The Barn House (48 page)

Estimating the size of the primeval forest is an inexact art. Here I follow Michael Williams,
Americans & Their Forests
(1989). Lest I be accused of exaggerating, let me clarify that the original forest cover had been reduced to 470 million acres by 1920, of which just 138 million were primeval forest. Of the rest, Williams says, 250 million acres had been disturbed by grazing, cutting, and burning, and 81 million acres were “wasted”—that is, reduced to unusable stumps.

The wide kerf partly explains why a two-by-four measures less than two by four inches. A typical framing member in the Barn House was one-and-eleven-sixteenths inches wide—the boards had been gang-cut, with the blades set every two inches on centers, and five-sixteenths inch had been reduced to sawdust. Two-by-fours today are even smaller, only one and a half inches wide, which has been explained away as shrinkage due to kiln drying, but inasmuch as blades are now thinner I think we can at least partly blame the lumber industry's predisposition to be cheap.

The following story has little to do with the nominal subject of this book, but I can't bear to omit it. In the early hours of the Chicago fire, the wind was blowing out of the southeast, and the flames threatened Holy Family Church and St. Ignatius College, an impressive complex of buildings about a mile southwest of the Chicago central business district and five blocks from Mrs. O'Leary's barn. (Yes, there really was a Mrs. O'Leary, and the fire did start in her barn, although the bit about the cow and the lantern was a reporter's invention.) The founder, pastor, and chief fund-raiser of Holy Family and St. Ignatius was a formidable Dutch Jesuit named Father Arnold Damen. In the baroque version of the story, Father Damen stands on the porch of St. Ignatius and prays that his life's work might be spared. At the last moment the Almighty answers his prayers and causes the wind to clock around to the southwest. The fire, which till then has been driving toward the outskirts of town, promptly shifts direction, sparing the church and instead burning down the rest of Chicago, including the central business district and most structures of consequence constructed up to that time. For generations St. Ignatius alumni proudly told this story, illustrating, as others have pointed out, the somewhat narrow priorities of American Catholics at the time. The reality was slightly less dramatic. Father Damen was in Brooklyn at the time he made his prayer, and although the wind did shift, the fire missed the church and school by a fairly wide margin. But still.

Chicago, if I may be permitted a bit of hometown pride, had played a central role in the reduction of the forest. It had been built where it was because the site was near the subcontinental divide separating the Mississippi and the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basins. The term divide suggests a mighty prominence; the Midwest being what it is, the reality is less impressive—an imperceptible rise that separates the Des Plaines River, which flows south, from the Chicago River, which, when it flowed at all, generally during rainstorms, flowed east. (The rest of the time it stagnated—much of the low-lying region was a swamp.) In 1673, it occurred to a French explorer named Louis Joliet, who had portaged his canoe the short distance between the two waterways, that a canal would greatly simplify his life, not to mention inland commerce, and 175 years later one was built—the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which opened in 1848. The I&M made it possible, if not easy, to transport goods across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico entirely by water. By 1856, Chicago had surpassed Albany to become the leading wholesale lumber center in the United States, and as much for that reason as any other became a great city. San Francisco, another nineteenth-century boomtown, became a great city, too, but San Francisco had gold. Chicago did it with cows, grain, and two-by-fours.

Acknowledging again the murky state of the terminology for the residential architecture of this period, I note that the term “Queen Anne” wasn't uniformly popular at the time—by the mid-1880s some considered it old-fashioned and preferred “eclectic.” The Shingle Style has been described as an extension of the Queen Anne—certainly there's considerable overlap between the two. The Barn House, for example, though not a Shingle Style house by any stretch, had some features of the style, notably a pair of steep shingled gables.

I'm not the first to think this. Vincent Scully has written: “No American . . . can look back upon those houses without some nostalgia, disappointment, or even sorrow. They promised a great deal for American life which has not been fulfilled. . . . They were the freest and, on the whole, among the most generous forms that the United States has yet produced, and . . . in their own way . . . also the gentlest.” He was speaking of Shingle Style and earlier Stick Style houses, but no bright line separates these from most other high-end wooden residential building of the period, including Queen Annes.

You saw all kinds of things on the near north side. In the mid-1970s, during a brief stint as a police reporter, I'd seen two men whom I took to be a couple walk into the Eighteenth District police station, where I was then loitering. One appeared to have been painted red, owing to a profusely bleeding scalp wound inflicted by the other (weapon uncertain, although I'm guessing a bottle) in the course of an argument that was still in progress. This was a sight you didn't see every day, even in the Eighteenth District, and the cops behind the counter were briefly agape before scrambling to arrest the perp and call an ambulance for the victim, who despite the fact that a considerable fraction of his blood was then external to his person seemed more pissed than hurt. Another time I was the night foreman at a typesetting shop just off Rush Street. After work one night, maybe around one a.m., I was getting a burger at a local coffee shop when I noticed an attractive, well-dressed young woman sitting alone a couple booths over. A few minutes later an odious lounge-lizard type sat down across from her and attempted to make conversation. With an expression of terror the woman looked around for the waitress, who strode over briskly. “The lady doesn't want to be disturbed,” the waitress told the lounge lizard. The man made some comment to the effect that the woman could speak for herself. The waitress repeated that the lady didn't want company and that if he didn't bail she would call the police. The lounge lizard grudgingly exited. A short time later the waitress returned to take the young woman's order. The woman pointed at the menu and made inarticulate barking noises. Evidently she was what in crueler times was known as a deaf-mute, although without apparent cognitive difficulties.

