The Barn House (5 page)

The Barn House frequently provoked speculations of this sort. Despite its dilapidated state, you could see it had once been an impressive home. We decided after studying the architectural guidebooks that it was a conservative Queen Anne—lacking the wraparound porch (arguably the lot was too narrow), but having the asymmetrical façade and busy massing.
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There were two projecting bays, one in the front and one on the side. The peaked roof was in the form of a T, with the ridgeline in the rear running the length of the house, the one in the front running laterally and intercepting the rear one at right angles, like the transept of a church. It must have been a helluva job to frame.

The Barn House, we found out at the local public library (the house was part of a historic district and the submittal documents were on file), had been built in 1891 for a woman named Georgianna Carr, about whom nothing more was known, at any rate by us. I imagined her to be a wealthy widow of somewhat eccentric tastes, although I grant you eccentricity at a hundred years' remove can be a difficult thing to judge. Take the front hall. Certain components of the stairs excepted, the hall was finished entirely in pine. From there the visitor passed into a parlor finished in maple and then to a dining room finished in oak—a natural progression in terms of grandeur, I suppose. But it seemed to me Mrs. Carr had taken things a bit far. The parlor was separated from the dining room by a massive pocket door four and a half feet wide by three inches thick. You could stop a bullet with such a door, or anyway with the rails and stiles that framed it, but that wasn't the remarkable thing, in my opinion. Rather, it was the fact that the door was maple on one side, oak on the other, to match the rooms. Likewise the door between the dining room and the front hall, two inches thick, was oak on one side, pine on the reverse. This had been accomplished by applying a three-eighths-inch veneer of one wood to a solid door made of the second one. Even in 1891, I think it's safe to say, that would have been an expensive proposition. Completing the ensemble were heavy brass hinges and knobs of intricate design. Had I been on hand at the time of construction, I might have made sniffy remarks about this display when there were children starving in the Crimea. However, I have to say that a hundred years later it looked pretty cool.

It's possible Mrs. Carr had gotten her ideas about design from her neighbor two lots up the street. The builder of that house had had such an infatuation with Victorian splendor that he installed a stained-glass window in the pantry. I was shown this by Ned, the owner, who gave me a tour. He also showed me an odd porch that opened off the dining room. The porch was perhaps ten feet long but only three feet deep. There was scarcely room for a chair—anyone proposing to take the air there had to stand. That was the idea, Ned said. It was a smoking porch, where the men would retire with their after-dinner tobacco lest they stink up the house.

We found an equally inscrutable gesture in the Barn House—a small window on the rear wall of the closet under the front stairs. At first we thought this was evidence of another visit from the stained-glass-window salesman. But an architect who visited the house said no: The little pane provided natural illumination in the days when one couldn't rely on electric lights.

One of the many curious features of the Barn House was its two staircases—not an unusual thing in itself, but these were side by side. There was the fancy front staircase already mentioned, plus a narrower rear stairway immediately adjacent, the latter rising the height of the building. My brother-in-law asked about it one day as we descended the narrow back steps. “The other one's for the white people,” I said—not the most sensitive remark I ever made, but probably the truth. The Barn House had been divided into two distinct zones, one for the menials and one for the gentry.
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Mrs. Carr no doubt spent much of her time in the parlor and dining room, retiring at night via the imposing front stairs to the master suite at the front of the second floor. The master suite was—well, luxurious probably overstates matters, but certainly comfortable, consisting of a bedroom with a fireplace plus an adjacent sitting room, the two connected by a pocket door. Meanwhile the lower classes confined themselves to the kitchen and pantry at the rear of the house, reaching the second floor (and if need be the basement or attic) via the servants' stairs. The dining room and one of the bedrooms had separate entries for the lady of the house and her employees. There was a small room with no other obvious purpose at the back of the second floor; we guessed it had been the maid's. If the maid had been discreet, Mrs. Carr might have gone without seeing her for days.
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Okay, so Mrs. Carr had probably not gone on to vote for Eugene Debs and the Social Democrats. At least she'd had the work on her house done properly. That was more than you could say about her successors.

Back to the front hall. It was by far the most striking interior feature of the house, dominated by an ornate staircase rising to the second floor. The staircase was of elaborate design, with a carved oak banister and newel posts and turned oak balusters. At some point prior to our arrival an occupant of the house had decided that the beauty of the staircase would be enhanced by painting the risers red and the balusters brown. This belief was without foundation. In all likelihood this same person—I refused to believe the house had been in the possession of two such bozos—had gone on to paint the oak flooring in the upstairs bedrooms red, white, and blue. The color scheme was less patriotic than it sounds; the red was a sort of maroon, the white more or less cream, and the blue somewhere between turquoise and teal.

To give the painter his due, however, he'd left us something to work with. That wasn't the case in the second-floor hall, where the balustrade at the top of the front stairs was missing altogether. It appeared to have been broken off—one could see the place where the banister, a formidable piece of hardwood, had splintered. We imagined a bar fight with the brawlers crashing through the railing; they must have been the size of sumo wrestlers. The Sillses, finding the railing missing at the time they acquired the house, had repaired the damage with construction two-by-fours pending the day when they could do the job right. That day hadn't dawned during their tenure; now it was up to us.

Some parts of the house had deteriorated simply because of age. Overlooking the front staircase was a tall nine-paneled window, the top six panels of which, arranged three wide by two high, used an unusual sort of decorative glass called bottle glass. Each panel consisted of glass circles, thickened in the center and similar in size and appearance to the bottom of a wine bottle, arranged in a four-by-four grid. In description it sounds a little weird, but I assure you it was a pretty thing to see, or at any rate had been in 1891. Now the glass was grimy and sagging—the panels would need to be cleaned and releaded.

