by Ed Zotti
Most oak planking sold nowadays is plainsawn, meaning that boards are sliced from the log with a succession of parallel cuts. Planks made in this way display great variation in grain, depending on the angle with which a particular cut intersects the log’s growth rings. Some of the boards are fine-grained, while others show the coarse pattern I thought of as zebra striping. Most of the new flooring in the Barn House was plainsawn.
After we’d gotten the new oak flooring installed in the back of the house, we learned there was another way of cutting oak called quartersawing. This entailed slicing the log lengthwise into quarters, then sawing each quarter so that the cuts were roughly perpendicular to the growth rings.
The result was that all the boards were fine-grained. Many also exhibited what the wood experts called “medullary rays,” also known as fleck or figure, which were stripes or splotches having to my eye a somewhat mica-like appearance running across the grain. Quartersawn oak was more expensive than plainsawn due to the extra labor and greater waste, but the effect was more elegant. Equally important, it had the useful ability to look instantly old. The new oak balusters milled to replace those missing from the fancy front staircase had been quartersawn (the stair guys had voluntarily provided them that way; we hadn’t known to ask); once stained they were indistinguishable from the original except on minute inspection.
PLAIN - SAWN YS. QUARTER SAWN LUMBER
We couldn’t afford quartersawn oak for the living and dining room floors. But with the fireplaces we had our chance.
Cutty and his helper spent most of a day installing three mantelpieces—the antique donated by Charlie plus two new ones of quartersawn oak. I busied myself in my office most of the day and spent little time inspecting the work in progress, having concluded that these were men who knew what they were about. In the late afternoon they called me down for a look. They had fires going in all three locations, a feat more easily accomplished than one might think, since we’d had the foresight to pipe in gas. I was charmed—the new mantelpiece in the living room, I thought, was particularly fine. In the middle of the horizontal span above the firebox the lads had glued a little ornamental carving depicting a stylized wicker basket with flowers and tendrils erupting out of it in a carefree symmetrical sprawl, which notwithstanding its being cornball was perfect for the spot. A few weeks would pass before I’d get around to applying stain, which would show off the oak’s fleck to great advantage, but even then one felt the shock, which time’s passage has only minimally diminished, of having uncovered something that had always been there.
Much of it was mere stage effects, of course. The artificial log sets—splits, they were called—were molded from some sort of dense poured concrete. Beneath them Cutty and his helper had spread a darkened gravel meant to suggest coals, and on top of this had scattered a fibrous material that became incandescent when heated, which is to say that when the gas flame ignited, it glowed. The resemblance to a wood fire was remarkable, except that there was no smoke, no need for kindling or constant fuss, and no ashes to haul out when done. While Charlie’s mantelpiece was authentically old, the illusion of antiquity created by the quartersawn oak was a function solely of the angle used to cut the wood. The trick, in home renovation as in a good deal else, lay in the shrewd management of surfaces. No matter. Though it would be a long time before we could afford proper furniture, friends who visited the house were in awe.
Periodically we were reminded that we lived in the city. One late spring afternoon while working in my office I heard a popping sound that instinct suggested wasn’t a firecracker. I looked out the window to see a tall man and a companion running down the sidewalk past the house. The tall man held what appeared to be a handgun—judging from the glimpse I had of it, possibly a target pistol (which, okay, is no Uzi, but still). Chasing him were two other men, one of whom was dressed in a uniform of some sort and waving what I took to be a revolver. The tall man was wearing black nylon pants and a fluorescent yellow shirt; he could scarcely have been more conspicuous if he’d been on fire. I called the police, expecting a brisk response, since Chicago cops in my observation generally responded to shots-fired calls with much spirited martial display; to my exasperation, five minutes elapsed before a lone cop in a squad car arrived, by which time the tall man and his pursuers were gone.
