The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  Being the electrician gave one a certain basic life confidence. On one occasion while wiring my parents’ house I was trying to hook up two lights in different locations that were to be operated by the same switch. Not knowing any better, and thinking I might economize on wire, I connected the lights in series rather than in parallel. When I flipped the switch, the lights shone at half intensity. I puzzled for a moment, realized my mistake—I’d had this problem with Remco Thinking Boys’ Toys once—then corrected the wiring. When I flipped the switch again, the lights shone at normal intensity.

  My father, who’d been observing this procedure, asked me what I’d done. I explained. He was mystified. I provided a more detailed explanation using my stubby pencil on a scrap of gypsum board. He still didn’t get it. I hammered away at the subject for a good twenty minutes. At length my father leaned back and said with a resigned expression, “Well, at least you understand it.”2

  You can appreciate the position this puts one in. I was just short of fifteen years old. Like all adolescents I affected to believe my parents were morons while secretly clinging to the belief that if things really went off the rails I could get my dad to put things right. Now that pleasant sense of security had been swept away. I was in effect being told: It’s all up to you, schmuck. At some point in life everyone comes to such a realization. Prior to it he is a child; afterward, whatever profound mental, physical, and moral deficiencies he may have—I’m thinking of my brother here—he’s an adult.

  So it was with me. I spent the rest of the summer wiring the house and can say with some assurance that everyone was satisfied with the result, which is to say the lights all operated and the house didn’t burn down, to my mind the acid test of quality electrical work. To be sure, I made my share of mistakes, some of which didn’t become apparent until later. There was the business of the soffit lights3 in the kitchen, for example, where, having packed the maximum number of conductors into a conduit run and not having any more wire anyway, I decided to hook a switch into the neutral side of a circuit. The lights seemed to work fine and I considered the project a job well done till some years later, when I got an anxious call from my mother: There was something wrong with the soffit lights. It wasn’t that she couldn’t turn them on; she couldn’t turn them off. They were fluorescent lights, you see, and one of the ballasts had melted and shorted to the frame. Normally this failure would have tripped the circuit breaker, but, owing to the inopportune siting of the switch, it instead provided an alternative path to ground for the balance of the lights on the line.

  Obvious, no?4 It took me a couple minutes, too. I was able to repair things for the time being, but—I tell you this truly—for the ensuing thirty-one years it bothered me that someday long after my time the ballast would fail again, the lights wouldn’t shut off, and some electrician called in to deal with the mess would think: What horse’s ass did this? Which is why one day at age forty-six, with my own house far from finished, I went out to my parents’ home with several spools of wire and, while my flabbergasted family watched (I had timed this to coincide with a reunion), pulled all the wiring out of the kitchen ceiling, ran new, and hooked up the lights correctly, thereby, in my view, getting right with God at last.

  You may think I digress. Not so. I speak for a class of person that is little heralded in this day and age—the class that says: I will get this right or die. And for another class also, to a considerable extent coinciding with the first, that says: It’s all up to me, and (I suppose this class is somewhat larger, since it includes Frank Sinatra): I’m going to do it my way. It’s largely these people who have rebuilt cities in our time, and if they recognize themselves in this book, the effort will have been well spent.

  That brings me to a second point I want to address before taking up my story. It wasn’t enough for me to fix up an old house; I wanted to fix up an old house in the city. I’m not sure exactly when or why I fastened on this idea. My family’s first home had been in the city, but my brothers and sisters had lived there without in consequence forming the opinion that they needed to reside in cities ever after. Just the opposite—the city was something they were happy to leave behind. I was different. I was a city guy.

  It may be presumptuous to say so, but it seems to me that being a city guy is a little like being gay. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about it; it’s just what you are. You may try to live in the suburbs like other people, and for a time you may succeed. But one day your primal impulses will reassert themselves, and you’ll find yourself prowling the streets looking for Italian beef or cheese steaks5 or some other low commodity; or riding the subway doing the crossword (or I suppose nowadays the sudoku) puzzle;6 or sitting at a rickety café table adjacent to whatever grand promenade your town may have, ostensibly reading the newspaper while surreptitiously checking out the boulevardiers; or bicycling along the waterfront on a warm summer evening with the lake (ocean, river, whatever) on one side, purple clouds coiling behind the tall buildings on the other, and the human pageant all around; and you’ll think: Who am I trying to kid? I’m a city guy. This is where I live.

  A city guy doesn’t live in the city because he has to, or because it’s more convenient, or because all his buddies live there, or because the rent is cheaper, or because he has a better chance of getting laid, although all of these things may be true, rent by and large being the exception. He lives there because it’s where he’s happiest.

  A city guy isn’t necessarily smarter or hipper or more virtuous or better-looking than suburban people, not that it would take much. He’s merely, shall we say, a little less risk-averse.

  The city guy isn’t necessarily male, although it must be said there are significant attitudinal differences between male and female city folk. The city girl worries about the children. The city boy figures they’re small and quick and can dodge the bullets.

