The Barn House (46 page)

Most masonry buildings constructed in Chicago prior to 1975 used a type of brick variously known as “Chicago pink” or “Chicago common.” These bricks, which are basically beige but have an attractive reddish cast to the clay from which they were made, haven't been manufactured since the closing of the old brickyards. They remain highly prized, however, and command a substantial premium at salvage yards—as of 2003, according to
Crain's Chicago Business
, it was two and a half cents a brick.

I learned about the Krupa connection from Charlie the architect, about whom we will hear more later. Charlie was a jazz buff—I learned
that
when I inquired why it was taking him so long to prepare baseline drawings of the Barn House. Turned out Charlie was spending long afternoons at the house discussing jazz with the previous owner. Charlie assured me I wasn't being charged by the hour for these colloquia. Whether his firm was paying him by the hour I didn't ask.

No one knows why a Queen Anne house is so called, nor does there seem to be a consensus on what its defining features are. There was a queen of England named Anne, who ruled from 1702 to 1714; her reign saw the introduction of a style of furniture characterized by (a) walnut construction, (b) cabriole legs (that is, legs shaped like an elongated S, usually having a paw foot or claw-and-ball foot at the bottom), and (c) intricate decoration. I learn this from the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
The
Britannica
goes on to say, with reference to houses, that the Queen Anne was also a “red brick architectural style of the 1870s in Great Britain and the United States [having] no real connection with the original Queen Anne period.” Red brick was confined strictly to the chimneys in the Barn House, which was otherwise of frame construction, as are most Queen Anne houses I've seen, including the majority of those thus described in every reference book other than the
Britannica.
The
American Heritage History of Notable American Houses
(1971) observes that American interest in the so-called Queen Anne style was apparently inspired by certain English buildings seen at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, but notes that the open halls and large fireplaces of those structures recalled the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, not that of Queen Anne. The
History
further says that “the style was soon transformed into an American vernacular characterized by light frame construction, irregular outlines, verandas and balconies, steep-pitched roofs, and large, open interior spaces [plus] the inevitable porches covered by sloping eaves,” which, as far as the Barn House is concerned, is a little more like it. I mention all this merely to suggest the difficulties faced by architectural historians when confronted by the work of uneducated vernacular carpenters with no sense of system.

A house owned by some friends showed an even more extreme division. It was a beautiful old place in Chicago's north suburbs—a mansion really, with dark wooden wainscoting, stained-glass windows, a massive fireplace, and enormous rooms clearly intended for entertaining on a grand scale. But the house was oddly designed. If you walked up one staircase, you found yourself in a large bedroom suite—but it didn't connect to the rest of the second floor, except through a concealed door at the back of a closet. The other half of the second floor had its own staircase. Downstairs, we learned, a large pocket door made it possible to divide the first floor into two halves, each with its own door into the kitchen. Our friends had been told that the house had originally been owned by two spinster sisters. They could only guess that the two loathed each other, each living separately in her own half of the house, joining the two halves of the first floor only when they entertained.
⁴
How many households had servants in the 1890s isn't precisely known. One book I read claimed the number was only 20-25 percent, implying that this fraction was small. But it seems to me that, assuming you had roughly equal numbers of servers and served, the theoretical maximum had to be in the neighborhood of 50 percent, making 25 percent a pretty impressive total. Then again, the fact that a house was equipped for servants didn't mean there actually were any. My parents' house in Oak Park, for example, had a butler's pantry in the dining room that backed up on the regular pantry in the kitchen. The two were separated by a small sliding panel at counter height. The idea apparently was that the cook would place dishes of food on the counter in the kitchen pantry, whereupon the butler would enter the dining room pantry, slide open the panel, extract the dishes, and serve the guests. This was in a house of perhaps eighteen hundred square feet as originally constructed, hardly large enough for one servant, let alone two, and in any case there were no servants' stairs, maid's room, and so on. My guess was that the butler's pantry enabled you to
pretend
you had servants, only you had given them the night off. Conceivably you might go through the motions of passing dishes through the pantry a few times, but undoubtedly you'd eventually concede it was simpler just to walk through the door.

