The Barn House
Page 30
■ A hammock suspended between two trees, as commonly depicted in the funny pages but seldom seen in real life, mainly because no American born since 1945 has the patience to plant two trees the right distance apart and then wait till they grow. We didn’t either; we got lucky. But the opportunity having presented itself, we didn’t need it to knock twice.
■ A porch swing, a once-forlorn wooden contraption we’d spied in the Barn House’s basement on our first visit and maybe eight years later gave a fresh coat of paint (purple again), then suspended from the porch ceiling by springs obtained at a Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin—not a venue known for quality home improvement products, but these were holding up a Colorado-type hanging chair that was sold at a booth and presumably appealed to the Ren Faire demographic, and I figured would work just fine for me. I thought I had a discount coming—the springs normally were sold singly whereas I needed two, and I felt in light of the stiff price of the first I deserved some consideration on the second. The sales varlet didn’t see it that way, and I have to concede that, in the big-picture view, we were a little late in the project to start worrying about price.
You see what it adds up to. We’d had a house when we started; now we had a home. Once I’d gotten the swing hung and my feet up and had a moment to contemplate the passing scene, any peevishness with respect to worldly woes vanished instantly away. Our street was idyllic. We had a dogwood out there, courtesy of the people in the town houses next to the Witnesses; a locust; numerous maples; a dying but still majestic ash; what I deduced from my tree-finder book to be a linden, and was pleased to be told by a guy from the forestry department actually was; and of course (let’s be honest) my pathetic and embarrassing lawn, fortunately concealed by bushes from everyone’s eyes but mine. Against this bucolic backdrop there promenaded the adorable neighbor kids and their hundred-square hopscotch game; virtuous dog walkers identifiable by their plastic bags, as opposed to wicked ones without; my neighbor Joe’s son Larry manicuring the family’s already enviable lawn; plus the usual parade of cyclists, Nike-shod yuppies, and neighborhood characters intent on secret errands. Perhaps I lacked ambition, but I wanted nothing more.
It was widely agreed among the neighbors who occasionally stopped by to chat that the city had never looked better, and not just downtown—once-seedy neighborhoods all over town had been transformed. The Old Town School of Folk Music, a beloved local institution looking for larger quarters, moved into an old library building in a neighborhood not far from us called Lincoln Square; soon a thriving restaurant district developed to serve the crowds attending concerts. It had a Starbucks like every other semigentrified community in America, but in addition had a handsome branch library (the replacement for the old one), one of the librarians in which for a time had been a guy who sat two rows over from me in fourth grade and used to get a swat once a week from the nun; a park with a bunch of baseball diamonds, which you expected to see in a Chicago park, but also a gazebo, which you didn’t; a homeopathic drugstore established in 1875; an old movie theater (admittedly converted to multiple screens) where I had seen German movies—this was an ethnic neighborhood of long standing—while in high school language class in 1968; a classic toy store; numerous outdoor cafés; an excellent pastry shop and restaurant founded by a couple of local women in the early 1980s, when founding any kind of upscale business in most Chicago neighborhoods took nerve; an absurdly ornate but nonetheless delightful storefront that was the last commissioned work by the architect Louis Sullivan and couldn’t have made economic sense even when opened in 1922; the inevitable L line with a nondescript modern station, snappy transit design in Chicago being a largely (and inexplicably) lost art;95 a municipal parking lot where the city held farmer’s markets periodically during the growing season; a small fountain surrounded by benches, the majority of which on most days were occupied by regular people, as opposed to comatose drunks; and ten or twenty other points of interest that have momentarily slipped my mind. The street buzzed with life, and yet—important point—it was no South Beach, which is to say it wasn’t a tourist attraction. It had only a handful of chain stores, Starbucks being one, all small. The average commercial building was three stories tall, the houses mainly two-flats. For the most part it was an ordinary city neighborhood, returned from the dead.
Chicago, I’m willing to believe, had once had many such thriving districts. At its nadir during the 1970s it had had maybe three. (I concede the precise count is open to debate.) Now vibrant communities were again numerous. Many were organized around a theme of some sort: Wrigleyville, a lively area around the Cubs’ ballpark, hosted a sort of daylong Mardi Gras whenever the team was in town; Boystown on North Halsted Street was the principal gay nightlife strip; Roscoe Village had a vaguely retro, small-town-in-the-big-city feel and seemed to be overrun with parents pushing strollers and little kids on scooters—although children were pretty common all over.
