by Ed Zotti
So it went. A little more for concrete work. A lot more for carpentry—a new iteration of the drawings indicated much more framing than originally envisioned. A little more for roofing; I can’t remember why. Eddie shaved his contractor’s markup. It helped a little, but not enough. By the time we were done, the price of the job had ballooned to more than $284,000.
The obvious and for practical purposes only solution was for me to do a lot of the work myself. I’d always planned on doing some work, because I enjoyed it; now I’d do so because I had to. The electrical and heating systems—they were my problem now. Other work I decided to subcontract myself, to save the contractor’s markup—plumbing, air-conditioning. Some work we omitted altogether. Woodwork refinishing, for example—some other time.
We got the price down to $213,000—not an extravagant sum, given the breadth of the work required, but it was a little deceptive. To cite one obvious difficulty, while I was a fair electrician, I didn’t know jack about heating. Worse—this was the part I hadn’t explained in detail to the bank—even after all the money in the budget was spent, the house still wouldn’t be done. Woodwork refinishing was a case in point. An unwary loan officer might consider this task a dispensable luxury—who cares if the woodwork was a little scuffed up? But the truth was, the old woodwork we’d piled in the basement was more than scuffed up; it was probably wrecked—in the fever of demolition the boys had shown a little too much zeal. While I hadn’t ruled out the possibility of reusing some of what we’d salvaged, chances were we’d need to install new. Remilling woodwork to match the opulent original would be an expensive project—more than 5,000 feet of oak and poplar stock worked into four different shapes using custom-made knives. We could use cheap stock moldings, of course (though I cringed at the thought), but even that would cost thousands of dollars I didn’t have and had no immediate prospect of getting. Some work had never been on the bid sheet—painting and decorating, chimney relining. Rebuilding the fireplaces. Repairing the dining room floor. Finishing the third floor, where my office was to go. All required. All unbudgeted.
But it was too late now. Interior demolition was now well advanced. Decrepit as the house had been when we bought it, it was now completely uninhabitable. The project was fairly launched; we wouldn’t come up for air for another three years.
8
I was by now fairly desperate to get the work under way, but one obstacle remained. We still faced the delicate matter of getting a building permit.
Some controversy attends the question of when a building permit is required. To hear some tell it, you’re supposed to get a permit every time you change a lightbulb. That wasn’t the attitude in Chicago, where the common view was that you should never get a permit if you could possibly avoid it. I’d known people who had built major additions entirely on the sly. Partly that simply reflected the instinctive distrust of authority in a working-man’s town—obtaining a permit wasn’t going to materially advance your project; it merely gave someone the opportunity to tell you to stop, or that you were doing it all wrong. Chicago being Chicago, it also gave someone an opportunity to put his hand in your pocket.
There was also the matter of the building code. Chicago—I imagine this is true of many older large cities—didn’t use the uniform national building code that smaller municipalities typically adopt. Rather, it enforced a code of its own devising, the peculiarities of which were legend. For example, for years the city had demanded that the water supply in every building be connected to the feed from the street main using something known as a wiped lead joint. It’s unnecessary to explain what such a joint was other than to say it required copious amounts of the heavy metal lead. Lead in drinking water causes mental retardation. Many who’ve had dealings in Chicago will find a lot explained right there. Eventually the lead-joint requirement had been rescinded, but a great many other oddities remained, with some new ones added.
There was the matter of purple primer, for instance. The city had decided to permit the use of drainpipe made of polyvinylchloride, commonly known as PVC. The joints in PVC pipes were secured with glue. Before daubing on the glue it was necessary to apply primer, which cleaned and softened the parts to be joined. So far so good. The twist in Chicago was that the primer had to have purple dye in it.50 This enabled building inspectors to determine that you had in fact used primer, as opposed to spit or taco sauce or (I suppose this was the real fear) nothing, thereby producing a substandard joint and subjecting posterity to the embarrassing possibility that the waste line on the upstairs toilet would give out immediately following the arrival of someone’s prom date. I appreciated the thought, but there were manifestly so many thousands of other things that a creative plumber could screw up that I wondered why anyone would single out primer. One far greater risk, for example, was that the plumber would saw through all the floor joists to accommodate horizontal pipe runs, something that happened constantly and which in terms of potential seriousness was comparable to removing the home owner’s spinal column. I speak from experience; someone had done it in my house, causing Bob the engineer to come as close as I ever saw him to betraying agitation.51
The code had a great many other problematic clauses, of which I can give only a sample. All house-current wiring had to be placed in ductile metal conduit. I’d spent thirty years learning to bend pipe and had no personal objection to it—on the contrary, I thought it was a worthwhile investment. There had been multiple safety-related changes in wire manufacture in my lifetime—cloth-and-rubber insulation had given way to the more durable plastic TW; TW to the more heat-resistant THHN or THWN; copper wire to aluminum and back to copper when aluminum proved more prone to fires. In a house without conduit you had to chop holes in the walls to replace the wiring, or more likely just live with the danger; with conduit you merely pulled the old wire out of the conduit and ran new. All that having been said, virtually every other habitable place on earth permitted armored or plastic-sheathed cable in residential service, which was much cheaper to install.
