Gargoyle glimpses

As manager of the Margoliash Lab, a post he's held for seven years, Daniel D. Baleckaitis can look out the Anatomy Building windows and see the Cobb Gate gargoyles on a daily basis. "I always found it fascinating that hundreds of people walk by every day," he says, "but they never look up." Soon after he started the job in June 1999, Baleckaitis, whose hobby is photography, began taking pictures of campus gargoyles, often on Saturday mornings when few people are around and, in the early light, "you can play with the shadows, make them more menacing."

Eventually taking some 300 photos of U of C gargoyles and grotesques, he posted them on a Web site. When viewers asked where he found the carved figures, he redesigned the site to include a campus map. He has since removed several images, after disovering Web surfers were downloading them and claiming them as their own—even the ones with Baleckaitis's watermark. Still, about 40 images remain online, including his favorites of Cobb Gate.

A.M.B.

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Photos (left to right): Gargoyles on Bond Chapel, Bartlett, and Ryerson, respectively.

Photos by Daniel D. Baleckaitis.

March 24, 2006