With all of the focus now directed at the 87-story Aqua, it's easy to forget that two of Lakeshore East's other residential towers, The Chandler and 340 on the Park, still have a handful of unsold homes available.

According to Leila Zammatta, senior vice president of sales for Magellan Development Group, The Chandler (above left), located at 450 E Waterside Dr, has a single one-bedroom / 1.5-bath and two three-bedroom / 2.5-baths for sale.

The one-bedroom is a ninth-floor unit with 1,024 square feet, priced in the $490s. One three-bedroom located on the 25th floor has 1,900 square feet and is priced in the $740s. The other, a 22nd-story home with 2,215 square feet, is priced at $1.18 million.

The MLS lists an additional 15 resales at The Chandler, ranging from a second-floor one-bedroom priced in the $340s, all the way up to a $1.89 million three-bedroom on the 33rd floor, which sold in April for $1.41 million.

Of all of Lakeshore East's condo towers, The Chandler is the closest to both the lake and the river, and is almost directly across the river from The Chicago Spire's site in Streeterville. Construction on the Chandler started to wrap around this time last year, according to the Yo archives.

On the other end of the neighborhood-sized development, bordering both the southern edge of Lakeshore East's central park and the northern end of Millennium Park, is 340 on the Park (above right), 340 E Randolph St, where work wrapped early this year.

Back in March, I reported that 340 on the Park was down to its final two units. The floor plan I profiled at that time has since sold, but the other, a 2,750 square-foot three-bedroom on the tower's 56th floor, is still available for the same price of $2.2 million. A contract must have fallen through at some point this spring or summer, because Zammatta says a 16th-floor, 1,900 square foot home with two bedrooms, 2.5 baths and a den is now selling in the $900s.

The MLS lists another 11 resales in the building, ranging from the $540s up to $1.24 million.

- Rate and review The Chandler at NewHomeNotebook.com.
- Rate and review 340 on the Park at NewHomeNotebook.com.

It's often difficult to envision a completed building when looking at a cement skeleton, and New West Realty's 1555 Wabash in the South Loop is no different. With the addition of some glass on the lower residential floors I was hoping to get a better idea of how this building will turn out, but I'm still having a tough time reconciling this structure with the glass box seen in the rendering.

I'm always impressed with artists' ability to take a little creative license and sneak the Sears Tower into renderings where it doesn't belong, but this one (below) is particularly egregious. In this rendering it looks like the Sears is east of Wabash - a full seven blocks from where it stands at 233 S Wacker St. It looks like it could be on Michigan Avenue, and the AT&T Building is even further east.

I understand the iconic status of the Sears and its importance to the Chicago skyline, but to anyone familiar with the city, this rendering could give the impression that 1555 Wabash is more than a half mile from where it's actually located.

- Rate and review 1555 Wabash at NewHomeNotebook.com.

A Chicago Tribune report from Friday finds a silver lining - if however faint - in the housing crisis: Real-estate agents are educating themselves, expanding their vocabularies and improving their craft.

Here are a few choice quotes from the article:

"There has to be a paradigm shift in everyone's thinking…When the boom hit, people couldn't keep up. All you knew is that everyone wanted to buy quickly. It was more a matter of juggling the contracts. It wasn't helping educate them so they can make an informed decision."

-Joan Sinnott, Century 21 Lullo in Addison

"The real estate agent of 10 years ago is not the real estate agent of today. We've become more of a resource for our sellers, rather than you just hire us to sell. The agents today know they have to come to the table prepared and if they don't, it's a challenge."

-Patrick O'Rourke, Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage

"[Buyers] should expect that an agent will go back to the basics. I'm constantly having to re-educate myself…We need to put ourselves in the position of building a pipeline for a future business. We have to now counsel them. Before, we were just salespeople. You bring it, we sell it. Now we're going back to the fiduciary responsibility we have."

-Marki Lemons, Rubloff Residential Properties

Upon learning that MCL Companies' new park was open to the public, I took a walk down to Streeterville on Friday and had a look at the new green space, which is located across the street from the River East Art Center and adjacent to the ParkView Tower . The park is bordered by Illinois Street, Grand Avenue, and Peshtigo and McClurg courts.

