Scraping the sky with a towering project

The week before Christmas, Jesse Evans moved his Chicago skyline from a spare bedroom to the front yard.

It took a while. After all, it was 16-feet, 4-inches high and weighed close to 1,600 pounds. The smoked plexiglass and anodized bronze exterior were breathtaking when framed against a blue December sky.

Jesse spent nearly 20 years dreaming about building a replica of the 110-story Willis Tower, once known as the Sears Tower. His fascination began when he visited the skyscraper in 2003, marveling at how it truly scraped the sky. For almost 25 years, it was the tallest (1,450 feet) building in the world.

He began studying its architectural details, from the 16,100 windows to the famed “Skydeck’’ on the 103rd floor, the highest observation deck in the U.S.

It took almost two and a half years of cutting, sanding, cementing and sizing everything to scale and constructing it in five sections.

No, this wasn’t some giant Lego model right out of the box.

He finished last fall and was anxious to move it outside in the yard “to see what it looked like.’’ He anchored it on a 4x4 concrete slab and showed his Christmas spirit by placing a red holiday bow somewhere around the 25th floor.

After three days, he began taking it down. Anyone on the lower end of Elm Street in Beall’s Hill hardly had time to swivel their heads from their car windows before it vanished after 72 hours and was moved back indoors.

He never intended for it to be to be any kind of attraction.

“It wasn’t done as a showcase’’ Jesse said. “It was strictly done for me … so I could take pictures of it.’’

He invited family members and a few friends to stop by before he hired a local sign company to help gently take it down. He sent photos to the companies that sponsored his project by providing materials — from Glass Wholesalers of Macon to Evergreen Scale Models, Sherwin-Williams and the manufacturers of Gorilla Glue.

He also contacted the front office at the Willis Tower for permission to erect the model in public view from private property. Not only did they give him the thumbs up, company officials were intrigued with his project.

There was no instruction manual to follow or set of blueprints to consult … just the genius and experience of a man who has a degree in physics and once headed a cryogenics program for NASA.

You could call Jesse a city planner, of sorts. The tower has not been the only urban high-rise building to occupy a spot in his yard.

He spent 18 months and devoted some 1,500 man-hours in 2000-01 constructing an aluminum replica of the Seattle Space Needle. The Willis Tower came and went without staying for long. But the neighboring Space Needle has found a permanent home on the other side of the yard for most of the past two decades. (He once took it down and transported it to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the Washington-Michigan college football game.)

Jesse built it in honor of his late wife, Theresa Lee Evans. They met when he was living in Seattle, and they married 40 years ago this year. She moved to Macon with him in 1994 and died unexpectedly of a heart attack on Jan. 1, 2000 – the first day of the new millennium.

The two replicas are the same height — 196 inches — although, in the real world, the Willis Tower is more twice as tall as the 605-foot-tall Space Needle. The replica Needle can withstand the cold winters, rainy springs and humid summers. Jesse said his tower was not built to withstand the elements and could not have survived in the great outdoors.

“Where the beams and windows meet, there are some exposures,’’ he said. “You can’t see them, but I know they’re there. Water would find those openings. You can’t fool water. After a while, it would begin to deteriorate. I prefer it to be kept inside, in an enclosed area.’’

Jesse grew up next door to the house where he now lives. His father, who worked for the railroad, built the home in 1925. (Jesse, was born in 1951 and holds the distinction of being the first Black baby delivered by an African-American physician at the old Macon Hospital.)

He bought his first plastic model — an Indy-style race car — when he was 7 years old. If he closes his eyes, he can still smell the Tester’s Model Cement on his fingers.

He and his brothers would buy models at a downtown hobby shop located in the basement of Mayor Ronnie Thompson’s jewelry store near the corner of Second and Cherry Streets. When the Evans family would travel by train to visit relatives in New Jersey, he and his brothers would take models to build on the way.

The “models’’ have gotten much larger over the years. For his next project, Jesse is planning to roll out a replica of a Lockheed C5 Galaxy aircraft.

He said he doesn’t plan on keeping the tower on four dollies in the guest bedroom forever.

He will find it a home.

“Oh, I expect to put it somewhere,’’ he said. “I was playing the Vera Lynn song this morning. … We’ll meet again. Don’t know where. Don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.’’

Ed Grisamore teaches journalism at Stratford Academy in Macon. His column appears on Sundays in The Telegraph.