The Barn House (34 page)

Another thing we know, or think we do, is that the last great era of city-building is now upon us—arguably it'll conclude by the end of this century. Two factors contribute. The first is that the world's population will be close to stabilizing at between nine and ten billion. (That's another little-appreciated development—the population of most developed countries will soon level off or decline due to falling birth rates, with the United States one of the few exceptions thanks to immigration. Even in developing countries like India the growth rate is falling.) The second and more important factor is that the global migration of people from the countryside into the cities, under way since the early nineteenth century, will be coming to an end. By 2050 the United Nations estimates the world will be 70 percent urbanized and the developed countries 85 percent, the latter figure presumably approximating the end state. As urbanization winds down, the worldwide boom in city construction will taper off as well. That doesn't mean individual cities will necessarily stabilize. Judging from the experience of the present day, some will thrive while others wither away.

Which ones? Who knows? That's where we get into unknown country. Social scientists have struggled for much of the past century to explain the sharp turns of urban fortune, and for that matter the most basic mechanisms of urban growth, with decidedly mixed success. In the 1920s, researchers in the so-called Chicago school of sociology, many of whom were on the faculty of the University of Chicago, took the then novel step of venturing out into the city around them to search for patterns of neighborhood change—what some called urban ecology. Chicago was a promising laboratory for this project because: (a) for the U. of C. researchers at least, it was just outside the door; (b) it lacked topographical features (Lake Michigan chiefly excepted) that would distort the pattern of settlement; (c) like many American cities at the time, it was growing rapidly, offering a chance to observe the process of development within a compressed period of time; and (d) it wasn't New York—which is to say, it was a fairly typical (if big) U.S. city. As a result, it's been said, Chicago during the twentieth century was the most thoroughly studied city in the world.

An influential product of this work was an evolving theory of urban development, or to use the textbooks' grander term, urban spatial organization. In 1923, a U. of C. sociologist named Ernest Burgess proposed what became known as “concentric-ring theory,” illustrated with a famous diagram (it consisted of concentric rings), which held that cities naturally developed outward from the initial point of settlement, with the central business district at the core; then the “zone of transition,” a euphemism for the slums; and after that the zone of workingmen's homes, the “zone of better residences,” and farthest out the commuter zone—the suburbs. A defect of this scheme, obvious from the start, was that it was too simple even for Chicago's relatively blank slate. In 1939, the land economist Homer Hoyt, who'd spent many years in Chicago, proposed a refinement known as sector theory, which held that transportation routes emanating from the city center tended to become development corridors, helping to establish one side (or sector) of town as the affluent part while another was stigmatized as the poor part. This pattern persisted as the city expanded into the hinterlands, with the result that in Chicago, for example, the south side has remained for well over a century the baddest part of town.

You may say:
It took sixteen years to figure out
that
?
But of course scientific progress is often slow, seldom more so than in the case of cities, where the research subjects are scattered around the globe. Hoyt, demonstrating exemplary thoroughness, based his theory on an analysis of 142 cities throughout the developed world, doubtless running up some serious frequent-railroad-passenger miles in the process. Despite his hard work, just six years later sector theory had to make room for the “multiple-nuclei” model proposed by former University of Chicago students Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman (Harris spent his career at the U. of C. as a geography professor). The multiple-nuclei model acknowledged the fact, evident even in 1945, that with the increased mobility made possible by the automobile, in many metropolitan areas the traditional downtown was but one of many commercial centers, and not necessarily the most important. Suburban decentralization is now recognized as a worldwide phenomenon associated with increasing affluence.

But the suburbs weren't the last word in urban spatial organization either. The latest development to stump researchers has been gentrification. First widely evident in the 1950s—if you buy the argument that artists and bohemians represent the first wave, you can make the case that gentrification was under way in Greenwich Village, and possibly the near north side of Chicago, in the 1920s—the phenomenon had attracted scholarly notice by the 1960s. Forty years later experts still don't agree on what it is, what causes it, or whether it's good or bad. (Indeed, as that value judgment suggests, the debate has become highly politicized.)