- Rate and review ParkView at NewHomeNotebook.com.
- Rate and review Lofts at River East Art Center at NewHomeNotebook.com.

Among the pictures photographer Michael Kardas dropped off last week were two shots of construction at Silver Tower, the 40-story high-rise going up at 303 W Ohio St in River North. As we noted a couple weeks ago, the tower's glass is a little more blue than silver, but we'll wait until the whole thing is finished before passing judgment on its execution.

- Rate and review Silver Tower at NewHomeNotebook.com.

Every morning, we survey scores of local and national newspapers and magazines, amateur and professional blogs and other interesting Web sites in search of stories that are relevant to Chicago home buyers. We add those stories to own news feed, thereby creating a one-stop news source for anyone interested in Chicago's neighborhoods and new-home market.

Click here to read YoChicago's news feed.

A year ago today we posted a round-up story on Chicago's "soaring skyline," featuring nine luxury super-talls.

The headline today might be "Chicago's souring skyline" - 4 of the 9 may never be built.

We received word Friday morning from MCL Companies marketing director Susan Devine that MCL's new park in the 400 block of East Illinois Street in Streeterville was open to the public, so I took advantage of the afternoon's fair weather and walked down to River East. Some work was still going on and a few fences were still in place, but several people were already out enjoying the park.

As I was leaving, I bumped into a construction worker who said that while excavating the site for the underground parking garage, workers found an anchor, some chains and railings, possibly from George Wellington Streeter's boat, The Reutan. As the story goes, Streeter ran his steamboat ashore during a storm in 1886 near what is now the site of ParkView. The shallow water surrounding the beached boat later was filled in with trash, extending the landmass of the city.

The fellow I spoke with seemed to think the artifacts were indeed pieces of Streeter's boat, but it seems equally plausible that they were simply pieces of trash from the landfill. Either way, he says they plan to use them to build some sort of monument to Streeter. I'll be interested to get MCL's take on the Streeter monument the next time I talk to them.

Below are a couple of MCL's early renderings of the park, and photos I snapped from similar angles.

You've got to laugh to keep from crying, Yo readers. That's why we're celebrating "Gallows Humor Weekend" at YoChicago. Think of it as our own real-estate-themed prelude to Halloween.

To get things rolling, we'll pass along this hot-off-the-presses news release:

Coming Soon…

We're delighted to announce a GRAND OPENING WING DING for…

TRAMP TOWER

Blair Kamin says: “Wee doggies, they got a pen'house an' one o' them tables what got a umbrella!”

Featuring:

• All surface-mounted wiring
• "Indoors" outhouse
• Kustum Kitchens by Possumbility
• Passive solar heating & cooling
• Vintage wind generator
• Highly sustainable environment for native species
• Enjoy sustainable, locally produced dietary regimen of tasty local critters
• Low population density affords easy supply of road kill
• Porches, decks and stairwells mostly in compliance with OSHA standards

The comment section is all yours, boys and ghouls!

With apologies to Raymond Carver…

Anyone who has looked at a PageRank meter recently or uploaded a video onto YouTube knows that Google has plenty of data about traffic on the Web. One toy we've been playing around with this afternoon is Google Insights for Search, which can compare search patterns across regions, categories, and time frames. For example, what is the more popular query among Google users - "new homes Chicago" or "new construction Chicago" - and how has the number of those searches changed over the past four years?

As you can see in the chart above, "New homes Chicago" (in blue) is used just a little more frequently than "new construction Chicago" (in red), but searches for both have tanked by about 80 percent from the halcyon days of early 2005.

And what if you add "real estate Chicago" (the orange line below) to the mix?

The trend line is the same, but "real estate Chicago" definitely blows away the other two.

For what it's worth, Google says the top five searches related to these phrases are:

• "homes in Chicago"
• "new homes Illinois"
• "Chicago new construction"
• "new construction homes"
• "Chicago Tribune homes"