The Barn House (23 page)

T
he Chicago building department, and city inspectors in Chicago generally, have long been notorious for petty graft. “Petty” is the operative term here. Corruption-wise the serious money in Chicago, at least on a per-transaction basis, is made at the higher levels of government. Chicago aldermen are legendary for their industry in this regard—between 1972 and 1999, twenty-six were convicted of felonies, mostly involving bribes, with occasional instances of embezzlement, extortion, fraud, ghost payrolling, and other malfeasance thrown in. At least two other aldermen were indicted but had their trials halted or indefinitely postponed due to failing health; even if we cast those aside, 14 percent of the people who served as Chicago aldermen over a twenty-seven-year period, or roughly one in seven (fifty hold office at any one time), were found guilty of corruption. A statistic like that inspires a sort of awe.
⁶²

Even an alderman, if one judged from the newspapers, was unlikely to get rich from bribery alone. The typical aldermanic payoff was on the order of $5,000, which bought you a zoning change.
⁶³
A few got more—I once had a pleasant lunch with a pair of disgraced ex-aldermen, one of whom had done time for pocketing $50,000 (the property involved was unusually large, and the recipient unusually influential), and an enterprising council member in the 1970s stole close to $100,000 from the federally funded jobs program he ran. As a rule, though, the truly life-changing boodle—the put-your-kid-through-college kind, as opposed to the week-in-Vegas variety—went to those who could influence the awarding of government contracts, where millions were at stake. In 1987, for example, a former Chicago Park District official who had been in charge of the city's lakefront harbors was charged with taking a $200,000 kickback for steering business to a marine contractor.
⁶⁴

In contrast, the amounts involved in inspector payoffs were often laughably small. In 1978, four Chicago building department supervisors were found guilty of taking $50,000 in bribes, a sum made more impressive by the fact that it had been collected in increments of $25 to $50 over a period of eight years. On the same day twenty-seven of the city's seventy electrical inspectors were charged with taking bribes ranging from a few dollars to $100. In 1985, eleven of the city's nineteen sewer inspectors plus three former inspectors were indicted for soliciting 1,287 bribes totaling $74,556 over the preceding fifteen years—an average of $58 per bribe.
⁶⁵

The mid-1980s were the high-water mark of small-time municipal corruption in Chicago in modern times, if one judges from the newspapers. While inspector busts continued to be reported, mostly from that point forward they involved individuals rather than half the department at once. With a few exceptions, the amounts remained small. In 1990, one building inspector was arrested after soliciting a $50 payoff, another for taking $400 to overlook safety violations in an apartment building. In 1992, an environmental inspector was accused of accepting six bribes ranging from $10 to $25.

Compared to the epic thievery of previous decades, it sounds pretty nickel-and-dime, and it's possible that by the time we started work on the Barn House street-level corruption in Chicago was more the exception than the rule. But I wouldn't have put good money on it, and doubt most Chicagoans would have.
⁶⁶
At any rate, I contemplated my upcoming dealings with city inspectors with apprehension.

My encounters with the city to that point had been relatively benign. In mid-summer the local ward superintendent, a good-natured but formidable woman of the sort one knows instinctively not to cross, had shown up at the house to chastise me for letting my contractor load the garbage carts with putrefying goo, to the distress of the garbagemen. In fact it wasn't the contractor who had ditched the goo, it was me—I had scooped it out from under the decaying basement stairs, the partially liquefied remains of leaves seemingly unraked since V-J Day. I professed shock and promised the ward superintendent I wouldn't let my guys get away with it again.

Then came Benny, the plumbing inspector. He was a hulking older man with a grim expression; he breathed with a rasp. He stopped by one afternoon to check progress to that point. He said little, glancing without much interest at the cast-iron soil stack and other pipework that the plumbers had installed.

On the way out he noticed a tangle of discarded electrical switchboxes and cabling lying on the floor. “You need those switchboxes?” he asked. I didn't. Benny wanted them for some project. The switchboxes were the deeper-than-normal kind you didn't see much in stores anymore.
No problem
, I said,
they're yours
.
Save them for me
, said Benny. He would stop by to pick them up.