I briefly considered not telling Mary that armed men were racing past the lawn where our children sometimes played, then thought better of it—if ever there were a time to start holding out on unsettling information, this wasn’t it. She muttered but said no more. When I inquired at the neighborhood police-beat meeting a couple weeks later, a cop told me in a conspiratorial tone that they knew who the shooter was, by which I gathered I was to understand: We’ve got a handle on things. One never knew what this meant. A cop in the neighborhood, regarded as something of a screwball (“soft” was the term a Chicago police detective I knew used to describe the force’s flakier elements), had once confided to me his methods of suppressing crime, one of which was dangling a suspect upside down over the river by his feet. Whatever persuasive techniques may have been brought to bear in this instance, I saw no further guns brandished in daylight.
It took a while longer before things quieted down after dark. Mostly it was people playing loud ranchera music late at night in the building behind us, who would knock it off if I went out in the backyard and yelled; other times it was delinquents hotrodding up and down the alley. One of these excursions concluded with a thunderous crash suggestive of rent metal and broken glass; after an interlude of ten or fifteen minutes, there commenced a series of clangs, which I assumed (it was maybe two a.m. and I was too groggy to investigate) was the vehicle’s owner returned to the scene and now trying to pound out the dents. Once I was awakened by a loud noise I was certain was a gunshot and called the police; there was no one to be seen in the alley when I peered out a discreet interval later, but a neighbor later told me he found a large bloodstain on the pavement the next morning. Then there was the grizzled old geek often to be seen sitting near the ranchera building’s alley entrance on a decrepit 1950s kitchenette chair; though no foul play was conjectured in my hearing, still it was disquieting to learn he’d been found in the basement dead.
Things like that became less frequent as the years passed, though. I’m not saying they stopped altogether. Violent crime on the north side was still twice that of the suburbs, in a typical south-side neighborhood ten times higher. Still, you could tell a corner had been turned. One sign was especially unmistakable: Property values, which had been drifting upward for a while, now began to spike.
23
Toward the end of 1999 the newspaper I wrote for asked me to contribute a year-in-review piece. The approach of the millennium seemed to demand something more momentous than usual, and almost immediately I thought of the perfect opening: “I knew the city had turned some kind of corner when I realized we would actually make money on our house.”
This was true. Beginning in the mid-1990s, property values in our neighborhood had begun to rise sharply. In 1996 our neighbors Charlie and Vanessa had bought the house next door to us for a little over $400,000; they would sell it four years later for more than twice as much. Around 1998 a real estate developer purchased an old building a couple blocks away, tore it down (the likely fate of the Barn House had we not bought it, we realized), divided the fifty-foot-wide lot in two, and built two houses, both more attractive than one might have expected, given that they were basically oblong boxes built to the limits of the zoning envelope, as the real estate lawyers said. In 1999 one of the houses sold for $650,000, the other for $669,000. A few months later the same thing happened on the next street over—two houses replaced one. This time one sold for $750,000, the other for $802,000. We refinanced in 1999; the appraisal came in at $795,000. We thought that low, but no matter: The value of our house now substantially exceeded our total investment.
A residential construction boom had begun in the city. It was most evi
dent downtown, where high-rise condo buildings sprouted on seemingly every block, but there was plenty of activity in the neighborhoods. Vacant lots filled up; dilapidated frame houses were pulled down and replaced with brick.
I called up the city’s demographer, a patient and resourceful woman named Marie. (Some think a major league sports franchise is the mark of the urban big time, but I say it’s when you’ve got your own demographer.) We spent an absorbing hour reviewing statistical arcana such as residential building permits—they now exceeded demolitions by a healthy margin, which may seem a modest achievement but hadn’t always been the case. However, the most surprising fact to emerge was a development anyone could understand. Chicago’s population, in decline since 1950, was now going back up—the 2000 census would eventually show that over the past decade the city’s population had increased by 112,000.
It seemed clear that the city had passed an inflection point of some kind. Residential building permits had doubled in the mid-1990s and stayed high since, in some years exceeding the numbers reported in Sunbelt cities such as Los Angeles. L ridership, which had reached an eighty-seven-year low in 1992, had rebounded; the line serving the Barn House’s neighborhood was now crush-loaded during rush hour, eventually necessitating a station expansion project to accommodate longer trains. The downtown population increased 40 percent during the decade, the fastest of any U.S. city. For years people in Chicago had believed the town was on the verge of turning the corner; now there was good evidence that it had.