On returning to the subject fourteen years later, at first I couldn't remember what a spud wrench was, but now recall it's used to screw a fitting into a radiator bushing.

The skin condition, not the roofing material. I assure you it's 100 percent cured now.

A commonplace now, I realize, but notable at the time.

I should clarify that Burnham wasn't advocating that Chicago be enlarged to this size, merely acknowledging that if the rapid growth evident in his day continued, the city would arrive at that number by 1952. His chief departure from earlier urban visionaries was in proposing no limits to expansion, with a few exceptions a characteristic of planning in the United States and particularly in Chicago to this day.

One such point is described in Appendix D.

Well, I thought it was hairless. Subsequent discreet inspection of the animals in question—they turned out to be fairly common in the neighborhood—established that the tail did in fact have hair, albeit quite short.

South Bend is outside metropolitan Chicago as officially defined, but it's the last stop on the South Shore commuter line, and is roughly as far from Chicago as Poughkeepsie is from New York. The South Shore Line, as rail fans know, is the passenger-carrying successor to the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad, the last U.S. interurban, interurbans being the glorified trolleys that flourished briefly in the early twentieth century before succumbing to the automobile.

In fairness, the far south side of Chicago was no garden of paradise either. In 1970, the electrical contractor by whom I was then employed asked me to make a delivery in the company pickup to a job site near Lake Calumet, then a center of the steel industry. I was startled to discover on arriving that virtually the entire district—buildings, trees, and for all I could tell the people—was tinted reddish brown, presumably due to iron oxide from the mills.

It was, too. Not to brag, but ours was by far the most entertaining wedding I have ever attended. We said our vows while passing beneath the Madison Street bridge at the edge of the Loop on a busy Saturday afternoon. One passerby leaned over the railing and shouted, “Mazel tov!” while another advised, “Don't do it!”

I speak as a north-side White Sox fan in a town where feelings about baseball run deep. A well-known tune in Chicago called “South Side Irish” concludes, “And when it comes to baseball / We have two favorite clubs / The go-go White Sox / And whoever plays the Cubs.”

Just one story about Boniek, whom I called in when our toilets backed up due to failure to replace the root-filled sewer pipes when we had the chance. Boniek's English was limited and he often brought his wife, Alice, along to translate. When he proposed replacing some pipe, I asked whether it would be wise first to inspect the pipe by threading a small TV camera into it catheter-style, as I had seen other plumbers do. Alice translated Boniek's reply. “Boniek doesn't need camera,” she said, trilling her
r
s gravely. “Boniek has
experience.
” The repair solved the problem; the toilets haven't backed up again.

At times one wished they had an occasional thought. Hearing loud bangs one day, I ran to the front hall to find Andrew, then one year old, sitting cheerfully on the floor surrounded by wooden pegs that Ryan had been dropping over the second-floor balustrade above, mercifully missing his brother but impressing a series of smile-shaped dings into the newly refinished heart pine.

One such sign in the Barn House was its old interior doors. They cleaned up smartly when I refinished them years later, but if you look closely you can see the neatly patched holes left by apartment dead bolts.

Oswalt, Philipp, and Rieniets, Tim, eds.,
Atlas of Shrinking Cities
(Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), p. 6.

It was the price they paid then, anyway. The public housing development has since been torn down.

It's possible, and now that I think about it more likely, that the reason they never mentioned it was that the carpenters who installed such things didn't buy ads.

Not to be confused with Charlie the architect. I realize that in this book Mikes and Toms are also far too plentiful. The next time I work on a house I plan to write about, I'll enlist males having a greater variety of names.

Some feel this is unfair. I point to Fallingwater, the 1937 Pennsylvania house commonly considered Wright's greatest work, whose cantilevered floors sagged to the point that the building was thought to be in danger of collapse. Structural engineers discovered that a portion of the house was supported by the window mullions, the steel dividers between the panes of glass.

The history professor Thomas Bender makes this argument about New York in
The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea
(2002).

I confess this is a sore spot. There are a handful of well-designed transit stations of recent vintage in Chicago. One is the O'Hare terminal on the Blue Line, a gorgeous essay in backlit curvilinear glass block by the architect Helmut Jahn, who also designed the United Airlines terminal, which features a kinetic neon-lighted pedestrian tunnel owing a good deal to
Star Wars.
A number of the World War II-era subway stations downtown have also been nicely renovated under the supervision of Charlie's old firm. If you arrive at the United C terminal, take the Blue Line downtown, and disembark at one of these stations, you're likely to think Chicago's reputation as a design center is well deserved. However, if you get off pretty much anywhere else in the system, the impression will be short-lived.

An indication of how Chicago has changed in this regard may be found in the views of Alderman Richard Mell, an old-school ward boss who was allied with the white city council faction opposed to Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, during the Beirut-on-the-Lake era of the 1980s. Mell's daughter Deborah is openly lesbian. The alderman has famously remarked, “I'd like to slap the bastards [who reject their gay children]. . . . Come on! If your child comes to you and tells you this and you really have a problem with it and it becomes a real issue, you really don't deserve to call yourself a parent.” Say what you will about his politics, a guy like that you can deal with.

Native Michiganders from ancient custom don't express geographical matters in such terms, preferring instead to indicate a spot on the backs of their left hands, which the lower peninsula resembles. According to this system the kids' camp was situated at the first knuckle of the pinky.

The following, which I found on a historical marker at the beach, gives some sense of the place:

A town like that you've got to love.