The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  In short, Chicago had matured. People were more invested in the city, in several senses of the term. There was more energy in the air, more shops and cafés, more people on the street. The city had always had its diehard fans, but now I sensed that for a great many Chicagoans the city was no longer just a place they were passing through, but rather the end of the line. That’s easy to say, and city people have long been notorious for taking the rosy view, but an objective measure of the new attitude (or so it seemed to me) would arise soon enough.

  22

  Although the work no longer occupied our every waking moment, we wrapped up an impressive number of projects during the late 1990s. We painted the front hall, living room, and dining room; stripped and refinished the front staircase; stained and varnished the new oak woodwork in the front of the house; painted the poplar woodwork everywhere else; finished the downstairs bathroom by among other things mounting a mosaic-tile frieze depicting twining ivy, which I assure you was more winning in reality than it probably sounds on the page; hung closet doors; rerouted the upstairs ductwork yet again because, notwithstanding my ad-libbed improvements following the discovery of Pete’s iceberg, the air handler had to work too hard and the compressor burned out; scraped the paint off the front porch deck twice because it kept peeling and the first time Henryk repainted with latex, as opposed to more durable oil, Henryk being the one worker who reminded us that devotion to the right way was a learned behavior, and not part of Polish DNA; repaired an ominously seeping crack in an upstairs bathroom radiator, which required drilling out the fissure and filling it with epoxy, because I remembered the previous owner’s sad experience with the failed radiator and the three inches of ice; plus numerous other small projects, the details of which it’s not necessary to review.

  In 1997 we finished the basement sufficiently for our purposes, which is to say we, or rather a squad of Polish workers hired for the purpose, painted the floor with epoxy and the walls and ceiling (more precisely, the joists and the underside of the floor planking) with white latex. As usual Tony and Jerry were the contractors, and as usual, from what I could gather, they barely made a dime, although for once the fault was only indirectly mine. They’d calculated that the ceiling would require twenty-five gallons of paint; in the event the antique timbers sucked up sixty-two. I coughed up some more cash unasked.

  Painting the basement was one job I had no intention of doing myself, because I knew it likely involved a paint sprayer, the devil’s instrument. As with much in my life throughout this period, it all started with the radiators. I loved radiators, I truly did, but they were a pain in the neck to work with, too heavy and always in the way, and in particular they were a nightmare to paint. From the outset I had known that I should have gotten the radiator painting done at an early stage of the project, before the house was closed up and life grew more complex, but at the decisive moment I had had no time and no money. For years thereafter the knowledge that I had merely postponed a task that would require baroque logistical arrangements under the best of circumstances filled me with the blackest dread. My fears along these lines had been confirmed during the finishing of the attic, when I had assigned the Chief to paint the two radiators appurtenant thereto. The job took him the better part of a week. The Chief could be meticulous to a fault, and at times with his small brush and exacting technique seemed bent on resurrecting pointillism à la Georges Seurat, but on investigation I could see such precision was necessitated by the intricate design of the radiator, a labyrinth of fins and rods and interior vanes. No fault could be found with the finished job, but I knew if we painted all the radiators at that pace we’d be at it till Jesus came back.

  When the time came to paint the radiators in the basement, therefore, I was amenable to the Chief ’s suggestion that we buy a paint sprayer. Use of a sprayer presented several challenges. One was drips. If you lingered a millisecond too long when maneuvering the spray head, the paint would collect in a pendulous stratum recalling the fate of Dorian Gray. Another problem was overspray. If you were outdoors and some zephyr came along at a speed above half a knot, an alarming percentage of the paint wouldn’t go where it was nominally aimed but instead would bedizen the rhododendrons. A third concern was asphyxiation, especially when painting indoors.