  The city guy has an unshakable optimism. Once I telephoned a couple I knew to get some comments for a magazine article I was writing about the neighborhood they were living in, a gentrifying but not then gentrified section of Chicago called Bucktown. The wife wasn’t sold on it. “Last year there was a drive-by shooting,” she fretted. Her husband, whom I spoke to separately, had more of a city-guy take on the situation. “It’s been a year since we had a drive-by shooting,” he said.

  City people turned up in unexpected quarters. When our children were small we hired a young woman from Switzerland to help care for them. Her name was Petra. She had been raised on a farm near a tiny village outside Lucerne. Made no difference. Upon moving in with us she discovered she was a city person and spent most of her spare time out on the town. After she had been with us a while she accompanied us on a vacation to my in-laws’ in Tennessee. Petra wasn’t impressed with the Smoky Mountains—she had lived in the Alps. She was a good sport during the trip, but you could tell she was bored. Heading home at last, we turned off the interstate at the first city exit past the steel mills, wound through a park past a museum, then drove up Lake Shore Drive. The weather was cool—May in Chicago can be like that—but there were boats on the lake and joggers, bicyclists, and picnickers in the park, and ahead of us in the blue haze you could see the tall buildings downtown. As soon as all this came into view Petra brightened noticeably—it’s little exaggeration to say she glowed. She was far from her native land; she’d lived in the city for just eight months. But she was home.

  The city guy is accustomed to being thought a little odd, an impression he is (well, I was) happy to encourage. Once while I was at a business dinner a fellow at my table was holding forth on the glories of the house he owned in, I think, rural Indiana. “I’m surrounded on three sides by forest!” he exclaimed. I leaned over to the woman next to me, another city dweller, and stage-whispered, “I’m surrounded on three sides by the Latin Kings.”6 The woman laughed. The suburbanites at the table stared. Other city folk may form their own judgments, but I thought: Nicely done.

  Non-city people are often baffled
by the desire to live in the city and bring up numerous objections to it. In the suburbs, they say, crime is lower; the schools better; the gasoline (and a great many other goods and services) cheaper; the shopping opportunities greater (assuming your idea of shopping is going to Wal-Mart); the houses bigger and generally, although this varies with the neighborhood, less costly on a square-foot basis; the streets wider; the parking easier; the air cleaner; the park space more abundant; the traffic less congested; the neighborhood quieter; the locals less likely to have (or deserve) criminal records; the government bureaucracy more responsive; the public services better; the police politer; the incidence of drive-by shootings lower; the potholes fewer; the graffiti less prevalent; the public utilities in better repair.

  “Perhaps so,” the city guy will concede grudgingly. “But the city has better coffee.”7 The city guy isn’t about to get drawn into a discussion of practicalities, because he knows that the practical advantages of urban life make for a short list. Better bus service, which to a suburbanite is like boasting that you’ve got cleaner jails. More restaurants, in some cities anyway. Easier access to drugs, and we’re not talking about the kind sold at Walgreens. You see my point.8

  The city guy knows that if he can nudge the discussion into intangibles, things even up a bit. “Cities are dirty fun,” my non-city-guy brother Bob once acknowledged. Bob being Bob, I imagine he was thinking of how he and Kevin McGuire used to throw flaming model airplanes off the back of the third-floor porch. But surely his comment applies in a more general sense: Cities are entertaining.

  One December when I was very young, probably no more than four or five, my mother took Bob and me downtown to go Christmas shopping. Chicagoans often reminisce about looking in the display windows of the Marshall Field’s department store,9 which were elaborately decorated for the holidays. I suppose we did that, but it’s not what I remember. Rather, it was the return trip home on the bus. It was evening; the weather was cold; the bus was crowded. Somehow my mother got a seat for us. She was a gregarious woman who could get into a twenty-minute conversation with a wrong number; the other passengers were in good spirits. Soon a general discussion was under way. The other passengers began fussing over my brother and me. A stout man in a heavy coat asked us in a conspiratorial tone: Want to see something? Of course we did. He pulled out a handkerchief, stuck it in his left ear, fished for a moment, then pulled it out of his right. My brother and I watched with our mouths open. The crowd laughed and applauded. The idea formed in my mind: A city was a place where strangers would take it upon themselves to amuse you. Long afterward I realized, as all city dwellers eventually do, that we’d been not so much spectators as the show. But the seed of city-guyness had been well planted.

  It’s the rare non-city guy who’s completely immune to the attractions of urban life. I once lived in an apartment building that stood beside the Chicago River. One day I had my family over for dinner on the rooftop deck. One could hear the clanking of painters on cleats as boats tugged against their moorings in the marina below. Other craft cruised up and down the waterway; waves splashed against the pilings in their wakes. A few blocks away the towers of the city glinted in the sunset. You would have had to be in a coma to be oblivious to the charm of such a scene. My brother-in-law Dave, a suburbanite so committed he refused to allow me to lock the car doors when I accompanied him to a suburban strip mall, gazed around, drink in hand. “I have to admit,” he said. “The river. The boats. The buildings. This is cool.”

