The Barn House (11 page)

I got on the wrong side of a lot of people that summer. Across the street from the Barn House was a meeting hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses. One Sunday morning while I was out shoveling debris into the Dumpster, two women strolled by with armloads of Witness literature.

“Shall we give him one?” one said in a voice just loud enough for me to hear.

“He's working on Sunday,” said her companion. “He's an animal—he doesn't even
have
a soul.”

Others were friendlier—my soon-to-be-neighbor Gabe, for one. Gabe was a city guy of the old school. He was a five-foot-six Vietnam vet who called himself a Puerto Rican hillbilly—he'd been born in Kentucky to Puerto Rican parents while his father was in the military. Though he'd moved to Chicago when he was nine, he still spoke with a thick Hispanic accent. Now a foreman at an injection-molding plant, he lived with his extended family in the two-flat next door to the Barn House.

Gabe stopped by to chat occasionally while I was en route to the Dumpster, filling me in on the neighborhood. He warned of the “bad building” behind us—although drugs were no longer openly sold there, he'd had a few run-ins with some of the residents, whom he described as Mexican riffraff. During one confrontation, his antagonists (kids, presumably) asked why he, a fellow Hispanic, was on their case. For Gabe this wasn't a question that required a lot of soul-searching. “I'm a home owner!” he replied. A short time before, he told me, a departing tenant had set a fire in a garbage cart shoved up against his garage, scorching the paint. The fellow had then rammed his truck into Gabe's garage door, knocking it off the track, and had stolen some jacks and tools.

On the whole, however, things were calmer than they had been, I was given to understand. Apart from the occasional irruption of graffiti, overt signs of gang activity had largely ended. That's not to say crime had disappeared. The police report in the local newspaper chronicled a steady drone of burglaries, robberies, assaults, vandalism, and the occasional drive-by shooting within a mile or two of the Barn House; every time I talked to Mike he seemed to know about some new murder or shooting that had occurred nearby. But that was true pretty much anywhere in the city. The main thing, I gathered, was that crime wasn't in your face to the extent that it had been a few years previously. You didn't have, as my friends in Bucktown did, a car bombing on your block, or surly youths loitering on the street corners; the residents no longer felt obliged to patrol after dark. On warm evenings, it's true, you could often find a sizable aggregation of young men hanging out in the parking lot at the muffler shop drinking beer, but mostly they were working on cars, and while I can't say that the sight did much to dress up the street, as far as I knew they never did any harm. I had a friend who lived in a neighborhood called Rogers Park on the far north side of the city; he was active at his kids' school, and one of his jobs was to stand at a certain location on a certain street during afternoon dismissal and keep an eye on a drug lookout stationed across the way. That sort of thing hadn't been necessary for some years in the Barn House's neighborhood. Nonetheless, you had occasional vivid reminders that you were living in the city, a matter to which I'll return.

The work in the Barn House that summer was filthy and tedious, but I remember those days with great fondness. Despite the occasionally hostile reception, I liked the neighborhood. Now that it was full summer, the mature trees lining the parkways had formed a canopy over the street. By city standards it was quiet and spacious. True, we were on a flight path for O'Hare airport; we were a short distance from two busy commercial streets; the L line and a commuter train line were about two blocks away; at rush hour many motorists trying to avoid the backup at the intersection (the city had dug up the sewers) took a shortcut down our street. Still, it was quiet compared to, say, a foundry.

Most of the time there was parking, too, except when the Jehovah's Witnesses had services, which is to say, pretty much constantly (services at the time were conducted in multiple languages and were held in shifts), and my impression was that we got a lot of overflow cars owned by teachers and students at the nearby high school. You also had the problem, which didn't become apparent till later, of people who would come home drunk and park in front of your driveway like mopes (we had the only driveway on the block, and one of few in the neighborhood, but look, you nitwits, our car was parked in it), although I will say the cops were pretty good about ticketing. Things could also be tight when the Cubs were in town, because we were just outside the restricted-parking district around Wrigley Field (not that anybody paid much attention to
that
), and people took advantage to park near us and walk to the game. But most of the time you could find parking without much difficulty, often right in front of the house.

Part of the charm of the place in those early days was that it was completely overgrown. No outside maintenance had been done in years. The front yard was full of violets; the backyard was like a forest glade. Weed trees—box elders and trees of heaven, mostly—had grown up at the rear of the lot, blocking the view of the apartment buildings behind us. Three enormous elms along one side fence filled most of the sky with their branches. There was a big cottonwood; a huge maple plus several smaller ones; three blue spruces planted front and rear in a not entirely successful stab at home improvement; a mulberry; a pear tree, of all things. Now that the leaves had grown in, what with the spruce in the front yard, low-hanging branches from the maple and a honey locust on the parkway, and a row of bushes along the front sidewalk that were a good six feet tall, you could barely see the house—arguably an advantage under the circumstances. Matters couldn't stay like that, I knew, but I was reluctant to cut the stuff down. I have a picture of my older two children in the backyard when they were small, surrounded by an Eden of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers; it recalls W. Eugene Smith's famous photograph
The Walk to Paradise Garden
. One had the sense of a landscape reclaimed by the wild.

My male relations, who continued to assemble periodically to assist with demolition, took a more practical view of things. Where romantics might gush about nature, they thought:
What this needs is some Agent Orange
. Late one afternoon as we relaxed on the derelict front porch after a day of wrecking walls, I noticed an exchange of glances. My brother-in-law Tom, who had a luxurious mustache that gave him a somewhat piratical appearance, stood up and stretched.

“Ready?” he said to the others.

“What's up?” I asked. One always wanted to keep the members of my family separated, lest there be unrest.