The abundance of such details brought to mind an obvious question: What was this house
doing
here? It wasn't a typical city house. It was incongruously large, for one thing. Its fine finishes, what was left of them, suggested it had been designed for an upper-middle-class suburb. Yet here it was in a thoroughly urban section of the north side.

The answer became apparent on further study of the historic-district documents at the public library. I realized that the house's history of great schemes come to naught had begun with Mrs. Carr.

The Barn House, it turned out, hadn't been intended as a city house. The subdivision in which it had been built was originally part of a suburb called Lake View. The lots had been platted out and offered for sale in the 1880s. The promoters of the area were from a suburban community a little farther out called Ravenswood, and they called the new subdivision Southeast Ravenswood. They meant to distinguish the area from the city, the border of which was then a couple miles away. The lots were bigger—50 by 165 feet, compared to the standard 25-by-125-foot city lot—and the streets were wider. Mrs. Carr, I gathered, had bought one of the lots and built her house.

But the development had flopped. An 1894 fire-insurance map showed the buildings on each block; of twenty-one lots on our block at the time, there were buildings on only nine. (At the rear of the Barn House, I was interested to note, there had been a stable and what I guessed was an outhouse.) Several possible reasons for the slow progress suggested themselves, the most obvious being the financial panic that swept the country in 1893. But that explanation seemed inadequate. Other ventures launched in the same era—for example, the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where my parents lived and Frank Lloyd Wright had built his early houses—had been mostly built up within a few years. Something else explained what had gone wrong in Southeast Ravenswood, and after some thought I decided I knew what it was: It had become urban.

That requires some explanation. However problematic urban life may seem at times now, 125 years ago it completely sucked. Cities as we know them today were sometimes exciting but more frequently terrifying novelties during the latter nineteenth century. In 1850, only three cities in the world had had populations greater than 1 million—London, Paris, and Peking. In 1900, after fifty years of chaotic but more or less continuous economic expansion throughout Europe and North America, the number of million-plus cities had risen to sixteen, one of which, Chicago, had been a sodden outpost of thirty thousand in 1850.

The shantytowns of the developing world today have nothing on the big cities of a century ago for squalor. In 1890, a year before construction of the Barn House, Jacob Riis had published
How the Other Half Lives
, a muckraking account of conditions in the tenements of New York. Riis reported, among other astonishing facts, that impoverished Jewish immigrants were packed into portions of the Lower East Side at a density of 330,000 per square mile, by far the highest rate of any city in the world; that a Bohemian cigar maker, living and working in a tenement owned by his employer, might expect to work seventeen hours a day, seven days a week during the busy summer season, at a piecework wage averaging six and a half cents per hour (less in the winter); that more than twelve thousand cast-off children, mostly employed as newsboys, bootblacks, and the like, lived in lodging houses operated by the Children's Aid Society; and that in one neighborhood during a cholera epidemic some years previously (presumably Riis refers to the outbreaks occurring in the years 1865-73), the poor had died at a rate of 195 per 1,000, which approached that of the medieval plague years.
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In 1894, William Stead, an English preacher and reformer, published
If Christ Came to Chicago!
It was somewhat derivative of Riis's book in terms of subject matter, describing as it did the only slightly less appalling state of the lower classes of Chicago, but Riis had nothing on Stead for style. Sample: “For the [police] station is the central cesspool whither drain the poisonous drippings of the city which has become the
cloaca maxima
of the world.” Shorn of flourishes, however, Stead's message was much the same: The urban poor live in such wretchedness as you, gentle reader, can scarcely dream.

Some middle-class reformers were repelled as much by the foreignness of city dwellers as by their poverty. Riis, for one, had little good to say about Italians (“content to live in a pigsty”), Chinese (“a constant and terrible menace to society”), or the inhabitants of “Jewtown” (“money is their God”). Stead, notwithstanding his rhetorical excesses, was more tolerant, writing sympathetically about the enterprising rogues who served as precinct captains in the Chicago political machine, which he felt functioned as a sort of social services agency, at least for those who voted the right way. On the whole, however, the genteel view of urban life during this period can be characterized as:
Ooh, ick.

The answer, in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth, was the suburbs. In 1886, the architect Daniel Burnham, the indefatigable urban booster whose landmark
Plan of Chicago
would be published in 1909, moved his family from the city's south side to the affluent suburb of Evanston, snootily asserting that he could “no longer bear to have my children run in the streets of Chicago.” Evanston had been founded as an independent town (it had grown up around Northwestern University), but after the Civil War real estate developers, recognizing a market when they saw one, began building bedroom suburbs specifically aimed at businessmen commuting to downtown. One of the more influential was Riverside, Illinois, southwest of Chicago. Laid out between 1868 and 1871, Riverside had several things going for it: (a) It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had earlier designed Central Park in Manhattan and in Riverside introduced the curving street pattern (in contrast to the standard nineteenth-century gridiron) that eighty years later became standard suburban practice; (b) it was built around a station on a commuter railroad that took workers to and from their jobs in the city; and (c) it was far enough out to be safe from the encroaching megalopolis.

Point (c) was where the developers of Southeast Ravenswood had screwed up. (They neglected point (a), too, but that was less crucial.) They had built their subdivision too close in, failing to take account of the likelihood of annexation.

Although the fact is little remembered today, all three U.S. cities that reached the 1 million mark by 1900—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—got that way largely through annexation. Philadelphia had been first, annexing the surrounding county in 1854 and increasing its land area by 2,000 percent. Chicago was next—in 1889, wanting to bulk up for the World's Columbian Exposition then four years away, the city annexed 120 square miles of hinterland and quadrupled its area. Last up was New York, then consisting solely of Manhattan, which merged with the independent city of Brooklyn and what became the boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island in 1898-99, giving the city a population of more than 3 million, after London the largest in the world.
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