The drain line for a dishwasher had to have a one-inch “air gap,” to preclude what in my opinion was a somewhat unlikely scenario involving the siphoning of contaminated water. The dishwasher also had to have a cutoff switch located nearby, in case the home owner wished to repair the wiring but couldn’t find the fuse box.
Oh, and grease traps. Grease traps in most of the world had gone out with chrome dinette sets, but the code in Chicago still required them, even though if used with a garbage disposal they’d rapidly fill with odious slop. Professional home builders in Chicago had adopted the tactic of installing a grease trap until the plumbing inspector had signed off on the job, whereupon the trap was removed and saved until needed again. I got the impression from plumbers that there were only a couple dozen extant grease traps in Chicago, which had been making the rounds from job site to job site since 1958.
In light of all this, obtaining a building permit struck some as foolish. But I intended to get one anyway, for two reasons, one obvious and the other possibly not. The obvious reason was that we had a Dumpster in the driveway and were about to tear off the front porch, the back of the house, the siding, and a good portion of the roof. For a period of several months the building would have gaping holes in it covered with big blue tarps. If an inspector happened by, we were hardly in a position to claim we were just cleaning out the basement. The less obvious reason was that building permits were a bulwark of civilization, and however stupid or seemingly pointless the process, to get one was to step back from the abyss.
You may think I exaggerate, and of course I do, but less than might be supposed. Here’s an episode that illustrates the matter in all its complexity. A few minutes after midnight on June 30, 2003, a tier of wooden porches at the rear of a renovated three-flat in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago collapsed without warning, the floors pancaking on top of one another as the floors of the World Trade Center had done on September 11. Thirteen people were killed, all twentysomet
hing professionals with (till then) bright prospects. Another fifty-four were injured.
In the ensuing media coverage, the following emerged:1. At least 114 people had been standing on the porches or associated stairs at the time of the collapse, all attendees at a party that was just then breaking up.
2. In hindsight this was really, really stupid.
3. Chicago was one of the few if not only cities in the country in which it had become routine practice in certain neighborhoods to build oversized wooden porches or decks behind walk-up apartment buildings for the purpose of having blowout parties.
4. Prior to the fatal accident, overloaded porches had been collapsing in Chicago for years, although usually without serious injury to the occupants.
5. Notwithstanding (3) and (4), no public or private regulations governed the number of people permissible on a Chicago porch.
6. The aforementioned parties often involved charcoal or gas grills; the porches on which the grills stood were almost invariably made of wood; wood was combustible. Furthermore, the original purpose of back porches was to provide not a venue for socializing but rather emergency egress, which, as one chagrined young partygoer pointed out, put Chicago in the possibly unique position of permitting wooden fire escapes.
7. In view of (1) through (6) above, Chicago had barely scraped the surface of potential porch catastrophes.
8. The individual who had renovated the building and constructed the porches a few years previously had obtained a building permit, but hadn’t indicated new porches on the plans submitted for approval. Getting a building permit for a non-controversial subset of the work actually contemplated was a time-honored dodge in Chicago, the idea being to obtain a building-permit placard to stick in your window while avoiding, or at least delaying, official scrutiny. The persons responsible for the 1930s defacement of the Barn House, for example, had gotten a permit to “move two windows” and then had proceeded to rebuild much of the third floor. True, the premises would eventually be visited by city inspectors, who presumably would notice that the work failed to correspond to the plans, but the typical Chicago property owner figured he could cross that bridge when he came to it, if you catch my drift.
9. Getting back to our subject, the porch-collapse building had been in fact visited by inspectors, but—I make no accusations—even though the porches were new and unpermitted, said inspectors hadn’t brought this to anyone’s attention.
10. The porch floor joists were two-by-eights but, according to city officials, were required by code to be two-by-tens.
11. The building code didn’t actually say two-by-tens, but merely referred to an industry standard set by the American Forest and Paper Association, which city officials contended was a well-known document but which none of the local builders interviewed by reporters admitted to having heard of.
With these facts in mind, few in Chicago would dispute the following: (1) Getting a building permit was an important civic duty; (2) it was still a pain in the butt.
I’d heard the process was arduous. Charlie told me his firm’s clients sometimes hired expediters whose job was to stand in line waiting to get the paperwork approved. I didn’t intend to go that far; I didn’t figure I had to. The people who needed to fear the process, I felt, were either small-time chiselers who were trying to sneak a mother-in-law apartment into the basement, or else Republicans. 52 I, on the other hand, was getting professional advice. I had a formidable collection of drawings, with impressive-looking title blocks and symbols and inscrutable instructions such as 16” φ TYP. and SHT MTL CRICKETS AS REQD, and embossed stamps saying STATE OF ILLINOIS * LICENSED ARCHITECT. In addition, I had the perhaps silly idea that getting a permit would be fun. I did my own taxes, too. For excitement I don’t claim either ranked with bungee jumping, but they were challenge enough for me.
