The Barn House (45 page)

Those having an interest in such things will find a diagram in Appendix A.

Those believing they're better equipped to handle this than my old man may inspect the diagram in Appendix B.

To a carpenter, a soffit is a boxlike piece of framing hung from the ceiling, commonly found above kitchen cabinets. (Another frequent use is to conceal air-conditioning ducts.) Soffit lights are built into the soffit to provide task lighting for the counters below.

Maybe not. See Appendix C.

An Italian beef is a sandwich made of spicy sliced beef on Italian bread drenched in juice. Having eaten this delicacy most of my life and assumed it was a staple of Italian national cuisine, I was surprised to learn in college that it was available only in Chicago. This was like finding out Chicago was the only place that had girls. Why Italian beef hasn't found a wider audience is an abiding mystery. The cheese steak, as I suppose most inhabitants of the East Coast know, is a sandwich consisting of chopped grilled steak with melted cheese on Italian bread, which originated at a place I know only as Pat's in Philadelphia. Like Italian beef it's exceedingly tasty, but, also like Italian beef, will kill you if consumed in excess, meaning oftener than maybe once a year. However, I venture to say anyone departing this vale of tears as a result of Italian beef or cheese steak overdose will die with a smile.
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I include this recognizing that even among confirmed city dwellers mass transit is more tolerated than enjoyed, but it remains one of the quintessential urban experiences, and riding it is not without, shall we say, opportunities for personal growth. One night during freshman year at college I and my room-mate Mike (a different Mike) were riding the L, as the rapid transit system in Chicago is known, when a large middle-aged man across the aisle began addressing us in a loud but incomprehensible voice, owing to the fact that he was stone drunk. Growing agitated at his evident failure to communicate, the man restated his proposition several times in a progressively more belligerent tone. Still no go. Mike, a nice Jewish boy from suburban Philadelphia, looked completely terrified, and I felt a little anxious myself. On the third or fourth iteration, however, it dawned on me what the man was saying. “Right!” I shouted back. “Joe Louis! Joe Louis was the world's greatest fighter!” Delighted at having made himself understood, the man broke into a grin, shook our hands, and staggered off at the next stop.

I hasten to say this wasn't literally the case. So far as I knew, the kids in what was known in the neighborhood as the “bad building” behind us weren't affiliated with the Latin Kings street gang; they were freelance delinquents. Even that may be putting it too strongly. While staving in my neighbor's garage door with a truck couldn't be dismissed as youthful hijinks, experience suggested that many of the balls, toy cars, and like items that went missing were carried off by five-year-olds unclear on the concept of private property. I still wonder what happened to those four plastic lawn chairs, though.

One recognizes that with the funguslike spread of Starbucks to the suburbs this isn't as true as it used to be.

Some city people, it must be said, are in denial about this. No disrespect, but New Yorkers are by far the worst offenders. I talked once with a fellow who had moved from Chicago to Brooklyn for career purposes, and who was having a hard time making the adjustment. “People come up with the weirdest rationalizations for living here,” he said. “I wanted to buy a frying pan, and a guy told me, ‘Well, one thing about New York, you can always find a frying pan.' And I thought,
I should hope to God.
”

Although there is still a large retail establishment located in the building formerly occupied by Marshall Field's, the store itself, alas, is no more, having been sold to another company. I forget the name of it.

Crime and neglect by no means exhaust the list of urban perils. In 1992, the year before we bought the Barn House, gas utility workers in a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood called River West opened a valve on a pressure regulator they were overhauling, inadvertently sending a surge of high-pressure gas through the mains serving the surrounding neighborhood. Within a short time eighteen buildings had blown up, killing four people. Although it soon dawned on the gas workers that the howling sirens, explosions, fires, and chaos surrounding them were quite likely their fault, they didn't shut off the gas for forty minutes pending instructions from their superiors. A few months later, only a few blocks away, a disused freight tunnel passing beneath the Chicago River collapsed, allowing hundreds of millions of gallons of water to flood into the city's extensive freight-tunnel network, which had formerly been used for deliveries, ash removal, and so on, and connected with the basements of most larger pre-World War II buildings in downtown Chicago. The flood knocked out several electrical substations, caused losses of nearly $2 billion, and rendered a portion of the city's subway system unusable for three and a half weeks. An investigation determined that the tunnel roof had been damaged almost two years previously by a contractor driving pilings into the riverbed near a bridge. Although an inspector had detected the damage almost immediately and recognized the danger, the city bureaucracy didn't consider the matter urgent and the tunnel had gone unrepaired. My point isn't that the people in charge of the municipal infrastructure in Chicago are unusually incompetent—hey, we all make mistakes—but that when things go wrong in an urban context, it's not just those immediately involved who feel the heat.