The Barn House (39 page)

One would like to offer the thought that, where Mary and I were concerned, paint did not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment and other sentiments of that nature. As one might deduce from the history of the project up to this point, it didn't happen. We fought like cats and dogs. Mary's chief argument was that I was color-blind. Maybe I was, I retorted, but I had outstanding grayscale discrimination. In addition, I had a plan. Mary had purchased more or less at random a couple paint samples from Martha Stewart's collection, which I conceded harmonized not only with each other but with the understated-but-definitely-not-white color we (okay, the Polish workers) had previously applied to the trim. I noted in addition that the two Martha Stewart colors came from the same paint-chip series, and by experiment determined that
any
color in this series would harmonize with all the other colors and with the aforesaid trim, and on this basis concluded that I had hit on a paint selection methodology that pretty much couldn't miss. Mary, on the other hand . . . well, we'll draw a veil over the lengthy and acrimonious process of negotiation that preceded the determination of the four colors used to paint the back half of the house. I'll merely say that, in concert as it were, they sang once the job was done.

We'd achieved finish. That's not to say we were
finished
, since we still had the second floor to do, which I didn't get to till additional years later with the assistance of the able Nick, a student at the Moody Bible Institute (regarding whom may I say that for reliability, resourcefulness, and all-round sunny nature a good evangelical Christian is hard to beat). But once you've achieved
some
finish, paradoxical as it may sound, the rest is a matter of time.

Much the same, I felt, could be said of the city. I realize this will strike some as an odd and possibly abhorrent thing to say, since the common view is that a dynamic metropolis is never finished and continually reinvents itself and so forth.
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Maybe so, but it seems to me there's a difference in terms of physical appearance between a town having an urbane and settled air and one that looks like it was just unloaded off a truck. Chicago, I felt, had only now passed that critical threshold. Previously it had seemed a work in progress—even in neighborhoods not conspicuously blighted you saw vacant storefronts, temporary-looking buildings, fenced-off lots used for nothing much. Now, after decades of incremental improvement, the city had begun to fill in, the commercial streets especially. Michigan Avenue was the most conspicuous example, but in their own way less pretentious neighborhoods elsewhere in the city had arrived at a similar end state. To the extent such a thing could be said of a big urban center, sizable parts of Chicago were done.

Some of this was the doing of city hall, which had undertaken an energetic program of civic improvements involving wrought-iron fences, ornamental streetlamps, and whatnot. But ordinary folks had gotten into the act, too. Many neighborhoods were now well past the gunshots-and-rats stage of urban existence, allowing the residents to turn their attention to things like gardening. Quite a few streets were gorgeous. The preferred approach was what I'd come to think of as the forest-floor look, which eschewed the usual grass and petunias in favor of intricate layered arrangements of ivy and other greenery that, in combination with the venerable towering trees, produced scenes of such sylvan splendor you expected to see elves.

People weren't just fixing up their own property, either. The railroad embankment used by the commuter trains a couple blocks from our house had once been a scraggly waste; the neighbors had taken it upon themselves to weed, seed, and plant shrubs and flowers—now the narrow street paralleling the embankment had the appearance of a country lane. A woman I met at a community meeting had turned the vacant lot next to her house not far from us into a park for the neighborhood, complete with benches and landscaping. My own project, to which I'd returned once the Barn House ceased to monopolize my time, was working with a civic group to establish a recreational path along the banks of the neglected Chicago River.

My contribution set aside, that kind of thing seemed to me the hallmark of a mature city: Its citizens took collective responsibility for it. The timing in any case worked out nicely. We'd been busting our hump for a good ten years, and now it was time to relax.

B
y some point in the early twenty-first century—you'll forgive me if I don't recall exactly when—we'd acquired the following essential household items:

You see what it adds up to. We'd had a house when we started; now we had a home. Once I'd gotten the swing hung and my feet up and had a moment to contemplate the passing scene, any peevishness with respect to worldly woes vanished instantly away. Our street was idyllic. We had a dogwood out there, courtesy of the people in the town houses next to the Witnesses; a locust; numerous maples; a dying but still majestic ash; what I deduced from my tree-finder book to be a linden, and was pleased to be told by a guy from the forestry department actually was; and of course (let's be honest) my pathetic and embarrassing lawn, fortunately concealed by bushes from everyone's eyes but mine. Against this bucolic backdrop there promenaded the adorable neighbor kids and their hundred-square hopscotch game; virtuous dog walkers identifiable by their plastic bags, as opposed to wicked ones without; my neighbor Joe's son Larry manicuring the family's already enviable lawn; plus the usual parade of cyclists, Nike-shod yuppies, and neighborhood characters intent on secret errands. Perhaps I lacked ambition, but I wanted nothing more.