  The last item was the major obstacle for us. Since the weather at the time was chilly—it was early spring, as I recall—and we had no hope of getting the radiators up the steps anyway, we painted them in the basement in a spray booth constructed of two-by-twos and sheet plastic and bearing an unpleasant resemblance to a gas chamber. I hooked up the shop vacuum in hopes of evacuating the most lethal fraction of fumes, and bought the most formidable breathing mask I could find, a complex piece of apparatus with multiple compartments for replaceable filter cartridges, which looked as though it would equip the wearer to survive a gas attack at Ypres. However, since the budget didn’t permit piping in oxygen, you still had the problem that at an advanced point in the spraying process your input air supply consisted of three parts standard atmosphere to two parts paint. After working for any length of time I developed a throbbing headache and fogged vision, and had the sense of watching brain cells individually die. We finished the basement radiators after considerable suffering—I note with satisfaction that we had minimal drips—but I vowed that for future painting I’d hire someone else.

  Thus the Polish workers. You may think it unseemly that I subcontracted my dirty work to third parties, but having inhaled my life’s quota and then some of carcinogens, I thought it wise to farm out the balance, in which aim Tony and Jerry cooperated during this interval (though we didn’t plan it that way) by never sending over the same crew twice. I was grateful for their assistance in any case, and I think anyone looking at my situation objectively would say I’d better be, for reasons it will be worthwhile to explore.

  During the time we worked on the Barn House I was often struck by the similarities between the era when it had been built and the present day. Granted, high-button shoes had pretty much bitten the dust, and cars and computers had transformed the world in ways no one a century earlier could have foreseen, but from a socioeconomic perspective, as the professors might say, there were curious points of comparison.

  The dependence on immigrant labor was the most obvious parallel. Chicago, and quite likely my house, had been built by immigrants in the latter part of the nineteenth century and largely rebuilt by them in the latter part of the twentieth. I counted up the workers who participated in some substantial way in the Barn House’s protracted reconstruction; setting aside the amateurs who helped with demolition, the total came to more than a hundred, of whom two-thirds were foreign-born. The majority of these had been sent over by Tony and Jerry, but even the people we hired on our own were nonnatives more often than not.

  Immigrants had always been a presence in Chicago, but by the 1990s they were more numerous than at any time in my experience. You encountered them everywhere. At the barbershop I got my hair cut by Almo from Albania or Luba from Uzbekistan. I quit mowing my own lawn when I found I could get a crew of Mexicans to do it for twenty bucks a week. We employed au pairs from Germany, France, Spain, and Croatia in addition to Petra from Switzerland, all of whom admittedly returned home when their thirteen-month visas expired. (Petra wanted to stay but couldn’t get a green card despite having lined up a job, no doubt because some bureaucrat decided: those shiftless Swiss.) There was Janos, the Hungarian college student we hired to drive the kids home from school after we quit using au pairs, a long line of Polish and Mexican cleaning people, the four Juans who painted the house (this was later), and just about every restaurant worker on the north side who wasn’t an aspiring artist or musician from Wicker Park, not to mention the numerous parties from India, Hong Kong, Ireland, Nigeria, the UK, Brazil, Italy, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere that you bumped into in the course of daily life.

  Granted, there weren’t as many immigrants as there had been in 1890, when
more than 40 percent of Chicagoans had been born in a foreign country. But the city had again become a major port of entry. During the 1990s, well over a half million immigrants flooded into the metropolitan area. As of 2000, more than a fifth of residents in the city proper were foreign-born, double the percentage thirty years earlier.

  A second similarity between a century ago and today was … well, I recoiled at the thought that we had servants. But as a friend pointed out, “You have staff.” We had full-time child care for eleven years, live-in help for five, and drivers for a few years after that. We had house cleaners and landscapers. The majority of these people were foreign-born. We didn’t hire them so that we could lead a life of leisure; on the contrary, Mary and I both worked long hours at demanding jobs and needed help with things we couldn’t manage on our own. Just the same, we had people on the payroll.

