Guy With Tools

About Guy With Tools

Near midnight on a snowy weeknight, most of Iowa City near campus goes quiet except for a last handful of students cutting across Clinton Street on their way back to a rental house, and that's often when Guy With Tools is out working those same blocks, the ones filling in between downtown and the river. Student housing here turns over every August, and the driveways and front walks get treated more as an afterthought than a feature, which means a heavy snow can sit for days unless someone else takes it on. The work is straightforward — walks cleared to bare concrete, a path from the door to the curb wide enough for a backpack and a bike both — done house by house through blocks where half the porches still have a string of lights left up from before finals. Once the university clears its own lots and walks, the difference between campus property and the block just past its edge becomes obvious fast. Keeping that edge maintained, one rental house at a time, is most of what the job comes down to.