“Relax, Ed,” said Tom with a sidelong look. “This will only take a minute.” Producing hedge trimmers and other implements previously concealed on the premises, the boys proceeded to assault the bushes and whatever other vegetation was in reach in front of the house.

“You
guys
!” I protested. I confess I did so without much conviction, and they paid no attention anyway. In ten minutes they were done. The bushes had been shorn to a more conventional size.

To be sure, there was plenty of vegetation left. Late in the afternoon a few days later I sat out on the landing off the rear of the third floor drinking a Mountain Dew. There was a jerry-built stairway there, presumably constructed as a fire exit when the house had been converted to apartments. From the top step I looked out into what to all appearances was a forest. Neighboring buildings were visible through gaps in the leaves. A few houses down I could see the big catalpa tree in Mike's backyard. It was almost July now and the tree was full of enormous white blossoms. In the trees closer at hand birds flitted from branch to branch. We lived on a flyway; migrating birds followed the Lake Michigan shoreline and roosted in the nearby cemetery. We saw more birds than I'd ever seen in my life—blue jays, robins, cardinals. We'd planned to tear off the raggedy steps and replace the back door with a window; now I started to think better of it. The scene was so pretty. Maybe someday we could build a deck up here. The project had barely begun, but I was content. I was fixing up my old house.

After a time I was roused from my reverie by a voice in the distance—an angry voice, I soon realized. Every so often it paused, then resumed. I was overhearing one side of a quarrel. I went downstairs and out into the backyard to investigate. The angry voice was coming from an open window in the bad building across the alley. The speaker was male; the words consisted chiefly of profanity: “You fuckin'
bitch.
” From time to time when the voice paused I could hear a barely audible response.

The man seemed to be growing more and more irate. At any moment I expected to hear blows and screams. I went inside the house and dialed 911.

When I came out again a short time later I noticed Betsy standing in her yard two doors down. She had heard the argument, too.

“I called the police,” she said.

“So did I,” I replied.

By now all was quiet—either the argument had subsided or he was cutting up the body. I listened for a few moments; nothing. It seemed to me my presence was no longer urgent, and I was overdue for supper. I consulted with Betsy. She said she would wait until the police arrived. I turned to go.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” Betsy called after me.

I
wasn't present when the kids began calling the place the Barn House, and no one now remembers who invented the name, but I suspect it was my daughter Ani,
³⁴
the more verbal of our (then) two. The term wasn't affectionately meant. Mary had taken the kids to inspect progress on the house, and they were unimpressed. Demolition by late summer was well advanced, and much of the framing was exposed. We'd swept up periodically, but bits of plaster and other debris lay in neglected corners, fragments of wood lath hung from the studs, and grime covered every surface. I seem to recall Ani on her return commenting disdainfully, “It's a
barn
house, Daddy,” and wrinkling her nose. In any case the name stuck; we called the place the Barn House for the next five years.

O
ther than the possums, which we'll get to by and by, I Ocan't honestly say that anything about the Barn House surprised us. While we weren't without our illusions, for the most part we expected the house to be a project from hell, and it was. Still, I'd be lying if I said we never wondered whether we were crazy to take on the job. It wasn't so much that investing in the house alarmed us. We were uneasier about the city.

I don't mean to exaggerate the risk. At the time we bought the Barn House, Chicago, like most cities of any size, had its share of reviving neighborhoods. But cities as a whole, and Chicago in particular, were still on a downward slide. Sure, in some parts of town you could get a pretty fair flourless chocolate cake. The fact remained that, as of the early 1990s, Chicago had been losing population steadily for more than forty years—to be precise, 837,000 people, at the time the most of any city in the modern world not purposely destroyed or emptied out.
³⁵

Adjustments having been made for scale, the story was largely the same in most older cities. At the time we bought the Barn House, it could be argued in all seriousness that residing in one of the great central cities of the United States, or at any rate of its eastern half, was a vanishing way of life. Between 1950 and 1990 Boston lost 30 percent of its population, Philadelphia 31 percent, Baltimore 32 percent, Cincinnati 33 percent, Minneapolis 33 percent, Washington 35 percent, Buffalo 43 percent, Detroit 44 percent, Cleveland 48 percent, Pittsburgh 51 percent, St. Louis 54 percent. New York lost 824,000 people in just ten years, from 1970 to 1980.

In some parts of Chicago almost nothing remained. In 1981, the
Chicago Tribune
, to illustrate a series about the city's economic prospects called “City on the Brink,” had published a striking photograph of what apparently had been a residential neighborhood not far from the Loop, the city's central business district. The picture had been taken from some elevated point. In the distance was the downtown skyline surmounted by the Sears Tower, with a cluster of low-rise buildings in the middle distance.The landscape in the foreground was almost completely empty. The streets and sidewalks were still there, and the utility poles and street-lights; one could see street signs, some parked vehicles, and here and there a house or other structure. The rest was prairie.
³⁶

I'd seen a neighborhood disintegrate firsthand. When I was young my family had lived in a community on the far west side of Chicago called Austin.
³⁷
As city neighborhoods go, Austin was reasonably well equipped with the amenities. The housing had been solidly constructed—brick two-flats and apartment buildings, frame single-family homes.
³⁸
The parochial schools were good, the public ones fair. There was a magnificent regional park, Columbus Park, with woods, a golf course, and a lagoon, the masterpiece of a wonderful man named Jens Jensen, one of the giants of American landscape design. There was a fine old town hall and a library on a village green of sorts, vestiges of the day when Austin had been part of an independent town. The community was well served by transit and the expressway system. Shopping was convenient. The tree-lined streets were pretty.