The Barn House (33 page)

Still, objectively speaking, I was absorbing a lot of punishment, for which I figured I deserved a little credit. “I live in filth!” I yelled by way of opening statement. I exaggerated slightly, but for the most part this was true. Though we were now years into the project, I wound up covered in dust and grime just about every time I worked on the house, the kind that sifted into your hair and wound up in the handkerchief whenever you blew your nose. I offered a few other remarks in this vein, then launched the blockbuster of marital arguments:

“You're just like your
mother!”

Understand that I get along fine with my mother-in-law, always have. She had certain idiosyncrasies, some of which, considered in isolation, Mary could be said to share, that's all I was saying. Regardless, the shot had the desired effect. The argument continued in a desultory way for a while; Mary may have said I was just like my father. But her bunker had been knocked off its foundations. As we pulled into the driveway she said in a quiet voice, “Am I really just like my mother?” I doused my fuses immediately. “Aw, no, babe,” I said, putting my arm around her, and the argument was over. But I'd be lying if I said it was the last one we had.

 

T
oward the end of March 1995 I got a bill from Tony and Jerry for extras. I'd expected the bill but wasn't sure of the amount. At the outset I'd been fastidious about requesting a price in advance for this or that modification—a concrete floor in the crawl space here, a dropped ceiling to conceal radiator pipes there. But I became more casual about such matters as the project wore on. There didn't seem much point—whatever the price, I realized after the first couple outings, it would likely be reasonable, and I was certain to say go ahead. As a result I'd lost track of the total. Some changes I knew were going to be expensive. Rebuilding the turret roof because Charlie had indicated the wrong angle in the plans, for example—that was definitely going to cost me. Even so, I was taken aback when I opened the bill and saw the bottom line—$19,000. That night I sent Tony a long fax disputing a number of charges. He called the following day, quite upset. We needed to have a meeting.

Anyone who has worked on an old house, or been involved in a construction project or for that matter a complex contract of any kind, has had such a meeting. I'm certain tense words were exchanged upon completion of the great pyramid at Giza. The difference was that in the old days these disputes were settled by having the contractor put to death. Our prevaricating age didn't countenance such expedients. You had to argue endlessly about assumptions and technical terminology and standards of workmanship, and who said what to whom.

The major sticking point in our case had to do with moving the chimney chase for the fireplace in the family room. Tony had billed me $5,000 for it. I was exasperated. True, Charlie's plan was the proximate cause of the problem, and I'd hired Charlie. But, I reasoned, I'd hired the whole damn bunch of these guys. Tony had been responsible for constructing the roof and furnishing and installing the fireplace. Surely as an experienced contractor he ought to have realized during initial construction (if not sooner) that no flue was going to fit through that opening, and advised me to come up with a plan that would actually work. I rehearsed the matter with friends at a party, who were happy to see it my way. “This is why you hire people who know what they're doing,” I argued. “What do I know about offsets? I'm the fricking
home owner.
I don't know
jack.
I'm looking for
expert advice.
”

Tony arrived with Jerry one morning a few days later. We sat at the kitchen table—light poured in between the trees through the double windows; it was really quite pleasant—and debated for four and a half hours. I was subtle. I was eloquent. I pro-pounded arguments that at least should have gotten a special prosecutor appointed. However, a Polish guy is a tough nut. Tony didn't budge from his insistence that he was just following the plans. In the end Jerry suggested we split the difference, which seemed fair under the circumstances, so that's what we did.

The news didn't cheer Mary. Even with the reduction, we still owed thousands of dollars we hadn't counted on paying. That night she reported that our monthly expenses exceeded our income by a considerable margin. “I feel like we're destitute,” she said.

That overstated matters, but we were house poor, no question. Truth was, fixing up an old house in the city was an extraordinarily expensive proposition, even setting considerations of speculation and profit aside. We had purchased the Barn House for $250,000 (which at the time seemed high, considering its sorry state, but nonetheless was cheaper than virtually everything else we'd seen), then spent at least $350,000 renovating it—I say at least because after a while we quit adding up the bills lest we make ourselves sick.