  A third point of comparison, which could be deduced from the second, was the widening gap between the affluent and everybody else. Heavily in debt though Mary and I were, the fact was we made more money than most people, and our income rose just about every year, mainly due to Mary’s contribution. Average take-home for most other folks, inflation having been accounted for, stayed basically flat. It would be an exaggeration to say the United States had returned to the extremes of a hundred years ago, when there hadn’t been an income tax. But things were headed in that direction. In the late 1970s, the top 10 percent of taxpayers took home about a third of the national income. By 2005, it was nearly half.

  I don’t recall having heard the term globalization in the 1990s, but in retrospect it had a lot to do with these developments. In the broad sense globalization simply means the increasing integration of the world economy, a process under way since the time of Henry the Navigator. But nowadays Americans often conceive of it in gloomier terms: the loss of jobs to foreign countries, the consequent stagnation of middle- and lower-income wages in the United States, the increasing numbers of immigrants who may or may not have something to do with keeping wages down, and, in contrast to the so-so fortunes of everyone else, the rapidly growing affluence of the managerial and professional class that runs the whole show.

  The implications of all this didn’t fully sink in till years later, but I may as well state it plainly now: The revival of places like Chicago had been made possible by globalization’s uneven effects, specifically the lopsided distribution of wealth and the influx of immigrants who did good work cheap. Arguably it wouldn’t have happened—certainly not as fast—had the benefits been more evenly spread around. Our own situation demonstrated this. The rebuilding of the Barn House was terrifyingly expensive—Mary and I, despite what ought to have been a comfortable income and the fact that I did a lot of the work myself, were barely able to afford it. The task would have been out of the question for a couple of more modest means. As it was we were only able to swing it because of immigrants, who had come to Chicago in part because relatively well-heeled folk like us were around to employ them. Lots of other city-house rehabbers could tell comparable tales. I make no apologies; collectively we salvaged towns, or parts of towns, that were falling to pieces. But I can’t deny we got a break most people didn’t.

  No doubt that accounted for the sharply divergent views of immigration evident then and since. Much of the country felt (and feels) threatened by immigration, but on the whole it was welcomed or at least tolerated in Chicago. (In the city proper, anyway. Possibly the yokel element in the suburbs got more agitated.) Partly that was a matter of tradition; the city historically had assimilated millions of immigrants and was set up for it, with existing ethnic neighborhoods, decent mass transit, and so on. But the main thing was, we could use the people.

  I don’t say the newcomers presented no challenges. You had the occasional problem of getting rear-ended at a stoplight by a woman with only a Mexican driver’s license in a van with non-functional brakes, which caused no obvious damage in our case but did leave you wondering whether you ought to report the incident to the cops, a question I decided in the affirmative on the reasoning that (a) Chicago cops in my observation didn’t think it was their job to find out if you were legal, and (b) I wasn’t doing the world any favors to let somebody in a brakeless vehicle escape the notice of the law.

  But that kind of thing was unusual. More often, especially if you had occasion to hire, you had the sense of participating in a classic American spectacle—immigrants making their way in a new country. That sounds rather dutiful, I suppose. Not a bit. I found it exhilarating—I think any city person would say the same. The thought of living in a homogenous society with a uniform language and culture gave me the shudders. How much better to reside in one of the great crossroads cities, where people came from all over the world, some for a day’s business, some for the rest of their lives. The immigrants we encountered virtually without exception were a pleasure to deal with, hardworking and optimistic and happy to be here. Plus, no little thing, they did a beautiful job, and time after time went above and beyond the call.

