You've reached the water at Hoffman Park, and now I want you to look across the channel at that building with the swooping roof — the one that curves up at the end like a bird's wing lifting. That's the Weathervane, and it's Earl Young's masterpiece that you're allowed to walk into, because it's a restaurant. It used to be a gristmill, back in the eighteen seventies. Young bought it, stripped it down, and rebuilt it in the fifties with that gull-wing roof reaching out over the water. But we're not here for the roof. We're here for the fireplace. Because inside that building is the single greatest Earl Young story there is, and it's completely true.
The dining room fireplace is topped by one enormous glacial boulder. Nine tons. Eighteen thousand pounds of a single rock, sitting up over the hearth. And here is where Earl Young stops being an eccentric builder and becomes something closer to a folk legend.
He found that boulder back in the nineteen twenties, decades before this restaura
nt existed, while he was out developing land on the other side of town. He loved it. He knew, somehow, that he'd want it someday. But he had nowhere to put it yet — no house, no hearth, nothing worthy. So Earl Young reburied it. He put a nine-ton boulder back into the ground, on purpose, and left it there. For twenty-six years. And then, in the nineteen fifties, when he was building this restauran
