The Barn House (6 page)

Annexation had obvious benefits for Chicago, but was perhaps less advantageous for Southeast Ravenswood. Once it had been a suburb, with all that that implies. After 1889, it was just another neighborhood in Chicago.

Real estate development in Southeast Ravenswood didn't flounder indefinitely. It was given a boost by the extension of the L to the community in 1907. But where before most of the development had been suburban in character—frame houses on large lots—now it was urban. Developers divided some lots and constructed Siamese two-flats—mirror-image pairs of brick apartment buildings having a common wall. Other lots were consolidated and large blocks of flats erected.

The result was a jumble, neither urban nor suburban in character. The magnificent nine-paned window on Mrs. Carr's entry stair had once overlooked a meadow; now it looked out on the brick wall of the neighboring two-flat eight feet away. The backyard and its stable stood in the shadow of a massive three-story apartment building that occupied a good portion of the frontage on the next street over.
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You see the problem. Here was a house that had been conceived of, perhaps naively, as a country residence, with servants and lavish appointments. Thirty years later it was obsolete, built for a suburb that had never materialized in a world that was long gone. However many people may have had servants in 1891, it's a good bet no one in the Barn House's neighborhood, or for that matter most urban neighborhoods, had them in 1920. Mrs. Carr, one may reasonably conjecture, had ridden in a horse-drawn carriage; her neighbors thirty years later rode streetcars and L trains. Few now had sitting rooms and fireplaces; they lived in efficiency apartments with kitchenettes. Wealthy people still lived in big houses—in Chicago they gravitated to a string of lakeside suburbs called the North Shore, which started out rich and stayed that way. But not here.

Whoever owned the Barn House at this point—one presumes it was no longer Mrs. Carr—apparently decided to bow to the inevitable. In 1926, the building had been converted to a two-flat. (We deduced the date from old newspapers—the basement ceiling had been plastered to comply with a code requirement for fireproof barriers between floors of multiunit dwellings, and the newspaper had been stuffed behind the lath.) An additional kitchen had been installed on the second floor in the likely maid's room. Perhaps during the Depression and certainly by World War II, the building had been further (and illegally) divided into as many as seven apartments, most consisting of a single room with its own sink, dead bolt on the door, and possibly telephone and doorbell—the basement was a rats' nest of wires. We heard about crazy Walter who lived in the parlor, and a family that spent the war living in the front bedroom suite. Someone residing in the dining room had evidently owned a dog that was in the habit of begging to be let in; it had gouged deep scratches in Mrs. Carr's door.

Things had perked up briefly following World War II. A woman named Marge stopped by one day to tell us she had lived in the house as a child in the 1950s. Her family had shared the place with boarders at first, but by the time she left, around 1970, the house had reverted to single-family use. That suggests prosperity. The neighborhood as a whole saw a sizable influx of Hispanic immigrants, who moved into the big apartment buildings on the busy streets starting in the 1960s. But the older residents on the side streets for the most part stayed put.

Some may have had occasion to regret it. The neighbors told lurid tales, which possibly were exaggerated, but it seems safe to say that during the 1970s the community became, if not a slum, certainly a little raffish. Crime by all accounts got significantly worse. Late in the decade, we were told, a notorious Mexican drug family had established a sales operation in the “bad building” behind the Barn House; how long this remained in business we weren't able to ascertain, but drugs were available on a drive-up basis well into the 1980s. A drug kingpin, it was claimed, had lived in half of a four-flat across the street; the owner had sawn out much of the floor separating the upper and lower units, presumably in the interest of creating a dramatic architectural effect; one can easily imagine drugs having played a role in this process, if only as a source of inspiration, but whether the owner sold them can't be said to have been conclusively shown.