  We saw this now with the Polish workers detailed to finish the basement. I knew I wanted epoxy paint on the floor, because the stuff had the reputation, as it turned out well earned, of being virtually indestructible. But the paint was an industrial coating rather than a consumer product, and the manufacturer evidently assumed that if you were looking for something to rustproof your steam turbine, aesthetics were a minor concern. I’d hoped I’d picked the least objectionable of the dismal choice of colors at the paint store, but an hour after turning my purchase over to the workers they summoned me down to the basement for a look. They’d gotten perhaps a quarter of the floor painted when compelled by revulsion to stop. The stuff was the color of pureed vomit. The workers gave me to understand they’d paint the rest of the floor this appalling hue if I insisted, but they personally advised finding something else. A different paint maker proved to have a less obnoxious palette. Once the workers were finished (they’d sprayed the walls and ceiling earlier), I did a little touching up as always, and the whole thing wound up looking pretty sharp.

  The following year I had Tom the finish carpenter install cornice moldings around the ceilings in the living and dining rooms. Mary initially thought these of secondary importance, but it seemed to me on studying the photographs in the home-decorating magazines that the more sumptuous effects had primarily been achieved not, as the obsessive enumeration of accessories in the back pages suggested, with furnishings purchased at Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn and other such establishments (although I conceded these had their place), but rather with interior architectural detailing that the writers of the accompanying articles, presumably English majors all, assumed was automatically there—at any rate they never mentioned it.91It wasn’t, of course—someone had to ask for it, someone else had to design it, and additional parties had to perform whatever construction work was required. We didn’t have the budget for columns, pilasters, wainscoting (apart from a fairly basic application of bead board in spots), chair railings, mitered walnut floor inlays (although I thought about it, and in a moment of madness had discussed dragging in my brother John to help with the carpentry in order to pare the expense), entablatures of the more rococo sort, vaulted ceilings, and other extravagances. But I did want the rooms to have some jump.

  SECTION / ELEVATION OF BUILT UP CROWN MOLD

  Here again Charlie the architect came to the rescue. Aware of both my taste for the finer things and my perennial shortage of funds, he devised an artful cornice consisting of a stock crown molding tacked to a strip of colonial doorstop, which, despite the suggestion of inherited wealth, was as plebeian as molding could get and could be obtained at any lumberyard. Tom offered no objection (I’ve since come to understand that assembling complex moldings out of simpler elements is a common architectural dodge), and proceeded to install the molding in the living room, dining room, and front hall. The result was all the more remarkable in light of the simplicity of the constituent parts. I don’t claim
the result would shame Monticello, but it didn’t look half bad.

  Next, after staring for far too long at the gashes in the drywall where mantelpieces would someday be, I contracted with a fireplace company, which sent over a mason named Cutty, a wiry fellow from Belize with a lilting Caribbean accent. As had been the case with the majority of tradesmen who’d walked through the door up to that point, Cutty was a member of the artisans’ guild. He inspected the firebox I’d had built in the living room some years earlier. It was a reasonably competent job, but certain nuances of the mortarwork lacked the craftsman’s touch. Cutty pursed his lips. Had the firebox been constructed by so-and-so, he asked, who worked for such-and-such company? I didn’t remember the man’s name, but he’d gotten the company right. “I knew it,” said Cutty. I was impressed. To be a member of the Brotherhood of the Right Way was one thing, but to be able on the basis of forensic evidence to identify the shortcomings of your peers—that took matters to a new level entirely. Cutty and his helper spent a day or so building a couple of fireboxes, the more elaborate of which they proudly showed me with their names and the date neatly scratched in the drying mortar. As with so much in the Barn House, one hated to cover it up.

  But of course that was the idea. Sometime earlier my neighbor Charlie92 had offered to give me an old mantelpiece from an apartment building he was renovating. I thought this kind and went over to have a look, my expectations low. To my surprise, the mantelpiece was magnificent, with well-proportioned pilasters rising on either side, the tops swooping out to support a couple of shelves, the intersection of the pilasters and shelves denoted with rosettes. I felt I was being given one of the lesser works of Rodin, but Charlie would take no money. Now I turned the mantelpiece over to Cutty. He’d also brought the makings of the new mantelpieces we proposed to construct in the living room and the front bedroom. It’s here we get, at long last, to the subject of quartersawn oak.