The Barn House
Page 4
We found an equally inscrutable gesture in the Barn House—a small window on the rear wall of the closet under the front stairs. At first we thought this was evidence of another visit from the stained-glass-window salesman. But an architect who visited the house said no: The little pane provided natural illumination in the days when one couldn’t rely on electric lights.
One of the many curious features of the Barn House was its two staircases—not an unusual thing in itself, but these were side by side. There was the fancy front staircase already mentioned, plus a narrower rear stairway immediately adjacent, the latter rising the height of the building. My brother-in-law asked about it one day as we descended the narrow back steps. “The other one’s for the white people,” I said—not the most sensitive remark I ever made, but probably the truth. The Barn House had been divided into two distinct zones, one for the menials and one for the gentry. 14 Mrs. Carr no doubt spent much of her time in the parlor and dining room, retiring at night via the imposing front stairs to the master suite at the front of the second floor. The master suite was—well, luxurious probably overstates matters, but certainly comfortable, consisting of a bedroom with a fireplace plus an adjacent sitting room, the two connected by a pocket door. Meanwhile the lower classes confined themselves to the kitchen and pantry at the rear of the house, reaching the second floor (and if need be the basement or attic) via the servants’ stairs. The dining room and one of the bedrooms had separate entries for the lady of the house and her employees. There was a small room with no other obvious purpose at the back of the second floor; we guessed it had been the maid’s. If the maid had been discreet, Mrs. Carr might have gone without seeing her for days.4
Okay, so Mrs. Carr had probably not gone on to vote for Eugene Debs and the Social Democrats. At least she’d had the work on her house done properly. That was more than you could say about her successors.
Back to the front hall. It was by far the most striking interior feature of the house, dominated by an ornate staircase rising to the second floor. The staircase was of elaborate design, with a carved oak banister and newel posts and turned oak balusters. At some point prior to our arrival an occupant of the house had decided that the beauty of the staircase would be enhanced by painting the risers red and the balusters brown. This belief was without foundation. In all likelihood this same person—I refused to believe the house had been in the possession of two such bozos—had gone on to paint the oak flooring in the upstairs bedrooms red, white, and blue. The color scheme was less patriotic than it sounds; the red was a sort of maroon, the white more or less cream, and the blue somewhere between turquoise and teal.
To give the painter his due, however, he’d left us something to work with. That wasn’t the case in the second-floor hall, where the balustrade at the top of the front stairs was missing altogether. It appeared to have been broken off—one could see the place where the banister, a formidable piece of hardwood, had splintered. We imagined a bar fight with the brawlers crashing through the railing; they must have been the size of sumo wrestlers. The Sillses, finding the railing missing at the time they acquired the house, had repaired the damage with construction two-by-fours pending the day when they could do the job right. That day hadn’t dawned during their tenure; now it was up to us.
Some parts of the house had deteriorated simply because of age. Overlooking the front staircase was a tall nine-paneled window, the top six panels of which, arranged three wide by two high, used an unusual sort of decorative glass called bottle glass. Each panel consisted of glass circles, thickened in the center and similar in size and appearance to the bottom of a wine bottle, arranged in a four-by-four grid. In description it sounds a little weird, but I assure you it was a pretty thing to see, or at any rate had been in 1891. Now the glass was grimy and sagging—the panels would need to be cleaned and releaded.
The abundance of such details brought to mind an obvious question: What was this house doing here? It wasn’t a typical city house. It was incongruously large, for one thing. Its fine finishes, what was left of them, suggested it had been designed for an upper-middle-class suburb. Yet here it was in a thoroughly urban section of the north side.
The answer became apparent on further study of the historic-district documents at the public library. I realized that the house’s history of great schemes come to naught had begun with Mrs. Carr.
The Barn House, it turned out, hadn’t been intended as a city house. The subdivision in which it had been built was originally part of a suburb called Lake View. The lots had been platted out and offered for sale in the 1880s. The promoters of the area were from a suburban community a little farther out called Ravenswood, and they called the new subdivision Southeast Ravenswood. They meant to distinguish the area from the city, the border of which was then a couple miles away. The lots were bigger—50 by 165 feet, compared to the standard 25-by-125-foot city lot—and the streets were wider. Mrs. Carr, I gathered, had bought one of the lots and built her house.
But the development had flopped. An 1894 fire-insurance map showed the buildings on each block; of twenty-one lots on our block at the time, there were buildings on only nine. (At the rear of the Barn House, I was interested to note, there had been a stable and what I guessed was an outhouse.) Several possible reasons for the slow progress suggested themselves, the most obvious being the financial panic that swept the country in 1893. But that explanation seemed inadequate. Other ventures launched in the same era—for example, the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where my parents lived and Frank Lloyd Wright had built his early houses—had been mostly built up within a few years. Something else explained what had gone wrong in Southeast Ravenswood, and after some thought I decided I knew what it was: It had become urban.