In 2002, after completing various additional tasks to be enumerated shortly, we had my family over for Thanksgiving—we now routinely hosted this celebration at our house. Standing in the kitchen with a glass of wine, my father glanced around with as close to admiration as he was ever likely to get. “The place is finally getting a little finish,” he said.
It was, and about damned time, considering we’d moved in eight years earlier. But there was no escaping the stubborn fact: For all the sweaty labor involved in the early going, the critical parts of the project didn’t happen till late in the job. That was when you attained finish—the elusive state, familiar to all disciples of the right way, when everything came together and the whole exceeded the sum of the parts.
Finish was an entirely subjective concept. You might have toilets that flushed, lights that lit, a roof that kept you dry—but that didn’t necessarily mean you had finish. You might appease the title company’s every demand for lien waivers and W-9s, pass building inspection, and give the contractor his last check; as far as finish was concerned, these were necessary but not sufficient conditions. Woodwork, mantelpieces, even rugs and curtains . . . yes, of course, one wanted to cross these off the list. But finish was more than that. To put the matter scientifically, it was the point at which you walked into a room and said, or at least thought: That’s it. We’re done.
Finish usually took a while. There were a few masterminds, admittedly, who knew exactly what they wanted from the start and proceeded briskly to produce it, the foremost example in my mind being Frank Lloyd Wright, from whom fully realized designs were said to flow effortlessly whenever he felt like turning on the creative tap. True, Frank might overlook a few fine points, such as what was going to hold the building up, but these were details best left to the restoration committee.93More commonly you had our problem: We didn’t have a clear vision of what it would take to finish this or that aspect of the house, except that we’d know it when we arrived.
A case in point was the kitchen and family room at the rear of the house. To be sure, with the help of Charlie the architect we’d done a good deal of planning at the outset, some of which didn’t pay off till years later. The cherry kitchen cabinets, granite island countertop, and stainless steel ventilator hood over the cooktop—Mary knew she wanted those from the get-go, even though we didn’t finish installing them till nearly two years out. We knew we wanted low built-in bookshelves along one wall in the family room, and to that end had had the windows there installed so that the sills were forty-nine inches above the floor rather than the thirty-two inches prevalent elsewhere, a difference visitors pointed out from time to time in case it were a discrepancy I’d overlooked. It was a relief to get Tom over in 2001, eight years after we bought the house, to build the shelves at last. Even then I had him construct a wide central tier that projected inexplicably into the room for another five years, since the big-screen TV I knew I’d put there took that long to drop in price.
The rest we made up as we went along. Cornice molding to echo the similar molding atop the cabinets seemed an obvious step, and looked very nice, but didn’t finish the room. A back-splash for the kitchen counters—Mary came up with the idea of beadboard, and Tom suggested stainless steel behind the cooktop; these got us pretty close. But we could see in the end it would all come down to paint.
One would like to offer the thought that, where Mary and I were concerned, paint did not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment and other sentiments of that nature. As one might deduce from the history of the project up to this point, it didn’t happen. We fought like cats and dogs. Mary’s chief argument was that I was color-blind. Maybe I was, I retorted, but I had outstanding grayscale discrimination. In addition, I had a plan. Mary had purchased more or less at random a couple paint samples from Martha Stewart’s collection, which I conceded harmonized not only with each other but with the understated-but-definitely-not-white color we (okay, the Polish workers) had previously applied to the trim. I noted in addition that the two Martha Stewart colors came from the same paint-chip series, and by experiment determined that any color in this series would harmonize with all the other colors and with the aforesaid trim, and on this basis concluded that I had hit on a paint selection methodology that pretty much couldn’t miss. Mary, on the other hand . . . well, we’ll draw a veil over the lengthy and acrimonious process of negotiation that preceded the determination of the four colors used to paint the back half of the house. I’ll merely say that, in concert as it were, they sang once the job was done.