Riis has a great deal more in this vein, which space doesn't permit my quoting, but here's one last statistic: Of the 1.4 million people discovered by the 1890 census to be domiciled in Manhattan, Riis noted, an estimated 1.25 million lived in tenements (that is, buildings housing three or more families). Not all of these were abjectly poor, but Riis was of the opinion that virtually all of the approximately 1 million persons living in tenements below 14th Street were, and thus his book shouldn't properly have been called an account of how the other half lived, but the other 71 percent.

Annexation continues apace today—witness Houston, which, thanks to Texas's permissive annexation law, grew from 73 square miles and 285,000 people in 1940 to 579 square miles and 1,954,000 people in 2000. The champ with regard to land acquisition, though, is Sitka, Alaska, which, owing to a quirk of local law and the scale of the state—the three largest U.S. cities in area are all in Alaska—has only 8,835 people but encompasses 2,874 square miles.

This seems to have been a fairly general phenomenon, if you can trust playwrights. In Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
(1949) we learn that when Willy Loman purchased his house in what presumably is an outer borough of New York it was surrounded by trees and flowers; now in his old age it's hemmed in by apartment buildings. This is generally taken as symbolizing the contraction of Willy's hopes. Symbol nothing—in those days it was a flat description of events.

Not, I feel obliged to say, the current occupant of that office, who is a nice man giving every appearance of honesty. Even if he didn't I'd still like to keep getting my garbage picked up.

If you're not following this, a drawing of the house as it stood when we bought it may be found on page 50.

I don't mean to suggest it was the only reason. Whatever might be said for the immediate neighborhood, the house on the whole was well situated, being close to the lake, Wrigley Field, and the L, historically the armatures of redevelopment on the north side of Chicago.

The price in the early 1990s. It's a good deal more now.

Some longleaf pine is grown on plantations now, but takes decades to produce an appreciable amount of heartwood. Even then the grain is likely to be coarser, since new-growth trees have greater access to sunlight.

Before and after drawings of the house may be found on pages 50 and 51. To give credit where it's due, I should clarify that the perspective rendering we saw initially was drawn by a talented illustrator named Bruce Bondy, who was working off Charlie's plans. The original fax is the frontispiece of this book.

Oh, let's not be coy. She's my sister.

Yeah, I know, everyone thinks Wi-Fi has rendered such concerns moot. Wait till your kid's MacBook elbows your PC laptop off the home wireless network. More generally, do you realize that, depending on which band of the radio spectrum your wireless network employs, you're sharing the line with cordless phones, vehicle location devices, industrial plastic preheaters, microwave motion detectors, TV wireless extensions, cordless earphones, wireless gumball cameras, remote controls, ham radio, and microwave ovens, plus who knows what technologies yet to be invented? That every thought you commit to the airwaves will be vulnerable to any hacker with a radio dish and a laptop? (Sure, trust encryption. The Germans thought the Enigma cipher machine was impregnable, too.) On the upside, contrary to what some may claim, you have nothing to fear from sunspots.

The following was sent to me by Lisa, who worked at my newspaper. I thought to paraphrase it but find I can do no better than the original:

“When my boyfriend and I bought a small three-bedroom house [in the city] about ten years ago the first order of business was to gut the dungeon of a kitchen we had inherited. Somehow or another the boyfriend met and hired a couple of beatniks that he met in a bar in Wicker Park to do the kitchen job. He was particularly drawn to them because they were self-proclaimed communists that guaranteed the job at a very reasonable price. The drinking probably helped too. Of course the remodeling took twice as much time as promised—about three months of washing dishes in the bathtub and eating only what we could barbecue in the backyard. Our commies would show up to work for a couple of days then disappear to parts unknown for weeks. Typical contractor behavior, but we couldn't figure out what they were doing in the meantime seeing how we were their only clients. Turns out our socially conscious, tree-hugging communists spent their off hours organizing protests against every organization that looked at them cross-eyed and spent a lot of time in jail as a result. We found this out when I turned on the six o'clock news just in time to see the cops arresting our contractors for disturbing the peace during the Promise Keepers Convention at Soldier Field. Seems this was their life's mission. Not as part of a group or anything. Just the two of them and maybe a girlfriend once in a while. Remodeling was just a side job for earning bail money. They did a great job on the kitchen though.”

