If you walk through Lincoln Park during clement weather, you may see Horace Nowell, 26, armed to the teeth with a baggy white suit and a respirator mask. Someone once mistook him for a beekeeper, so a bit of an inside joke persists among his neighbors: “Here comes the beekeeper,” they often chaff.
Horace upcycles old newspaper boxes, reincarnating them into interior design fixtures that can be used as record player stands, bar carts, display shelves, plant stands—you name it. He does the bulk of his work in the park—sanding, grinding off rust, priming, and painting. His painter’s suit shields his clothes from overspray, and the mask protects his lungs from chemicals and fumes. A good neighbor, he lays down a white tarp to leave as little trace as possible.
Horace is an avid reader of local news, especially print media. He gets the Chicago Sun-Times delivered daily and regularly picks up copies of the Reader and South Side Weekly. So when he started to notice the disappearance of newspaper boxes, he got the idea to buy one for himself. He remembers seeing them on almost every corner when he was younger, each one advertising its news agency with distinct bright colors.
“They were really a part of that natural, urban Chicago scenery,” says Horace. “I noticed that they were kind of disappearing, and as a big Chicago history fan, I was like, ‘Well, how can I have a piece of this Chicago history?’”
In the summer of 2019, he purchased a Chicago Tribune box from the 90s on Craigslist. Its paint had chipped, and it was covered in rush and dust—a true vintage relic. He cleaned it up, slapped on a coat of fresh white paint, and preserved the original logo in its recognizable gothic font.
A few months later, he refurbished a decommissioned box from Hoy—a Tribune Publishing-owned, Spanish-language newspaper shuttered in 2019—this time taking things a bit further by adding interior lighting. Windy City Racks was born. In 2020, Horace established a small business that creates customized newspaper boxes that function as interior art pieces.
While the first Tribune box maintained its original intended use, holding his dad’s old papers from when the Bulls won various championships in the 90s, the second box served as a flashy record player stand.
Since then he’s restored a couple dozen newsstands representing various publications, such as the Reader, Red Eye, and Sun-Times. One client requested a box paying homage to the Chicago Defender, a Black-interest newspaper started in 1905, so Horace combed through Internet archives for hours studying photos so that he could mock up a worthy design.
Even before these DIY projects, Horace was no stranger to spray paint. As a high schooler, he painted murals throughout Chicago and even in other cities, like Berlin, perfecting his technique. Even so, because Horace aims to produce as close to a factory finish as possible, the painting process requires an extreme level of detail and effort. There’s a lot that goes into these projects, but the hardest part is before he even gets started.
Carless, Horace bikes all the way to suburbs like Cicero, Evanston, and Oak Park to buy spray paint. That’s because in the early 90s, the second Mayor Daley banned its sale in Chicago to crack down on graffiti, and the law is still on the books. A Streets and Sanitation webpage vilifies graffiti as “vandalism” that “scars the community, hurts property values and diminishes our quality of life.” Thanks to broken-windows-theory ideas about crime, graffiti has a bad reputation as a harbinger of violence and disorder. Consequently, the city spends millions scrubbing it from walls and viaducts. But when he was a kid, Horace’s biggest hobby was documenting, and thereby preserving, graffiti art.
Starting when he was eight or nine years old, he begged his dad to drive him from their home in Lincoln Park to some of Chicago’s industrial corridors to snap photos of freight trains as well as the graffiti art on the box cars. Back then, he didn’t have much of an interest in newspaper boxes themselves but instead was drawn to the collage of graffiti and stickers that accumulated on their glossy shells.
“I view most graffiti art as an art form; it’s something that I really appreciate. But unlike a lot of other art forms, there’s a sort of impermanence—because it’s not guaranteed to be preserved forever.”
Horace used photography to conserve these unique markings—that he considers pieces of Chicago history—bound to be lost over time, whether by human removal or succumbing to the elements.
The focal point of his newest hobby, newspaper boxes, has proven to possess a similar impermanence, signifying the waning popularity of print media. But thanks to Horace’s artistic talent and passion for preserving Chicago history, some of those boxes will avoid the scrapyard in favor of someone’s living room.
As you’d expect from a history lover, for Horace, the more nostalgic way of getting the news possesses a certain charm. Even as print readership declines, he remains a loyal supporter, buying merch and subscriptions and reading as much as he can.
“It’s something about the tangibleness of a physical newspaper that really resonates with me. . . . It’s something that is printed and then shows up on your doorstep overnight . . . something that has a little bit of magic to it.”
He supports in other ways too. In 2021, Windy City Racks helped with a giveaway where people could win an upcycled Reader box by becoming donating members of the publication. Then last fall, Horace collaborated with the Reader for its 50th-anniversary celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art by creating upcycled boxes for a money-raising raffle giveaway.
When he’s not working on boxes, Horace makes time for other interests, all rooted in a deep love for Chicago history and its urban landscape. He’s an avid model railroader, a hobby that harkens back to photographing freight cars as a kid. He regularly DJs house music (a genre invented in Chicago) live on the air for 88.7 FM WLUW. His sets usually have a transit theme. And he enjoys going on bike rides with friends, or just riding solo, to explore different parts of the city.
While Windy City Racks has certainly grown since Horace’s first two projects, he wants it to remain a hobby, in part to have time for his other pursuits.
“I really kind of hope just to continue my work as it’s being done now. Because it is just a hobby. It’s something that I’m able to allocate a certain amount of time for without it being overwhelming. It’s something that I can really put a lot of passion and detail into and still be fun,” says Horace. “And that’s how I’d like to keep it for now.”