We’d achieved finish. That’s not to say we were finished, since we still had the second floor to do, which I didn’t get to till additional years later with the assistance of the able Nick, a student at the Moody Bible Institute (regarding whom may I say that for reliability, resourcefulness, and all-round sunny nature a good evangelical Christian is hard to beat). But once you’ve achieved some finish, paradoxical as it may sound, the rest is a matter of time.
Much the same, I felt, could be said of the city. I realize this will strike some as an odd and possibly abhorrent thing to say, since the common view is that a dynamic metropolis is never finished and continually reinvents itself and so forth.94 Maybe so, but it seems to me there’s a difference in terms of physical appearance between a town having an urbane and settled air and one that looks like it was just unloaded off a truck. Chicago, I felt, had only now passed that critical threshold. Previously it had seemed a work in progress—even in neighborhoods not conspicuously blighted you saw vacant storefronts, temporary-looking buildings, fenced-off lots used for nothing much. Now, after decades of incremental improvement, the city had begun to fill in, the commercial streets especially. Michigan Avenue was the most conspicuous example, but in their own way less pretentious neighborhoods elsewhere in the city had arrived at a similar end state. To the extent such a thing could be said of a big urban center, sizable parts of Chicago were done.
Some of this was the doing of city hall, which had undertaken an energetic program of civic improvements involving wrought-iron fences, ornamental streetlamps, and whatnot. But ordinary folks had gotten into the act, too. Many neighborhoods were now well past the gunshots-and-rats stage of urban existence, allowing the residents to turn their attention to things like gardening. Quite a few streets were gorgeous. The preferred approach was what I’d come to think of as the forest-floor look, which eschewed the usual grass and petunias in favor of intricate layered arrangements of ivy and other gree
nery that, in combination with the venerable towering trees, produced scenes of such sylvan splendor you expected to see elves.
People weren’t just fixing up their own property, either. The railroad embankment used by the commuter trains a couple blocks from our house had once been a scraggly waste; the neighbors had taken it upon themselves to weed, seed, and plant shrubs and flowers—now the narrow street paralleling the embankment had the appearance of a country lane. A woman I met at a community meeting had turned the vacant lot next to her house not far from us into a park for the neighborhood, complete with benches and landscaping. My own project, to which I’d returned once the Barn House ceased to monopolize my time, was working with a civic group to establish a recreational path along the banks of the neglected Chicago River.
My contribution set aside, that kind of thing seemed to me the hallmark of a mature city: Its citizens took collective responsibility for it. The timing in any case worked out nicely. We’d been busting our hump for a good ten years, and now it was time to relax.
24
By some point in the early twenty-first century—you’ll forgive me if I don’t recall exactly when—we’d acquired the following essential household items:■ Wooden screen doors fore and aft. Screen doors of any type have become surprisingly rare in the United States, what with May-to-October air-conditioning having become pretty much de rigueur, but, at the risk of coming off like granola-eating radicals, we ran our air conditioner only when it was hot, letting the breeze blow through the house at other times during the temperate months. Mary was particularly adamant on this point, since she worked at a downtown corporate office run by men who evidently wore three-piece suits in July and in compensation caused the thermostat to be turned low enough to give the shivers to an Inuit. Naturally I was happy to accommodate her—God knows in Chicago from November through April you got plenty of refrigeration for free. Screen doors thus being advisable, since in our appreciation for things natural we drew the line at bugs, it seemed only reasonable to acquire the wooden kind, which produced that satisfying slam. However, there was more of a learning curve to the whole business than at first one might have thought. Initially I had Tom trick the doors out with simple spring-type closers not far removed from what one might have seen in 1956, which slammed the doors with a force measured in kilotons. While that hadn’t adversely affected my father’s screen doors that I’d ever noticed, it threatened to make ours fall apart, largely because whereas my father’s doors were held together with steel angle plates and corrugated fasteners and other sturdy hardware, the effete version we had (I’d ordered them at the lumberyard) used staples, which required more delicate treatment. Accepting the reality of the situation—no way did I have time to make doors on my own—I replaced the springs with standard pneumatic closers, which I could calibrate to dampen the pounding while preserving the desired acoustic effect. That done, we painted the doors with a color we called burgundy when company was over, but it was always purple to me.