I was told gangs dominated the high school a block away, which was easy enough to believe, since as far as I knew gangs at the time dominated pretty much every city high school. Graffiti became noticeably more prevalent, as did vandalism, break-ins, robbery, shootings, and other common features of late-twentieth-century urban life. A woman was said to have set up shop as a hooker in an apartment building across the street; on inquiry I found that, neighborhood gossip notwithstanding, her occupation hadn't been definitely established, and some were of the opinion that she'd merely been friendly, taking home a succession of scuzzy male companions, one of the scuzzier of whom shot up the lobby on one occasion and the last of whom (I'm not sure if it was the same guy) had stabbed her seventeen times. In 1986, a few years after the murder at Mike's house, a teenage boy living across the street had been accosted a few blocks from home by gang members demanding his bicycle. When he refused to surrender it they shot him; he collapsed on some porch steps and died. That was the version Mike told in his newspaper account of the incident, anyhow. Another was that the boy had been selling drugs in a rival gang's territory and was killed in retaliation.

I make no claim that all this was dramatically worse than any other city neighborhood experienced at the time—far from it. In some neighborhoods on the south side, I knew from my brief stint as a wire service reporter, you could get an equivalent amount of action in a long weekend. But it was a lot for the north side—certainly enough to make one think:
You know, the suburbs don't sound so bad
. But the residents hadn't done what was arguably the smart thing and fled. Instead they'd organized a community patrol, which consisted of people driving around after dark with CB radios scouting for crime. Mike had refused to cooperate with what he considered vigilantes. That was putting matters a little strongly, I felt, but it had been a rough era. Mike told us about the previous owner of his house, whom he knew as Emil the Turk. Emil had been accustomed to beating his wife. On one such occasion the wife had called the police. The police arrived; Emil slipped them fifty dollars; they turned around and left. Emil picked up with his wife where he'd left off.

Our neighbor Ned told me the police had visited him one day after he'd mistakenly tripped the burglar alarm. The policemen admired the woodwork in his house and told him he was lucky so much of it was still there—in years past the local alderman had sent them around to strip the finery out of unoccupied old houses.
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Ned himself had had to travel to Wisconsin to buy back a beveled-glass window that a previous owner of his house had carted off in 1947.

The Barn House hadn't been plundered in this way, merely abused. Virtually every fine thing in it had been damaged or destroyed through carelessness or neglect. At some point, probably during the two-flat conversion of 1926, someone had gone around the basement bricking up the “joist ends”—the space between the top of the foundation wall and the flooring immediately above. The bricks were meant to be a fire-stop. But the bricklayer had used a type of mortar that expanded upon drying, pressing up on the floorboards above and causing the finished flooring around the perimeter of the rooms on the first floor to buckle. The dining room floor had been finished in oak veneer, with a parquet border of complex design. The buckling of the planking beneath had ruined it.

At every hand one saw signs of stopgap repairs and renovations done on the cheap. The worst example was the third floor. Originally, we guessed, the attic had been unfinished, but in the early 1930s a fire had burned through the roof, and whoever rebuilt it decided to convert the attic to living space. The original attic apparently hadn't had a lot of headroom, so the remodeler provided more by adding a long dormer along the front of the house, parallel to the street. Where the dormer intercepted the projecting bay, the remodeler had built the bay walls up higher, then topped them off with an awkward roof. To complete the job, the owner sawed off the eave running along the front of the house, which had been orphaned when the transept roof was raised.
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The result looked completely stupid. A three-year-old with a crayon could have produced a more attractive design. But the third floor was also one of the reasons we'd bought the house.
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I worked at home; I needed an office. The bay windows in the attic offered beguiling views up and down the tree-lined street. A big maple stood in the front yard; though the leaves had long since fallen on the day we first saw it, the branches extended close to the windows. I guessed that having an office there would be like working in a tree house. But the job had been hopelessly botched—we'd have to reconstruct much of the front of the house, to say nothing of the rest of the building. Here was a home that had been built by naïfs and wrecked by knuckleheads. Restoring it wasn't a job we could just turn over to a contractor. We'd need an architect.