Granted the $350,000 included a few nonessential items, as Wayne had predicted it might. We'd spent two grand on a granite countertop in the kitchen. This was frivolous, I acknowledge; Formica would have done just as well. We had blitzed through $30,000 restoring the cedar siding. Another indulgence—I'm guessing $10,000 tops would have gotten the place clad in low-maintenance vinyl, at the cost, it must be said, of obscuring many of the house's distinguishing architectural features, limiting the choice of colors to the dozen or two the siding company felt like selling, and generally making the house as ugly as sin, but think of the money we'd have saved on paint. Nix the copper gutters, out with the fancy faucets, to the devil with . . . well, to be honest, there wasn't much else we could have easily dispensed with. I suppose we might have used half-inch drywall instead of five-eighths, and substituted stock moldings for custom millwork. Conceivably—one shudders—we might have repaired the venerable oak balustrade with stock pieces from Menard's.

But that was about it. If the job was to be undertaken at all, there was work that had to be done. It was customary in our coddled age to provide a house with running water and electric lights. Likewise a steel beam that actually supported the floor above, as opposed to merely seeming to, couldn't be considered a silly whim. One wanted a roof that didn't leak, windows not shedding parts, a porch on which one didn't set foot at peril of one's life. In a house of comparable age in the suburbs (my parents' home, for example), one might have expected repairs on this scale—some of them, anyway—to have been undertaken serially by a succession of previous owners, none of whom would have come close to bankrupting himself in consequence; in the city, by and large, it was all up to you.

My point is that while we might have cut the odd corner, nothing would have changed the fundamental fact: If you wanted to fix up an old house in the city, you had to drop a ton of cash. This needs to be borne in mind when considering the extravagant sums for which city houses are sometimes sold, which give the impression that windfall profits are easily come by and that the participants are cleaning up. Not so—certainly not in the early going, anyway. Our middle-class home in the city had set us back more than $600,000, which had gone toward a house purchased relatively cheaply and renovated by nonunion labor working for a contractor who had trimmed his profit margin. The $600,000 figure bore no necessary relation to what the house would actually
sell
for, you understand. That's what it actually cost.

The matter is worth enlarging on. In the midst of one anxious financial consultation, when the depth of the hole we had dug for ourselves had become inescapably plain, Mary had asked, “Did you ever think you would own a six-hundred-thousand-dollar house?” “Babe,” I said, “we don't own a six-hundred-thousand-dollar house. We own a five-hundred-thousand-dollar house that cost six hundred thousand dollars.”

Even the lower number for a long while was a stretch. Later in 1995, while we were in the process of arranging a new mortgage that would pay off the original mortgage plus the construction loan and put the financing for the house on a long-term basis, the Barn House was appraised at $470,000. This figure had been computed on an impressive-looking form, based on comparable sales with additions for this and subtractions for that, and purportedly reflected what the place would honestly fetch. The fact remained that no house in the immediate vicinity had ever sold for that much money. Somebody had to be at the high end, of course. The difficulty for us was that anyone willing to pop for the priciest house in the neighborhood would have wanted it more or less finished, which ours demonstrably wasn't. We had no intention of selling—I was stubborn, as I say—but it rankled that we didn't have the option of doing so unless we wanted to take a catastrophic financial bath.

All that having been said, I don't honestly think the biggest drain imposed by the Barn House was money. One day I mentioned to Mary that I always told myself the same thing at trying moments during the project; the only thing that changed was the emphasis. At first I mostly said, “It's just a house.” But as the project wore on I found myself moaning, “It's just a
house,
” as opposed to a cancer cure, the next
Huckleberry Finn
, or, to put the matter in practical terms, more vacations with the kids. My point was that the one unrecoverable asset you poured into a house wasn't cash. It was time.

 

T
oward the end of June we began preparing for our final city inspection. Two things had made this urgent. First, in order to pay off our construction loan and secure a new mortgage, we had to get an official city signoff. Second, we needed the space. I wanted an office so I didn't have to spend another winter freezing in the attic, and we also needed a room for an au pair—that would be cheaper than hiring babysitters to watch Andrew while Mary and I worked. But we couldn't legally finish the third floor without a second fire exit. I intended to install an exterior spiral staircase, but that would be a complex and expensive project. One step at a time: first the inspection, then the finished attic, and last the spiral stairs.

