Searching

I noticed a message sent to the Rensselaer Adventures Facebook page this week. (I am not always up on these things.) It told me I should stop by the new cycle shop at 201 E Washington because it is not just a bike shop anymore. So yesterday I stopped by. There are now two businesses run side by side, a bike shop and a car repair business.

 After a nice chat with the guys, I set off to solve another mystery. The Tuesday edition of the Rensselaer Republican had the Health Department Inspections, and the December 7 entry intrigued me; "Berrie'd Treasure & Treats, Rensselaer--Found establishment ready to open." I had not heard anything about any new eating establishment, so I stopped by Slice of Pie Pizza and asked the owner what he knew. He could not help me, but suggested that I go to the Health Department and ask.

So I did. They were very friendly, though I was a bit intimidated by the entrance. To get back to the Health Department, you walk through the Probation Department. They said that Berrie'd Treasure & Treats was not in Rensselaer, but in the country, on Iroquois Drive, which is a little strip of county road next to the Iroquois River as it leaves Jasper County. It is in the same location as Iroquois Guns and Repair.

I called the owner, Shirley LegGrand (phone 219-866-8532) to find out what she is doing. Her establishment does not serve meals or food on the premises, but rather she takes orders for a variety of dessert items and delivers them. I guess that makes her a dessert caterer. She has small ambitions, and her business is what I term a hobby-business. (I mean nothing disparaging by that term--much of what I do qualifies as hobby-business. I wish that this blog would earn enough money so I could add the business to the hobby part.) I told her she needs to get a Facebook page to let the world know about what she sells and how much it costs (and that I can link to). She said she has been thinking about it.

(Speaking of Facebook pages, the Rensselaer Adventures page just hit 400 likes. It is big compared to what it used to be, but it still is very small compared to some of the big local pages (Fair Oaks, Fountain Stone, Little Indiana).)

While I was in Slice of Pie, I noticed that the Park Department had set up a skating rink in Iroquois Park, so I went over to the park headquarters to find out the story behind that. The park superintendent said that the Park Board had wanted to revive the skating rink and this year the weather seemed to be favorable. They were still filling it, and with some warmer weather forecast over the weekend, it probably will not freeze solid enough for skating until next week, when we are supposed to get cold again. He was wondering where people would get skates to use the pond.

As you may notice, the site they chose was not level, so the ice will have different thicknesses.

We were trying to figure out when the headquarters building was built. I lived on Milroy Street for the first year I was in Rensselaer, 1974-75 and I am quite sure that the headquarters was not there at that time. Joe Effinger remembers spending time in the building as a boy, and he thought it was built in the late 1960s. Does anyone know exactly when this building was built?

On the same thread, he said that when Hal Gray ran the parks, he operated out of the white building in the picture above, the one that used to be the Strip Joint. Anyone know anything about that?