It was widely agreed among the neighbors who occasionally stopped by to chat that the city had never looked better, and not just downtown—once-seedy neighborhoods all over town had been transformed. The Old Town School of Folk Music, a beloved local institution looking for larger quarters, moved into an old library building in a neighborhood not far from us called Lincoln Square; soon a thriving restaurant district developed to serve the crowds attending concerts. It had a Starbucks like every other semigentrified community in America, but in addition had a handsome branch library (the replacement for the old one), one of the librarians in which for a time had been a guy who sat two rows over from me in fourth grade and used to get a swat once a week from the nun; a park with a bunch of baseball diamonds, which you expected to see in a Chicago park, but also a gazebo, which you didn't; a homeopathic drugstore established in 1875; an old movie theater (admittedly converted to multiple screens) where I had seen German movies—this was an ethnic neighborhood of long standing—while in high school language class in 1968; a classic toy store; numerous outdoor cafés; an excellent pastry shop and restaurant founded by a couple of local women in the early 1980s, when founding any kind of upscale business in most Chicago neighborhoods took nerve; an absurdly ornate but nonetheless delightful storefront that was the last commissioned work by the architect Louis Sullivan and couldn't have made economic sense even when opened in 1922; the inevitable L line with a nondescript modern station, snappy transit design in Chicago being a largely (and inexplicably) lost art;
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a municipal parking lot where the city held farmer's markets periodically during the growing season; a small fountain surrounded by benches, the majority of which on most days were occupied by regular people, as opposed to comatose drunks; and ten or twenty other points of interest that have momentarily slipped my mind. The street buzzed with life, and yet—important point—it was no South Beach, which is to say it wasn't a tourist attraction. It had only a handful of chain stores, Starbucks being one, all small. The average commercial building was three stories tall, the houses mainly two-flats. For the most part it was an ordinary city neighborhood, returned from the dead.

Chicago, I'm willing to believe, had once had many such thriving districts. At its nadir during the 1970s it had had maybe three. (I concede the precise count is open to debate.) Now vibrant communities were again numerous. Many were organized around a theme of some sort: Wrigleyville, a lively area around the Cubs' ballpark, hosted a sort of daylong Mardi Gras whenever the team was in town; Boystown on North Halsted Street was the principal gay nightlife strip; Roscoe Village had a vaguely retro, small-town-in-the-big-city feel and seemed to be overrun with parents pushing strollers and little kids on scooters—although children were pretty common all over.

Then there was Andersonville, called Girl's Town by some, owing to the supposed preponderance of lesbians. I was skeptical, since in my observation lesbians didn't congregate as conspicuously as gays, but one day Mary and I took the kids over to a well-known Andersonville shoe store—well known for being just that, a basic (if large) locally owned full-service shoe store, as opposed to the usual chain store or overpriced boutique—during the week of the city's Pride Parade, formerly (and still basically) the Gay Pride Parade, which was definitely a slice. On the day we were in the shoe store, it turned out, Andersonville had scheduled a satellite pride parade, informally known as the Dyke Hike. Among other things the parade featured several contingents of chesty topless maidens who concealed their nipples from casual view with shiny red cellophane tape. Naturally the transit of this picturesque aggregation brought sales activity in the shoe store to a temporary halt. The kids, along with everybody else in the store, watched with interest, then returned to business after the parade had passed.
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So okay, it wasn't the Chicago of the 1950s. Who would have wanted it to be? It was a real neighborhood in a real city nonetheless. We were content. We'd accomplished what we'd set out to do—fix up an old city house, raise a family, and lead, admittedly by a relaxed interpretation of the term, an ordinary middle-class life.

I don't mean to give the impression that all was perfect. Real estate developers seemed to be engaged in a long-running research project to see if it was possible to build a condo building so ugly no one would live in it. (Answer to date: no.) One innovation in the hideousness department, which caught on in a big way during the 1990s, was the substitution of concrete block for conventional common brick. Concrete block may be cheaper (it requires less hand labor), but it isn't beautiful and can't be rendered beautiful by any known technique. The only hope was to use as little as possible—we'd limited ourselves to four courses for the Barn House's foundation, thinking that concrete-block structures of larger scale were best confined to places where they'd have limited visibility, such as caves. But that wasn't what was done. On the contrary, developers took sinister delight in finding loopholes in the zoning laws that enabled them to build four-story concrete-block eyesores on sites the size of a bath mat. The front of the house had to be given some passably attractive treatment, lest the neighbors revolt, but commonly the façade had the pasted-on appearance of an afterthought, which it's safe to say it was.