The credit squeeze and slumping real-estate market claimed another local corporate victim this week, as an Orlando-based resort-development company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and reorganization.

Land Resource LLC had earlier this year closed most of its sales offices in five states and slashed its staff by more than half to about 100 people. The company on Thursday filed a voluntary bankruptcy petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Orlando, along with a number of related companies. That allows it to continue operating while it crafts a reorganization plan, though many companies eventually convert to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy to liquidate their assets and cease operations.

In its main filing, Land Resource estimated that it had debts of more than $50 million and assets of at least $100 million. The company indicated that it expected funds would be available for the court to distribute to unsecured creditors, once exempt property was excluded and expenses paid.

The company listed more than $1 million owed to its 20 largest unsecured creditors, including $423,241 owed to Prudential Relocation Inc.

Land Resource also listed the Atlanta Braves baseball team as an unsecured creditor, with $50,000 outstanding.

Mike Flaskey, chief executive officer and a former Orlando-area time-share executive, moved the company’s headquarters to Orlando in 2007 from Atlanta. He said at the time that it was to be near the pool of time-share sales talent in Orlando, as Land Resource used similar marketing and sales strategies to sell lots in resort locations such as the Carolinas.

The company’s founder, longtime Atlanta developer J. Robert Ward, who also lives in Windermere, was listed in the bankruptcy filing as the largest shareholder in the privately held limited-liability company, with 79.9 percent of the stock. Two Ward family trusts controlled most of the rest.

A number of related companies with the same Millenia Lakes Boulevard address also filed Chapter 11 petitions Thursday, listing smaller amounts of debts and assets. Among them: Land Resource Group Inc., LR Buffalo Creek LLC and Laird Point Brokerage LLC.

LR Buffalo Creek listed assets of at least $10 million and debts exceeding $1 million, including more than $1.5 million owed to its 20 largest unsecured creditors. A.B. Sitework Inc. of Hampton Cove, Ala., was the largest, owed $868,523.

Jerry W. Jackson can be reached at 407-420-5721 or jwjackson@orlandosentinel.com.
[via Orlandosentinel]

DIVISION STREET runs from east to west. It begins (or ends, if you prefer) in Chicago’s wealthy Near North Side, where high-rise condo buildings offer views across Lake Michigan, and continues through the bar- and club-infested area around State and Rush Streets. It is the main thoroughfare of hip Wicker Park; then it traverses Humboldt Park, before heading – like so many residents who once lived on or near it, including a few generations of my own family – into the suburbs.

Solomon Belo moved from Lachine, Chicago, to the Humboldt Park neighborhood when he was 9. About a decade later, shortly after publishing a short story called “The Hell It Can’t” about a savage, unexplained beating, he changed his first name to Saul and his last to Bellow. If the rest isn’t quite history, by now it’s certainly biography.

Late in his life, Bellow reflected on spending summer nights in Humboldt Park, “on the back porch, your neighbors on their back porches all down the line, the graceless cottonwoods reaching toward you and you listened to the accordions and player pianos and harmonicas below, across the way, down the street, playing mazurkas … One of the children was sent to the corner to bring home a pitcherful of soda pop (the druggist called it a phosphate). Over every drugstore in Chicago there swung a large mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs and every summer the sandflies with green light transparent wings covered the windows.”

Though you get the classic Bellovian sense of motion at the end of the passage, with the children running, sandflies beating their wings against the drugstore window, the tone is calm, quiet, almost pastoral. It lacks Augie March’s antic good humor, Herzog’s generative sense of woundedness, Charlie Citrine’s obsessing over his friend Humboldt eating a pretzel while already covered with “the dust of the grave.” But it retains (to my eye and ear, at least) an essential Chicagoness – or at least it evokes the Chicago I knew through my grandparents: a city of immigrants and first-generation Americans living close together, with an ear cocked toward the old country (accordions, mazurkas) while running toward the new (phosphates, electric bulbs).

These days in much of Humboldt Park, you are more likely to hear a tight horn section than accordions, the declining syncopated arpeggios of a piano used in a Latin band than a player piano, salsa, hip-hop or reggaetón than mazurkas. Heading down Division Street, from Western Avenue to the park itself, you pass beneath a row of abstract steel representations of the Puerto Rican flag flying over the street. Most of the signs are in Spanish; the gentrification that has transformed the neighboring areas of Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square is barely a ripple here. And yet, the essential feel that Bellow evokes – a cozy, cheek-by-jowl urbanity – remains palpable. The modest but solid apartment buildings – three flats and six flats – lining the side streets all across Chicago’s Northwest Side are snug and solid, the sorts of places that some people use as a first American toehold and others never leave. Bellow referred to the animal smells, the rawness of Chicago that struck him when his family first moved from Lachine; if the animal smells are gone – the huge Union Stockyards, just southwest of Humboldt Park, closed in the early 1970s, after decades of decline – Chicago’s rough vitality remains stronger here than almost anywhere else in the city.

The second house into which Abraham Belo moved his family is a brick three flat on Cortez Street. The house is on the ragged edge of Ukrainian Village; walking along these streets you’ll hear Ukrainian, Russian and Spanish with equal frequency. Some hipsters, but not many, have started to make inroads this far west. At the end of Bellow’s old block, on the corner of Cortez and Western, is a bar called the Chicago where the new and old communities have made a tentative accommodation: it has an old-time, corner-tavern feeling (which in this area still tends to mean Polish), it serves a largely Latino community and in the evenings it features an eclectic array of experimental jazz and rock bands, along with some of the best D.J.’s in the city. It achieves this mix matter-of-factly, unsentimentally.