  Just so. Cities were cool. Things happened in them that weren’t likely to happen anywhere else. I remember an event that occurred when Jane Byrne was mayor of Chicago during the early 1980s. Ms. Byrne’s tenure isn’t now remembered as one of the bright spots of Chicago history, but she had a sort of bread-and-circuses approach to municipal administration that, while probably unhealthy as a regular thing, could be entertaining in small doses. One year she or someone in her administration decided that there should be fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Official fireworks displays in Chicago are normally held on the lakefront, where there’s plenty of room. This time, through some decision-making process the details of which are mercifully obscure, it was determined that the fireworks should be held downtown, near the Michigan Avenue bridge, which crosses the Chicago River. The Chicago River isn’t especially wide, and is lined with tall buildings. The reader can guess what a fireworks display in such a confined space was like. A cherry bomb in a garbage can gives a pretty close approximation.

  Mary and I went to see the celebration. It was the most spectacular display of pyrotechnics I ever expect to witness not involving an act of war. Rockets bounced off buildings. Bursting incendiaries filled one’s entire field of vision. Bits of scorched paper rained down; the air was filled with acrid smoke. Planets have surely been spawned with less noise.

  It lasted fifteen minutes, more or less. Our reaction, and I venture to say I speak for everyone in attendance, could be summarized as: holy shit. We stumbled home completely shell-shocked. The event was never held again. Ms. Byrne wasn’t reelected for reasons unrelated to fireworks—New Year’s Eve fireworks, anyway. But I bet even now there are nights when she stares out her apartment window at the city lights and thinks: Let’s see those bastards in the suburbs top that.

  So okay, life in the city had its points. One still faced the question of the vantage from which best to enjoy it. Apartments were all very well when you were in your twenties. At a certain stage of life, however—city dwellers were no different from suburbanites in this respect—one entertained thoughts of a house. Thus do we arrive at the subject of this book.

  City guys tend to like old houses, which is good, because in the city that’s mostly what there are. In years past the city guy was obliged to become a rehabber whether he wanted to or not, mainly because the city houses he could afford to buy were in such a dilapidated state that emergency repairs were often required to achieve basic livability. (In some ways things aren’t so different now, but that’s a topic we’ll explore in greater depth later.)

  Not every city guy likes to fix up old houses, and not everyone who fixes up old houses is a city guy, but the two tend to go hand in hand. To the city guy, or at least a large subclass of city guys—and here I include myself—the city is an old house writ large. Give him a house or an old neighborhood, and his first thought is: This will be really nice when it gets fixed up. Never mind that right now it looked like Dogpatch. One took the long view.

  Fixing up an old house in the city is nothing like fixing up an old house anywhere else. It’s not that the process of construction is so much different. In the city as in the suburbs, one uses nails, hassles with contractors, and gasps at how much faucets cost. It’s true that the scale of an urban project is often greater, since city houses are so frequently neglected; you get used to working in close quarters and worrying about things like subsidence and equipment clearances and where you’re going to park the Dumpster.

  The more important difference, however, is that the city guy working on an old house must contend with, how shall I say, sociological considerations, by which I mean everything from rats in the alley to the local crime rate.10 A suburbanite faced with such problems has a relatively easy out—move. For a city guy, however, living in the city is the point. It’s not enough, therefore, to fix up the house; sometimes you have to fix up the neighborhood, too.

  In pursuit of that goal the city guy will endure extraordinary hardships. About the time we began work on the Barn House, I interviewed a couple who lived on the south side of Chicago for a magazine story. James was black; Diane was white; they had one child. They were both teachers. They lived in an area called North Kenwood/Oakland. Kenwood had once been one of the wealthiest sections of the city—Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, had built a mansion there in the 1920s. Starting in the late 1940s, black people began moving in and the neighborhood became poorer. The University of Chicago, which was close by, decided that it would try to
shore up the portion of Kenwood nearer to the campus through interventions of various kinds (some of which generated considerable controversy). But it lacked the resources to preserve everything, and North Kenwood was left to fend for itself.

  The dividing line between the two halves of the community had been 47th Street. Forty years later the difference between the two sections was immediately apparent. The neighborhood south of 47th was intact and the buildings were in good repair; north of 47th there were vacant lots, which became more numerous the farther north you went.

  James and Diane’s house (which was actually half of a duplex) was at 40th Street. It was a formidable-looking edifice, with a Romanesque masonry façade, eight fireplaces, an ornate full-height mirror in the parlor, and oak wainscoting and other fancy woodwork throughout.

  It was also one of the few remaining structures on the block. The couple had seen many of the others demolished. A few doors up the street, for example, there had been a six-flat apartment building owned by an old woman. She hadn’t been able to maintain it and her tenants moved out. When she was hospitalized, scavengers moved in to pilfer the bricks.11 Eventually so many bricks were removed that the rear of the building collapsed. A wrecking crew had to be called in to finish the job.