Not anymore. The second largest city in Poland, Lodz, has now grown to 789,000 people, which according to the
Tribune
exceeds the number of Poles in Chicago by a small margin.

It's worth pointing out that the male love of destruction has nothing to do with testosterone per se. On one of my early trips to the Barn House I took along my eldest, Ryan, then three years old. Thinking to keep him occupied while I worked elsewhere, I gave him a little hammer and pointed him at a disposable stretch of wall, then proceeded to get tied up in a phone conversation. When I went to check on Ryan thirty minutes later, I was startled to discover that he'd laid waste to a good fifteen square feet of plaster and in the process had given himself a blister. I had to buy him work gloves.

Howard the architect, who went on to become chief curator of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., told me many years later that numerous women's shoes turned up in walls during construction projects at that institution, which was housed in a building erected in 1886. This led him to think either women in D.C. had some mighty odd habits or else carpenters thought shoes were a token of good luck.

I'm informed Brady Bunch haircuts have made a comeback in some quarters. So?

I had it coming. Once, on the first day of a fishing trip, I caught a fish and Bob didn't. The next morning at breakfast I announced to our group that Bob and I had always had a friendly rivalry, but that midway through high school, by which time Bob was an inch taller than me and twenty-five pounds heavier, I had come to the realization that violence was immature. “From then on,” I declared a bit too grandly, “I resolved to outdo Bob based on intellect alone.”

Gus in the movie
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
thinks the answer to all of life's little problems is Windex, and many have a touching faith in superglue and duct tape, but for lasting resolution of vexatious situations, in my opinion, you can't beat drywall screws and a Makita cordless driver-drill.

A certain school of thought holds that cellulose is just as good as fiberglass and a lot cheaper. I'm willing to concede this may be true of new cellulose. Hundred-year-old cellulose, however, isn't something I want leaking particulates into
my
breathing space.

Her spelling, not ours, which she adopted in eighth grade. She was Annie during most of the events in this book, but if I use that spelling now I'll never hear the end of it.

This figure has now been exceeded by Detroit, which as of 2005 had lost 963,000 residents since its 1950 peak. War-ravaged cities have had greater losses; Berlin's population as of 1946 had fallen 1.3 million from the prewar level. Undoubtedly the most dramatic example of urban decline is ancient Rome, whose population is thought to have fallen from roughly one million during imperial times to about 50,000 in the Middle Ages.

My friend Philip Bess, an architect and baseball fan, published an equally arresting illustration of urban decline in a booklet entitled
City Baseball Magic: Plain Talk and Uncommon Sense about Cities and Baseball Parks
(1989). The booklet contained two fascinating maps. One depicted the environs of Tiger Stadium in Detroit in 1921, nine years after the park was built. The second showed the same neighborhood in 1986. The maps showed not just second showed the same neighborhood in 1986. The maps showed not just the streets around the stadium but the buildings, represented as black shapes. At first glance it was scarcely possible to believe the maps depicted the same district. In 1921, Tiger Stadium had been part of a densely built-up community, with buildings occupying virtually every lot. In 1986, easily three-quarters of the buildings were gone. Some close to the stadium had been torn down for parking; others had made way for an expressway cut through the heart of the area. Still others had been replaced by larger structures. But most had simply disappeared, presumably having been abandoned or burned out and demolished during Detroit's long decline.