t hold a candle to the original Printer’s Row. Working on antique equipment often more than 100 years old and using techniques that date back even further, small-scale printers are thriving by essentially zigging where others zagged and returning to printing’s roots. That pissed me off, that’s what pushed me to experiment. ![]() I loved that you could build something from objects in front of you,” said Farrell. “Twenty years ago, when I was in school, everything was going onscreen and I thought, ‘We’re removing the hands from everything.’ I got into printing because I loved the type aspect. Jennifer Farrell, owner and founder of Starshaped Press, is part of this new wave of old school printers. Jennifer Farrell is one of the purest letterpress printers working today, with a motto of “printing like it’s 1929 since 1999.” Her printing forms-the collection of letters and ornaments she sets to create images-are things of beauty in and of themselves and the technical proficiency on display is staggering. Up and down the Ravenswood Industrial Corridor, scrappy letterpress operators and screenprinters are carving out an analog niche in the digital world, setting type with their fingers instead of keystrokes and cranking out greeting cards and prints one piece of paper at a time by hand-kind of like swapping out an iPhone for a rotary model. “Chicago has, from what I can tell, the greatest concentration of independent printers,” said Jenny Beorkrem, owner of Ork Posters, a company she founded a decade ago when sales of her typographic map of Chicago’s neighborhoods exploded.Īnd of those indies, a sizable number, including Ork, have made their home along Ravenswood Avenue. Tabor Shiles prepping to print at Ork Posters. Donnelly, Palmer Printing stubbornly hung on as the Row’s lone survivor, weathering economic downturns and adapting to changing customer demands.īut after receiving an offer apparently too good to refuse for the plant’s prime piece of real estate, ownership finally cashed out on Clark Street. Following the exodus of industry giants like R.R. Once one of the nation’s liveliest printing hubs, the Printer’s Row neighborhood hasn’t lived up to its name for decades. Clark Street made official what has long felt like an inevitability: there are no more printers in Printer’s Row. In January, the announced sale of the Palmer Printing plant at 739 S.
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