One school of thought—the “production-side” theory, advanced by the geographer Neil Smith—holds that the forces of capitalism realized there was money to be made in buying cheap inner-city property and fixing it up for yuppies. No disrespect to Professor Smith, but from personal experience I can attest that profit doesn't enter the picture till the late stages of the process. Another school, the “consumption-side” hypothesis associated with the sociologist David Ley, proposes that—I omit a few subtleties—yuppies think cities are fun. (A late addition to consumption-side theory is globalization, which has increased the supply of yuppies.) Far be it from me to take sides in a dispute of such long standing, but the odds favor Professor Ley.

We'll get back to the broader implications of gentrification later. At the time we worked on the Barn House the subject raised a more pressing question, which was much debated then and is no less controversial now. It took one of two forms, depending on where you were: (1)
How can we halt this oppressive plague?
or (2)
How can we get it to start?
Had I spent my early adulthood in Boston, New York, or San Francisco, possibly (1) would have seemed more salient. Inasmuch as I'd slugged it out in Chicago, (2) loomed larger in my mind.

The truth is, nobody in Chicago in those days knew what it would take to get a declining city turned around. In college I'd read with great interest Jane Jacobs's book, which, notwithstanding the conceptual and methodological lacunae to which Professor Sternlieb presumably was adverting, seemed (and still seems) a shrewd description of city life. In it she enumerated what she felt were the essentials of a successful city—namely, mixed uses, short blocks, a diversity of new and old buildings, and sufficient density. Anyone with some experience of cities will grant that this is a plausible prescription. But it didn't fully address the situation in Chicago, where we seemed to have the requisite density, mixed uses, and so on, but neighborhood improvement remained elusive. There had to be more to it, I thought, and at an early age I developed my own theory of what it took for a down-at-heels part of town to revive: It had to look urban.

This requires some explanation. While driving taxicabs as a college student in 1970, I'd stumbled on a number of ramshackle Chicago neighborhoods that nonetheless were unmistakably citylike in appearance. One was a section of town known as Wicker Park. Though its fortunes have improved a good deal since, Wicker Park in 1970 was known chiefly for hookers and drug sales—it had been the setting for
The Man with the Golden Arm
, Nelson Algren's 1949 novel about a morphine addict. As late as 1992, the owner of a coffeehouse in the neighborhood was telling me the space occupied by his establishment had previously housed an illegal drug factory.

But it looked cool. The heart of the community, Milwaukee Avenue, one of Chicago's great commercial diagonals, was narrow, lined by three- and four-story buildings, and paralleled by an L line; the Loop rose like the celestial city at its foot. The houses on the side streets were attractive if weather-beaten exercises in red brick dating from just after the fire. A couple streets consisted mainly of mansions, reportedly built by German brewers who'd been the district's original settlers. I knew little about the neighborhood, but I thought:
This will come back
. I wasn't the only one who thought so; rehabbers were hard at work by the late 1970s, although it was fifteen years—some would say twenty—before they had much to show.

In the end, of course, their work paid off—the neighborhood became one of the most popular in the city, and the chief struggle now is whether rising rents and corporate tenants (for example, those Bank of America slimeballs) will dull the urban edge. Many people and organizations contributed to the neighborhood's revival, but without wishing to deprecate the importance of the Busy Bee restaurant and the Around the Coyote festival and other local institutions Chicagoans know well, I don't think there's any disputing that what got things off the dime was the neighborhood's striking physical appearance—it looked urban.

I'll have more to say about all this later—I certainly didn't understand it in 1970. Even then, however, I could see that my city-spotting instinct had one conspicuous weakness: There was no telling how long revival would take, except that it would assuredly be longer than you thought.

