It is easy to lose faith in humanity nowadays, with everything that is happening — but this restores things a bit. This open-air coat exchange, pictured above, is sitting near the Blind Pig Brewery and Cowboy Monkey in Downtown Champaign. There’s some background to the whole story.
The News-Gazette‘s Tom Kacich has more info:
CHAMPAIGN — John and Laura Biggan of Champaign saw a need, acted and now downtown Champaign has an open-air coat exchange for people trying to stay warm in the late winter.
“We moved up here from Texas a couple of years ago so for us the cold is maybe a bigger deal,” said John Biggan, a researcher on aging at the University of Illinois, who said he and his wife spend a lot of time in downtown Champaign. “But we’ve just seen a lot of people who are out and about and don’t look like maybe they’ve got the proper attire to keep warm on these cold nights. And so we just wanted to do what we could to help out.”
So Wednesday afternoon — during what turned out to be the biggest “snowstorm” of the season — Biggan put a coat rack on the Taylor Street pedestrian mall with a small sign that reads, “Need a coat? Take one! Have en extra Leave one!”
Top photo by Boswell Hutson.