That requires some explanation. However problematic urban life may seem at times now, 125 years ago it completely sucked. Cities as we know them today were sometimes exciting but more frequently terrifying novelties during the latter nineteenth century. In 1850, only three cities in the world had had populations greater than 1 million—London, Paris, and Peking. In 1900, after fifty years of chaotic but more or less continuous economic expansion throughout Europe and North America, the number of million-plus cities had risen to sixteen, one of which, Chicago, had been a sodden outpost of thirty thousand in 1850.
The shantytowns of the developing world today have nothing on the big cities of a century ago for squalor. In 1890, a year before construction of the Barn House, Jacob Riis had published How the Other Half Lives, a muckraking account of conditions in the tenements of New York. Riis reported, among other astonishing facts, that impoverished Jewish immigrants were packed into portions of the Lower East Side at a density of 330,000 per square mile, by far the highest rate of any city in the world; that a Bohemian cigar maker, living and working in a tenement owned by his employer, might expect to work seventeen hours a day, seven days a week during the busy summer season, at a piecework wage averaging six and a half cents per hour (less in the winter); that more than twelve thousand cast-off children, mostly employed as newsboys, bootblacks, and the like, lived in lodging houses operated by the Children’s Aid Society; and that in one neighborhood during a cholera epidemic some years previously (presumably Riis refers to the outbreaks occurring in the years 1865-73), the poor had died at a rate of 195 per 1,000, which approached that of the medieval plague years.15
In 1894, William Stead, an English preacher and reformer, published If Christ Came to Chicago! It was somewhat derivative of Riis’s book in terms of subject matter, describing as it did the only slightly less appalling state of the lower classes of Chicago, but Riis had nothing on Stead for style. Sample: “For the [police] station is the central cesspool whither drain the poisonous drippings of the city which has become the cloaca maxima of the world.” Shorn of flourishes, however, Stead’s message was much the same: The urban poor live in such wretchedness as you, gentle reader, can scarcely dream.
Some middle-class reformers were repelled as
much by the foreignness of city dwellers as by their poverty. Riis, for one, had little good to say about Italians (“content to live in a pigsty”), Chinese (“a constant and terrible menace to society”), or the inhabitants of “Jewtown” (“money is their God”). Stead, notwithstanding his rhetorical excesses, was more tolerant, writing sympathetically about the enterprising rogues who served as precinct captains in the Chicago political machine, which he felt functioned as a sort of social services agency, at least for those who voted the right way. On the whole, however, the genteel view of urban life during this period can be characterized as: Ooh, ick.
The answer, in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth, was the suburbs. In 1886, the architect Daniel Burnham, the indefatigable urban booster whose landmark Plan of Chicago would be published in 1909, moved his family from the city’s south side to the affluent suburb of Evanston, snootily asserting that he could “no longer bear to have my children run in the streets of Chicago.” Evanston had been founded as an independent town (it had grown up around Northwestern University), but after the Civil War real estate developers, recognizing a market when they saw one, began building bedroom suburbs specifically aimed at businessmen commuting to downtown. One of the more influential was Riverside, Illinois, southwest of Chicago. Laid out between 1868 and 1871, Riverside had several things going for it: (a) It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had earlier designed Central Park in Manhattan and in Riverside introduced the curving street pattern (in contrast to the standard nineteenth-century gridiron) that eighty years later became standard suburban practice; (b) it was built around a station on a commuter railroad that took workers to and from their jobs in the city; and (c) it was far enough out to be safe from the encroaching megalopolis.
Point (c) was where the developers of Southeast Ravenswood had screwed up. (They neglected point (a), too, but that was less crucial.) They had built their subdivision too close in, failing to take account of the likelihood of annexation.
Although the fact is little remembered today, all three U.S. cities that reached the 1 million mark by 1900—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—got that way largely through annexation. Philadelphia had been first, annexing the surrounding county in 1854 and increasing its land area by 2,000 percent. Chicago was next—in 1889, wanting to bulk up for the World’s Columbian Exposition then four years away, the city annexed 120 square miles of hinterland and quadrupled its area. Last up was New York, then consisting solely of Manhattan, which merged with the independent city of Brooklyn and what became the boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island in 1898-99, giving the city a population of more than 3 million, after London the largest in the world.16
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.17
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.18 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.