M
any people agonize over the choice of architects. Not us. I knew a number of architects through my work; we spoke with three. Stuart designed jewel-box renovations, photographs of which appeared in national magazines; his work was exquisite, but a kitchen alone could cost $60,000.
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Pete specialized in low-income housing; he did clever things with drywall and other inexpensive materials, but we were looking for something a little more pretentious. We settled on Howard. He was a big man; a mutual friend had described him as having “no physical fear,” an assessment that was hard to argue with—I'd once braced myself in the back seat of Howard's car as he barreled at speed through a service station to dodge a traffic light. Such stunts commended Howard to me now. Manic bravery normally wasn't a quality one looked for in architects, but with the Barn House it couldn't hurt.

Howard was a pretty fair architect, too, concentrating on projects in a traditional vein. His firm was housed in a stately old building downtown that I was surprised to learn had originally been an automobile showroom—auto showroom design has come down a jot since they built this palace. Now it was a fine arts building full of piano tuners and violin teachers, with high ceilings, grand staircases, and big windows. I found all this comforting, and presumably from Howard's standpoint that was the idea. If one's would-be clients discover their prospective architect's atelier is in a strip mall next to a Dunkin' Donuts, they start having second thoughts.

Howard spent a morning inspecting the Barn House with Mary and me, pointing out features of interest. One of the first he noticed as soon as we walked in the door. The floor in the front hall was finished in a fine-grained wood of a rich red color that we didn't recognize. Howard informed us it was heart pine, cut from the heartwood of virgin timber.

I'd never heard of heart pine before, and am not entirely certain I've got things straight now, but here's the story as best I can piece it together: Heart pine came from a tall, straight species called longleaf pine, which grew in a vast continuous band along the southeastern U.S. coast. Longleaf pine was slow-growing under the best of circumstances, but in the virgin forest longleaf saplings grew slower still due to competition for resources beneath the dense tree cover—I've heard of a tree three hundred years old that was less than a foot thick. As a result, annual tree rings and thus the grain were close-spaced and the wood was, for pine, unusually heavy—a board weighed as much as oak, and served equally well as flooring. By the early twentieth century the original stand of longleaf pine, some seventy million acres, had almost all been cut down. If you want heart pine now—it does make a handsome floor—you have to deal with a salvager, who ransacks old buildings destined for the wreckers or sends divers to the bottoms of rivers or lakes looking for logs sunk during nineteenth-century lumbering operations. Salvaged heart pine costs two to three times the price of new hardwood, which itself isn't cheap.
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I was fascinated to find such stuff in my house. It was like discovering the original owners had dined on buffalo tongue or hunted passenger pigeons. There was only one problem. Someone had sawn two large rectangular holes in the heart pine floor to install heating grates, which had long since been removed. One hole had been patched with maple, the other with construction pine. Neither came anywhere close to matching the original. There was surely a way to repair the holes less conspicuously; we just needed to figure out what it was.

Howard found another noteworthy item in the basement, where radiator pipes hung from the ceiling. They were wrapped in insulating material that in cross section looked like corrugated cardboard.

“Asbestos,” he informed us. We'd need to hire a special contractor to haul it out, in all likelihood at exorbitant expense.

That was pretty much how the whole tour went—one happy discovery to two or three dismaying ones. Howard was more circumspect than others to whom we'd shown the house, many of whom had stared with their jaws slack. But the thought undoubtedly crossed his mind:
Thank God this isn't mine.

Afterward we sat down for coffee on the red stools in the diner down the street. The day was cold and gray. Howard was uncharacteristically quiet. “The house has good bones,” he said finally. He was referring to the method used to construct it, known as balloon framing. Balloon framing is commonly understood now to mean any kind of lightweight stick framing, but in fact it was a particular type of wood construction in which the exterior structural members rose the height of the building. When the joists and rafters were added you had a sort of cartoon outline of a house—a balloon, I suppose—to which everything else was then appended. In the case of the Barn House, the exterior studs were two-by-sixes twenty-seven feet tall, while the floor joists were massive two-by-tens twenty-five feet long. The enormous boards were another product of the virgin forest, unobtainable now except through special order. The house was a relic of a departed era.