The next morning I arrived at the house early. About eight a.m. there was a rap on the door. It was Benny.

“You got the switchboxes?” he asked, his tone suggesting I'd better. I was a little taken aback, having expected I might see him in a week.
Uh, sure,
I said. I hunted up my tools and set to work disconnecting armored cable while Benny watched grimly, breathing heavily all the while.

After a few minutes I handed the salvaged hardware to Benny. He grunted an acknowledgment and left.
Well
, I thought as I watched him go,
if that's all Chicago building inspectors are demanding nowadays, I've got no reason to complain
.

Others didn't get off so easy. Kevin the plumber told me Benny had instructed him to deliver a load of plumbing supplies, at Kevin's cost, to Benny's daughter's house in the suburbs. A neighbor who rehabilitated apartment buildings told me he'd had difficulty getting the plans for one of his projects approved. When he asked about the holdup, he received the cryptic response, “Oh, that's one of Benny's jobs.” But I was lucky. I never saw Benny again.

O
ne of the pleasures of renovating an old house is that, once a basic scheme of operation has been established, the work doesn't fully occupy the mind. You have to pay some minimal level of attention, of course, lest you slice off a leg or suffer some other disaster, but the essentials having been dealt with, you're free to ponder other things.

I'd now arrived at that point with the piping of the radiators. The work had become routine, although engagingly so. I was nowhere near as proficient a pipe fitter as I was an electrician, but I'd attained a certain threshold competence. I knew the system would work. I had to pause periodically to noodle out some knotty detail, but had no doubt I would.

In short, life had lightened up. Notwithstanding the edge of desperation that had come to be a constant feature of the project, there was something therapeutic about working with your hands, and it was in this moderately cheery state that I began to contemplate my surroundings. It was now possible to see the house's framing in all its unencumbered glory. Howard had been right: The house had good bones. Indeed, from the standpoint of scale, it had bones such as are to be found in no house built in the last half century, log cabins set aside. It was all very well to see balloon framing illustrated in books. The reality was more impressive.

During breaks I strolled around inspecting the premises. The house had been framed so that, except in the odd cranny (the joists I had to drill through for the radiator pipes were in one), the studs and joists were sixteen inches apart, measured centerline to centerline. The great majority of houses in the United States are built to this standard, which has prevailed since at least the Civil War.
⁶⁷
That may seem unimportant, even obsessive, but in fact it's pretty handy. Because of it you can hang forty-eight-inch-wide sheets of drywall without having to custom fit each piece; you can run standard-width air-conditioning ducts between studs; you can install standard insulation, which is fourteen and a half inches wide, the distance between the facing sides of studs or joists. (Truth be told, insulation installed in an old house will be a little snug, because two-by-fours sawn a hundred years ago are three-sixteenths of an inch wider than those cut yesterday afternoon, but luckily the fiberglass readily compresses.) You can, in short, retrofit an old house . . . well, I won't say cheaply, but at least in a relatively systematic and predictable way. For this you can thank the standardization of American building practice ushered in by balloon framing.

Balloon framing is treated only briefly, if respectfully, in histories of architecture and construction because, frankly, there isn't much to tell. The technique was invented in Chicago in 1833 by one Augustine D. Taylor, a carpenter from Connecticut who'd been commissioned to build the city's first Catholic church. The pastor of this church, it's safe to say, wasn't free with cash—the contract amount was $400, ultimately paid in the form of eight hundred silver half-dollars. The standard wood construction methods of the day called for a “New England frame” of heavy beams and posts held together with hand-hewn mortise and tenon joints, construction of which required a large crew of skilled carpenters. Undoubtedly realizing that if he built the church in this way he'd lose his shirt, Taylor devised a new method of framing using two-by-fours and nails, mass production of which had been perfected a short time before. His essential insight was that a building composed of many lightweight timbers was just as strong as one made of a few heavy ones, and was boatloads easier to erect. Taylor's approach had two advantages: (1) the materials were abundant and cheap; and (2) assuming you had one guy who knew what he was doing (presumably Taylor), you could get by with three carpenters, two of whom could be relatively unskilled helpers.
⁶⁸
Balloon framing was quickly adopted for residential and other light construction throughout the United States and made possible the explosive growth of American cities during the nineteenth century.