City Hall in Chicago—properly known as the City-County Building—is a large cubical edifice occupying a full city block in the Loop. It’s split down the middle. The eastern half contains the administrative offices for Cook County, of which Chicago constitutes the larger part; the western half houses those for the city. The city half is where most of the excitement is. The ground-floor lobby is a study in marble and terrazzo, impressive in a 1930s B-movie kind of way, full of cops, clerks, and scurrying citizens, with quiet eddies here and there where well-fed parties in expensive suits conferred with leaner individuals—lawyers, likely—regarding matters of dizzy import, such as the Bears game.53
One applied for construction permits at the building department, which was on the eighth floor of the city side. One saw fewer people in expensive suits, and more nervous-looking nebbishes such as myself. Inquiring at the counter, I was told to fill out a form stating the particulars of the project. One of the blanks to be filled in was the value of the work. I completed the form and handed it to the sad-eyed man behind the counter. He studied the form for a moment. “You sure it’s going to cost this much?” he asked.
Clearly I wasn’t supposed to be. “More or less,” I said.
The sad-eyed man looked at me and sighed. I’d gotten a similar look from an old cabbie when, as an eighteen-year-old summer fill-in driver, I stood at a counter in the cab barn and filled out a federal tax form with the amount of tip money I actually made.
“The form is used by the county when they reassess your property after the work is done,” the sad-eyed man said.
“Oh,” I said. I took back the form and scratched off a zero.
The next stop was the zoning man, a youngish fellow in a polo shirt. The zoning man glanced through the drawings, then pushed them back. “You need to get a driveway permit,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It’s an existing driveway.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You still need to get a permit.” He gestured toward a counter on the far side of the room.
This was unexpected. I could understand permits for new construction, but who ever heard of getting permits for things built twenty years before? The notion seemed to open the door to all manner of bureaucratic meddling: We’re sorry, sir, but we shouldn’t have given out that driveway permit to start with. And while you’re at it, tear down that eyesore of a house, too. I also knew from Mike Royko books that the sale of driveway permits had once been a lucrative sideline for unscrupulous Chicago aldermen. While I was reasonably sure those days were gone, I wasn’t eager to put the matter to the test. Plus, there were sure to be more delays and fees.
No use complaining, though. I went to the indicated counter and explained my problem to the woman sitting behind it, one of those stout bottle blondes who, in Chicago as in probably every other city, accomplish all the useful work of government. She handed me a form.
“Fill this out and bring in a photo of the driveway,” she said.
“A photo?” I said stupidly. I didn’t see the point, but at least they weren’t asking for an environmental impact study. I rolled up my blueprints and went home to get the camera.
A couple days later I returned with an envelope full of driveway pictures. I handed one to the woman behind the counter. She studied it, then handed it back.
“Your driveway is cracked,” she said. “You’ll have to get it repoured.”
“Repoured?” I looked at the picture. The driveway had some cracks across one corner. The affected area amounted to about a square foot. Repouring seemed absurd. More important, it would take days, maybe weeks depending on whether they expected me to replace a corner or the entire driveway. It was already the end of September. How much longer it would take to get a building permit once I got the driveway permit I didn’t know. I was planning major structural work that would leave much of the house open to the elements. If I lost a month we would be working outdoors in the depths of a Chicago winter. I thought of Napoleon on the banks of the Dnieper.
I looked down at the remaining driveway photos and had an idea. Shuffling through the stack, I placed a different one on the counter. “You know,” I said, “I’v
e got another photo here.”
The picture showed the driveway from a different angle. The cracked corner wasn’t visible.
The woman looked at the photo, then at me. All of us encounter these little face-offs with destiny at some point in our lives. In some the fate of nations hangs in the balance. Others are about driveways. “Let me ask the boss,” the woman said. She picked up the photo and walked into a nearby office. A few moments later she returned and shoved the photo back across the counter.
“Okay,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. One down.
Back to the zoning man. He looked through the drawings for a second time. I hoped he would find nothing to object to, but no. “Can’t do this,” he said, pointing.
I leaned over. On the drawing for the third floor Charlie had labeled one room OFFICE and another FUTURE BATH.
This problem I understood. Months earlier Charlie had faxed me a page from the city’s building code about the “minimum number of exits.” It was written in typically opaque building-code style, but after some study I gathered that, if you had a two-story house, the city would let you get by with one set of stairs between floors, but if you had a three-story house, you needed two sets of stairs, both serving all three floors. The idea was to provide an alternative fire exit in case the first was blocked.