The Barn House (36 page)

But no one did. The issue never came up that I heard about. The mild suggestion about a committee made it into the published plan unaltered.

I found this interesting. It's not that no one thought the issue important, as we'll shortly see. The review committee had been vocal about plenty of other subjects. But something had changed. I had a hard time putting my finger on what it was until I heard a comment at one of the committee's meetings. A businesswoman recalled how impressed she'd been by Michigan Avenue on her return to Chicago in the early 1990s after an extended absence: “It had matured,” she said.

I was struck by this remark and thought about it a lot afterward. The woman had been speaking of the commercial district, but it seemed to me her comment applied to the city as a whole. Although people were only then beginning to realize it, the town had grown up.

Partly this was a matter of appearances—the city looked more finished, a matter to which I'll return. But it seemed to me the city's maturity involved more than just physical improvements. You could see it in people's attitudes. A good example of this, I thought, was the subsequent controversy over street performers, which as was to be expected didn't end with the formation of a committee. On the contrary, what we'd seen in 1996 was the beginning of a protracted and bitter dispute, of which I can give only a summary:

None too edifying, you may think. I disagree. Whatever one's view of the solution
pro tempore
(I doubt we've heard the last word on the subject), it seemed to me just the sort of argument to be expected in a city come of age. Even during the city council debate, those doing most of the talking weren't the civic leaders who in earlier times would have dominated the discussion (if there had been a discussion at all), but rather the people most directly involved—the politicians saw themselves mostly as mediators or champions of their constituents' rights.

Moreover, if we ignore the thin-skinned sort, the attitude of bucket-boy opponents could be generally characterized as:
There's only so much urban irritation you can ask even city people to take.
Sure, nobody was entirely happy with how things had turned out, but in a way that was the point. City life had innumerable drawbacks—noise, congestion, crime. Some of the problems might ease over time but they never disappeared. What kept the city going was the collective calculation by those who lived or did business in it that the attractions outweighed the costs—and people would fight hard to keep the cost from getting too steep.

Arguments over street artists were by no means the only arena in which you saw this. I had some friends who were fixing up an old Victorian town house on the west side, on a street where homes in the mid-1990s sold for the then royal sum of $350,000. Their house faced a small park, on the other side of which was a sprawling low-rise public housing development. My friends weren't enthusiastic about this, speaking darkly of shots fired and visits by the police. But they put up with it—it was the price they paid to live in the city.
⁹⁰

So I think in that sense Paul Goldberger had been right. City people weren't necessarily more tolerant because they were naturally inclined that way, but because living in the city didn't give them much choice. I don't mean to suggest that their acceptance of the raucous urban scene was in all cases grudging; on the contrary, whatever they might think of this or that detail, I think most found it one of the city's great charms. Nor would they put up with conditions they found intolerable. But they didn't feel powerless to change things. Unlike city dwellers fifty years earlier, they didn't just bail when things got tough; they waded in and duked it out.

In short, Chicago had matured. People were more invested in the city, in several senses of the term. There was more energy in the air, more shops and cafés, more people on the street. The city had always had its diehard fans, but now I sensed that for a great many Chicagoans the city was no longer just a place they were passing through, but rather the end of the line. That's easy to say, and city people have long been notorious for taking the rosy view, but an objective measure of the new attitude (or so it seemed to me) would arise soon enough.

A
lthough the work no longer occupied our every waking moment, we wrapped up an impressive number of projects during the late 1990s. We painted the front hall, living room, and dining room; stripped and refinished the front staircase; stained and varnished the new oak woodwork in the front of the house; painted the poplar woodwork everywhere else; finished the downstairs bathroom by among other things mounting a mosaic-tile frieze depicting twining ivy, which I assure you was more winning in reality than it probably sounds on the page; hung closet doors; rerouted the upstairs ductwork yet again because, notwithstanding my ad-libbed improvements following the discovery of Pete's iceberg, the air handler had to work too hard and the compressor burned out; scraped the paint off the front porch deck twice because it kept peeling and the first time Henryk repainted with latex, as opposed to more durable oil, Henryk being the one worker who reminded us that devotion to the right way was a learned behavior, and not part of Polish DNA; repaired an ominously seeping crack in an upstairs bathroom radiator, which required drilling out the fissure and filling it with epoxy, because I remembered the previous owner's sad experience with the failed radiator and the three inches of ice; plus numerous other small projects, the details of which it's not necessary to review.