Useful as balloon framing was, it had a significant drawback: Buildings constructed in this way were firetraps. Balloon-framed walls were hollow; wall insulation in those days was unknown. The space enclosed by the long timbers provided an unobstructed passage—a flue, if you will—from the basement to the attic. If a fire started in the basement and reached the exterior walls, it would race up to the roof in minutes, and there went the house, and possibly the neighborhood. City houses in those days were built close together; firefighting methods were primitive. Not surprisingly, catastrophic fires in nineteenth-century cities were common. Everyone has heard of the Chicago fire of 1871 (300 dead, 18,000 buildings destroyed) and the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 (498 dead, 28,000 buildings destroyed). But we've largely forgotten the Seattle fire of 1889 (29 square blocks destroyed, including most of the city's downtown), the Boston fire of 1872 (775 buildings destroyed), the Baltimore fire of 1904 (1,526 buildings), the St. Louis fire of 1849 (430 buildings), and the Pittsburgh fire of 1845 (1,200 buildings). Probably there are others, but those are the ones that came up when I Googled “great
xxx
fire,” substituting for
xxx
the names of the first dozen large U.S. cities that popped into my head. As I say, they had a lot of fires in those days.

As it turned out, there was a relatively easy way to eliminate the flue problem, although it wasn't universally adopted for a hundred years. An example was then taking shape at the rear of the Barn House, where the carpenters were constructing the kitchen, the family room, and the master bedroom. It was called platform framing. Rather than heave up exterior studs extending the height of the building, the carpenters were building the addition one story at a time—raising the walls, decking over the result with floor joists and plywood (a platform), then starting the next floor. The platform prevented easy passage of flame from one floor to the next; fire-resistant fiberglass wall insulation filling the space between the studs provided an additional measure of safety.

Fire prevention wasn't the only reason carpenters abandoned balloon framing for platform framing, though. The other reason was perhaps more urgent, and not without some relevance today: They'd used up the wood.

Therein lies an instructive tale. The Barn House had been erected at the height of what may be unblushingly described as the golden age of wood construction in the United States. You may object:
The golden age of wood? That's like talking about the golden age of linoleum.
Wood is so . . . ordinary. Just my point. Wood was the default material for every application at the time of the Barn House's construction. It had been used not just for the framing—90 percent of American homes are still framed with wood—but for the siding (cedar clapboards over pine boards, in contrast to the vinyl or aluminum over waferboard sheathing commonly seen today), the roof (cedar shakes rather than asphalt shingles), flooring (oak or maple over pine planking rather than tile or carpet over plywood), even the wooden lath that supported the plaster. In the basement, six-by-six-inch pine posts supported eight-by-ten beams, which in turn carried two-by-ten floor joists. The doors were solid pine or oak, not the hollow-core wood or metal variety common now. The wooden baseboards were eleven inches high and topped with a formidable milled cap. Each window and door was trimmed with a five-inch-wide decorative wooden frame consisting of a finely milled casing surrounded by an equally complicated backband (to my ear the terms have a fittingly old-fashioned ring, though they're familiar enough to finish carpenters). Wood had been used for purposes for which it was patently unsuited, such as the tracks for the pocket doors, which in all likelihood due to friction and misalignment hadn't opened freely since the time the house was built. (We eventually replaced those on the heavier door with steel.) The only things not made of wood in the place were the foundation, chimneys, glass, plaster, wiring, hardware, tile, and pipes—and in old cities from time to time you heard of backhoe operators unearthing even pipes made of wood, usually cored-out logs or sometimes large-diameter tubes assembled from staves like a barrel.