The circus comes to the CHA

This priceless little gem comes from the vault of the Chicago Housing Authority. It happened four years ago at Washington Park Homes, a family development on South Calumet Ave on the South Side, a CHA official tells us. The CHA received a call one day from a resident asking for someone to come out and investigate a strange “clippity-clop” noise coming from an upstairs balcony. Housing officials dismissed the call. “We just thought it was someone being crazy,” the official tells us. Over the next three hours two more residents called, each reporting the same odd “clippety-clop” noise coming from upstairs. Perplexed, the CHA paid a call on the development. It turned out that the famous UniverSoul traveling circus had set up camp three blocks away in Washington Park for its annual show, and an entrepreneurial local man had stolen a Shetland Pony from the circus, taken it to Washington Park Homes and put the poor animal on an elevator up to the sixth floor of a 16-story highrise. There he proceeded to give kids rides on the pony, up and down one of the narrow balconies that run the length of the building, charging a quarter for each ride. “He couldn’t really claim that the Shetland Pony was his,” the official recalls. “He just looked sheepish because he was busted, and the circus was glad to have their animal back.”
We promise we didn’t make that up.