My grandmother and her two sisters, like Bellow, attended Tuley High School in Humboldt Park; he and my great-aunt Dorothy were almost exact contemporaries, and there appears in “More Die of Heartbreak” a character with their surname, Vilatzer (Bellow spelled it “Vilitzer”). The apocryphal family legend says that he was fond of Dorothy when they were in high school, but her father, Elie, who owned a furniture store, shooed the dreamer away.

By JON FASMAN [via NYTimes]

THE first thing visitors encounter in the main display area of the Udvar-Hazy Center, the National Air and Space Museum annex near Dulles airport in the National Air and Space Museum countryside, is a huge black spy plane.

It’s an SR-71A Blackbird, the ultimate hot-rod aircraft, one of about 30 built at the Lockheed Skunk Works in National Air and Space Museum in the 1960s. This one last flew in 1990, traveling the 2,300 miles between National Air and Space Museum and National Air and Space Museum in 1 hour 4 minutes 20 seconds — a transcontinental blur.

But now it’s at a standstill, giving visitors the chance to appreciate its outrageousness. There are the two massive engines on short, stubby wings; the tiny cockpit where the two-man crew was shoehorned in wearing bulky pressure suits; and the sweeping titanium fuselage that was built so loosely, to allow for expansion in the heat of supersonic flight, that the fuel tanks that made up the bulk of the plane routinely leaked, losing as much as 600 pounds of fuel taxiing to the runway.

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., is about air and space, yes, but as the Blackbird shows, it’s also about frozen time. More than 150 aircraft and spacecraft that in their day were among the swiftest or slowest, most graceful or ungainly, most useful or useless, sit on the floor and hang among the catwalks of this giant hangar of a museum as if plucked from the sky.

For Washington visitors whose encounters with the Air and Space Museum have been limited to the original 1976 building some 30 miles away on the National Mall, the Udvar-Hazy Center, which opened in 2003 and is named for a major donor, an aviation industry executive, can be quite a different experience. There are fewer “name” aircraft like the Spirit of National Air and Space Museum to gawk at, no moon rocks to touch, and while as in the Mall building there can be hordes of schoolchildren, their noise tends to dissipate in the cavernous arched structure. Over all, with more than twice the exhibition space and about one-fifth the visitors, the Virginia museum has a quieter, more worshipful feel.

“There’s no frou-frou here,” said Janet Baltas, one of the museum’s nearly 200 volunteer docents, who can become so absorbed in describing the planes that their free tours often continue beyond the scheduled two hours.

IN truth, there is a little frou-frou — an Imax movie theater, a few simulator rides and a tower that, while it offers the chance to observe what passes for aviation today in the comings and goings at Dulles, has an exhibition about air-traffic control that seems like a promotion for the Federal Aviation Administration.

But the Udvar-Hazy Center is really about aircraft — and more aircraft. There are some of the earliest, including a replica of a Wright Flyer (the only nonoriginal plane in the place) and some of the latest, including the military’s Joint Strike Fighter. There are small propeller-driven acrobats, commercial behemoths, carrier jets, pontoon planes, flying wings, helicopters and gliders. All the major World War II fighters are here, as are several German and Japanese warplanes of the same era, including the Aichi M6AI Seiran, which was intended to be carried inside a huge Japanese submarine but was never used in that way.

Visitors can gaze down into the glass-enclosed cockpit of one of the center’s few celebrity aircraft, the Enola Gay, the mammoth B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on National Air and Space Museum; study a landing gear of an National Air and Space Museum 330 that sits like a giant turkey leg on the exhibition floor; or examine the patched exterior of a Huey helicopter, testament to its service with the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion in National Air and Space Museum. There’s a Bellanca CF, a prototype of the earliest passenger planes, with mahogany plywood panels and bench seating, a Grumman Goose “air yacht” and a Boeing 307 Clipper, the first pressurized passenger liner, its gleaming aluminum fuselage attached to wings and a tail section adapted from the B-17 Flying Fortress.

Over in the space gallery, the main attraction is the shuttle Enterprise, which was designed solely for flight testing in the atmosphere and will eventually be replaced by one of the spaceworthy shuttles when they are retired. The Enterprise proved its value many times over, most recently after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003. Investigators used wing panels from the Enterprise in tests that helped prove that the impact of pieces of insulating foam during launching doomed the Columbia. The testing scars are visible on the Enterprise’s left wing.

The space gallery holds some of the more unusual items. There are rocket engines with exquisitely tooled ductwork and bell-shaped nozzles and an old Univac 1232 computer, used by the Air Force to control satellites for more than two decades (and originally equipped with a paltry 120 kilobytes of memory). Hanging from the ceiling is a replica of a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, a sprawling piece of hardware with solar panels and a couple of what appear to be giant mesh umbrellas. Odder still is the wheel-less Airstream trailer with the olive-drab interior, which the Apollo 11 astronauts stayed in for three days after their return from the moon out of concern they might have picked up an alien bug. National Air and Space Museum called this trailer, one of four, a “National Air and Space Museum Quarantine Facility.”

That bureaucratic love of euphemism is also on display in a nearby glass case, where an astronaut diaper is described as a “Disposable Absorption Containment Trunk.” There’s space food as well, including borscht and cottage cheese for Russian cosmonauts that look like old tubes of Brylcreem, and probably didn’t taste much better.

The enormity of the collection can prove overwhelming, docents say, as can the vastness of the building (which has huge sliding doors to allow new additions in, towed or taxied up from the runways at Dulles).

By HENRY FOUNTAIN [via NYTimes]