On a smaller scale, that was the problem we now faced at the Barn House. Finishing the attic—one project on a seemingly endless list—took nine months. There was an extraordinary amount of work to do, some of it complicated, a lot just tedious, and in the early stages I had to do most of it myself, with occasional assistance from the Chief. At best I could devote two or three days a week. I wangled some work out of Tony under our existing contract, but I couldn't afford to hire him to do more—our credit card debt was brushing up against six figures. The only way we avoided crushing interest payments was that Mary routinely flipped debt to whichever card issuer (the credit card companies were having a price war at the time) was offering the lowest introductory rate.

No doubt my insistence on doing things the right way prolonged matters, but I expected to spend a lot of time in the office, and in my experience I was more likely to regret things I wished I'd done and didn't than wished I hadn't done and did. Anyone in my shoes would have felt the same. The cantilevered “bench” where one attic gable extended out over the driveway—no sensible person would have left that sagging five degrees out of true, and a couple dozen precisely sawn wedges were all that was required to make it level and square. Similarly, the oddball jogs in the framing were easily concealed with furring and a false wall. The floor that sloped so steeply as to verge on requiring a tow rope—okay, I grant you that meant pulling up all the subflooring and notching the planks at one side of the room and shimming them at the other so as to feather the rise to the point of imperceptibility. But I'd have had to open up the floor anyway so I could stuff insulation in the joist ends to avoid drafts. The electrical work, the ductwork, the remainder of the insulation, truing up the ceilings, screwing down the subflooring, gluing and screwing half-inch plywood underlayment on
top
of the subflooring . . . why, anybody would have done those things. They needed to be done.

By September I was far enough along to start thinking about drywall, so I got on the phone to Jesus, the head of the drywall-hanging crew. I braced myself for a hefty quote—what with the turret and dormer, the walls and ceilings in the attic had all sorts of exotic angles that were sure to require fancy trimming. What's more, the heavy sheets of drywall were in the basement, and had to be hauled to the top of the house. Sure enough, when Jesus dropped by, he made frightful grimaces as he considered the complexities of the job. “I gotta tell you, man, you gotta lot of work here,” he said. “This is gonna cost you a lot of money.” He paused and screwed up his face again. “I'm gonna have to charge you seven hundred dollars.”

I'd been expecting two thousand. “Whoa,” I said weakly. I agreed to rent a scaffold so Jesus and his crew could throw the drywall up the side of the house, and two weeks later that's more or less what they did, hoisting the massive sheets effortlessly in a sort of vertical bucket brigade. Moving forty or fifty sheets of drywall plus a couple dozen more sheets of plywood (the aforementioned carpet underlayment) took them till mid-afternoon, whereupon they set about the work of hanging. If cutting the drywall into precise trapezoids and half octagons gave them pause, I detected no sign of it. By the following afternoon they were done.

Next came Ricardo, the mudder. I pointed out the angles—the ceiling looked like a geodesic dome. All the lines need to be straight, I said.
De nada,
said Ricardo. He charged me $750. I did a little touching up when he was done, then applied a coat of white primer. The effect on a bright day was remarkable. I felt as though I was standing inside a Platonic solid. “It's not the Barn House anymore,” Ani announced, inspecting the job. “It's the house.”

The day before Thanksgiving I took the sawhorses downstairs to the dining room and set up a couple sheets of plywood on them; Mary spread a cloth to make a table for Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family—the first time we'd had everyone over since we moved in. At mid-meal my brother-in-law Tom (the piratical one) paused to gaze around the room. Though there was still much to do, a fancy brass light fixture with etched glass globes now hung from the ten-foot ceiling. “This place makes our house seem small and out of date,” he said.

The remainder of the work we may pass over lightly. The stair guys installed a nicely proportioned balustrade on the service stairs. Tom spent a week or so installing the trim. My brother John helped me paint. The final step was carpeting the attic and the service stairs down to the first floor. The installers were a couple young guys in T-shirts who looked like slackers but did an exemplary job with no visible seams. We finished in mid-March. We moved in Petra, our Swiss au pair, and I set up my office. The trees outside the window were starting to bud; I saw robins and blue jays. Though some details were still missing, the attic was the first part of the house's interior to be reasonably complete, a couple months shy of three years after we'd purchased the house.