In 1997 we finished the basement sufficiently for our purposes, which is to say we, or rather a squad of Polish workers hired for the purpose, painted the floor with epoxy and the walls and ceiling (more precisely, the joists and the underside of the floor planking) with white latex. As usual Tony and Jerry were the contractors, and as usual, from what I could gather, they barely made a dime, although for once the fault was only indirectly mine. They'd calculated that the ceiling would require twenty-five gallons of paint; in the event the antique timbers sucked up sixty-two. I coughed up some more cash unasked.

Painting the basement was one job I had no intention of doing myself, because I knew it likely involved a paint sprayer, the devil's instrument. As with much in my life throughout this period, it all started with the radiators. I loved radiators, I truly did, but they were a pain in the neck to work with, too heavy and always in the way, and in particular they were a nightmare to paint. From the outset I had known that I should have gotten the radiator painting done at an early stage of the project, before the house was closed up and life grew more complex, but at the decisive moment I had had no time and no money. For years thereafter the knowledge that I had merely postponed a task that would require baroque logistical arrangements under the best of circumstances filled me with the blackest dread. My fears along these lines had been confirmed during the finishing of the attic, when I had assigned the Chief to paint the two radiators appurtenant thereto. The job took him the better part of a week. The Chief could be meticulous to a fault, and at times with his small brush and exacting technique seemed bent on resurrecting pointillism à la Georges Seurat, but on investigation I could see such precision was necessitated by the intricate design of the radiator, a labyrinth of fins and rods and interior vanes. No fault could be found with the finished job, but I knew if we painted all the radiators at that pace we'd be at it till Jesus came back.

When the time came to paint the radiators in the basement, therefore, I was amenable to the Chief 's suggestion that we buy a paint sprayer. Use of a sprayer presented several challenges. One was drips. If you lingered a millisecond too long when maneuvering the spray head, the paint would collect in a pendulous stratum recalling the fate of Dorian Gray. Another problem was overspray. If you were outdoors and some zephyr came along at a speed above half a knot, an alarming percentage of the paint wouldn't go where it was nominally aimed but instead would bedizen the rhododendrons. A third concern was asphyxiation, especially when painting indoors.

The last item was the major obstacle for us. Since the weather at the time was chilly—it was early spring, as I recall—and we had no hope of getting the radiators up the steps anyway, we painted them in the basement in a spray booth constructed of two-by-twos and sheet plastic and bearing an unpleasant resemblance to a gas chamber. I hooked up the shop vacuum in hopes of evacuating the most lethal fraction of fumes, and bought the most formidable breathing mask I could find, a complex piece of apparatus with multiple compartments for replaceable filter cartridges, which looked as though it would equip the wearer to survive a gas attack at Ypres. However, since the budget didn't permit piping in oxygen, you still had the problem that at an advanced point in the spraying process your input air supply consisted of three parts standard atmosphere to two parts paint. After working for any length of time I developed a throbbing headache and fogged vision, and had the sense of watching brain cells individually die. We finished the basement radiators after considerable suffering—I note with satisfaction that we had minimal drips—but I vowed that for future painting I'd hire someone else.

Thus the Polish workers. You may think it unseemly that I subcontracted my dirty work to third parties, but having inhaled my life's quota and then some of carcinogens, I thought it wise to farm out the balance, in which aim Tony and Jerry cooperated during this interval (though we didn't plan it that way) by never sending over the same crew twice. I was grateful for their assistance in any case, and I think anyone looking at my situation objectively would say I'd better be, for reasons it will be worthwhile to explore.

 

D
uring the time we worked on the Barn House I was often struck by the similarities between the era when it had been built and the present day. Granted, high-button shoes had pretty much bitten the dust, and cars and computers had transformed the world in ways no one a century earlier could have foreseen, but from a socioeconomic perspective, as the professors might say, there were curious points of comparison.

The dependence on immigrant labor was the most obvious parallel. Chicago, and quite likely my house, had been built by immigrants in the latter part of the nineteenth century and largely rebuilt by them in the latter part of the twentieth. I counted up the workers who participated in some substantial way in the Barn House's protracted reconstruction; setting aside the amateurs who helped with demolition, the total came to more than a hundred, of whom two-thirds were foreign-born. The majority of these had been sent over by Tony and Jerry, but even the people we hired on our own were nonnatives more often than not.