We removed my temporary office and other signs of habitation from the attic, then called the city. As expected the inspector headed straight for the third floor and nodded approvingly when he saw the unfinished framing. He noticed the rear attic door, which now opened onto nothing.
Going to bring some stairs up there?
Yes, I said—someday I wanted to finish the third floor.
You're doing this the right way
, he said.
Yup
, I thought,
just not in the right order
. He jotted on some papers and we were done. Two days later I cleared out the attic so I could start the finishing work. I discovered a considerable amount of dirty cellulose insulation remained. It was July 1, 1995; I'd been hauling this stuff out of the attic off and on for more than two years.

S
urprisingly little of a systematic nature is known about cities and how and why they grow and decline. No doubt that's an impertinent thing for a nonspecialist to say, but I suspect many who make their living studying cities would privately agree—some not so privately. In 1986, I wrote an article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs's
Death and Life of Great American Cities
, a famous attack on the bulldozer-style urban renewal programs of the 1950s. The book struck a chord with the public, and largely because of it the late Ms. Jacobs (she died in 2006) remains widely revered today. But professionals were less impressed, as I discovered when I called up George Sternlieb, then director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University and a prominent figure in the field, to ask for a comment. “I don't think much of her work, and I think it's a sad reflection on the field that they're taking her stuff seriously,” he said. “It's by default of other insight. On a flat plain, pimples begin to look like the Rocky Mountains.”

Professor Sternlieb's view of Ms. Jacobs, I think, was harsher than she deserved, and in fact her reputation among scholars has grown in recent years, a matter I'll return to. But it's hard to quarrel with his larger point. It's not that cities are a complete mystery; to the contrary, in the big-picture sense—the orbiting-ninety-miles-overhead view, as it were—we know quite a bit. It's at the street level that things fall down.

We know, for example, that the world is currently undergoing an urbanization boom unlike any yet seen. In 1800, 3 percent of the world's population lived in cities; as of 2007 half did; and 60 percent are expected to do so by 2030—almost 5 billion people. In 1950 there were 67 cities with a population of a million or more, in 2000 there were 387, and by 2015 the United Nations expects there to be 554.

It's commonly assumed most cities in the developing world are gigantic slums, and many are indisputably squalid; the UN estimates that more than a billion people live in shantytowns or worse. But quite a few cities have acquired the accoutrements of modernity. Of the one hundred tallest buildings in the world as of 2007, fifty-six were in Asia or the Middle East, including eight of the top ten. (The tallest as I write is the Taipei 101 building in Taipei, Taiwan, which is more than two hundred feet taller than the biggest U.S. building, the Sears Tower in Chicago.) In 1950, twenty cities in the world had rapid transit systems; today 165 do. China, one of the most rapidly urbanizing countries, had only a handful of airports with scheduled service in the 1950s; as of 2005 it had 135, and within five years it expects to have 186.

At the same time, however—I venture to say few other than specialists have grasped the extent of this—many cities are declining in size, and not just in the United States. According to the
Atlas of Shrinking Cities
, a fascinating volume produced in 2006 by a consortium of architects and others based in Berlin, 350 major cities throughout the world saw their populations drop a tenth or more between 1950 and 2000, and a quarter of all large cities lost population in the 1990s.
⁸⁹
In the UK, Liverpool, Man-chester, and Glasgow have lost roughly half their people. The populations of Lisbon, Leipzig, and Brussels have fallen by more than 30 percent, that of Copenhagen by 40 percent. Venice remains one of the world's most popular tourist destinations, yet only sixty-two thousand people still live there. The causes of the downturns are varied—deindustrialization, suburbanization, the occasional signal disaster. The
Atlas
cites post-Katrina New Or-leans, whose population has fallen by nearly half, as well as post-Chernobyl Pripyat, Ukraine—population loss 100 percent. To be sure, fewer people aren't always a sign of decline; in cities such as Paris and San Francisco, they reflect the fact that small affluent households are replacing large poor ones.