Then there was Andersonville, called Girl’s Town by some, owing to the supposed preponderance of lesbians. I was skeptical, since in my observation lesbians didn’t congregate as conspicuously as gays, but one day Mary and I took the kids over to a well-known Andersonville shoe store—well known for being just that, a basic (if large) locally owned full-service shoe store, as opposed to the usual chain store or overpriced boutique—during the week of the city’s Pride Parade, formerly (and still basically) the Gay Pride Parade, which was definitely a slice. On the day we were in the shoe store, it turned out, Andersonville had scheduled a satellite pride parade, informally known as the Dyke Hike. Among other things the parade featured several contingents of chesty topless maidens who concealed their nipples from casual view with shiny red cellophane tape. Naturally the transit of this picturesque aggregation brought sales activity in the shoe store to a temporary halt. The kids, along with everybody else in the store, watched with interest, then returned to business after the parade had passed.96
So okay, it wasn’t the Chicago of the 1950s. Who would have wanted it to be? It was a real neighborhood in a real city nonetheless. We were content. We’d accomplished what we’d set out to do—fix up an old city house, raise a family, and lead, admittedly by a relaxed interpretation of the term, an ordinary middle-class life.
I don’t mean to give the impression that all was perfect. Real estate developers seemed to be engaged in a long-running research project to see if it was possible to build a condo building so ugly no one would live in it. (Answer to date: no.) One innovation in the hideousness department, which caught on in a big way during the 1990s, was the substitution of concrete block for conventional common brick. Concrete block may be cheaper (it requires less hand labor), but it isn’t beautiful and can’t be rendered beautiful by any known technique. The only hope was to use as little as possible—we’d limited ourselves to four courses for the Barn House’s foundation, thinking that concrete-block structures of larger scale were best confined to places where they’d have limited visibility, such as caves. But that wasn’t what was done. On the contrary, developers took sinister delight in finding loopholes in the zoning laws that enabled them to build four-story concrete-block eyesores on sites the size of a bath mat. The front of the house had to be given some passably attractive treatment, lest the neighbors revolt, but commonly the façade had the pasted-on appearance of an afterthought, which it’s safe to say it was.
For all that, the new construction had the virtue of being essentially citylike, no trifling achievement. This was most evident on the city’s commercial streets. Twenty-five years earlier the common practice in Chicago had been to build a row of one-story shops with a parking lot in front—a strip mall, the kind of thing one might find in the suburbs. Now this was less prevalent. More commonly one saw apartments stacked over stores, a building type common before World War II but little seen since. High-density mixed-use buildings didn’t represent any great conceptual breakthrough on the part of real estate developers—Jane Jacobs had advocated them in 1961. The difference was
that now people would live in them (and banks therefore would finance them)—in Chicago, at least, they were part of the urban deal.
Occupying the condos were phalanxes of kids in town for their first big jobs out of college. As was true the world over, this group’s arrival didn’t occasion universal applause, owing to the oblivious sense of entitlement some of its members displayed. The term for the female offenders in Chicago was “Trixies,” who in the stereo-typical view were airheaded blondes who whined about their wedding plans via cell phone on the bus; Ned once referred to their backward-baseball-cap-wearing male counterparts as Lincoln Park meatheads.
I don’t wish to exaggerate the failings of this much-maligned subculture. True, we now had the problem that, while the ranchera music in the building behind us had by and large died down, some obnoxious yuppies moved into a renovated two-flat down the alley and threw parties on their deck (and why couldn’t that one collapse?) that entailed playing loud music till two a.m. and necessitated my calling the cops. There was also the ponytailed ditz in the SUV who gunned around me on Sheffield Avenue—Sheffield is a narrow two-way street—because I was too slow pulling away from a stop sign for her taste and she couldn’t spare the additional two seconds it would take to reach a parking spot up the block, which spot she then pulled into headfirst without looking, with the result that she clipped the car parked astern and had her right taillight erupt in a burst of red plastic shards. Here was an individual, one felt, who wasn’t long for the city, and maybe not long for this earth.
More commonly, though, you met people like the young guy who lived in the condo building next to my buddy Joe’s renovated two-flat in outer Bucktown, with whom we spent a pleasant summer afternoon discussing the local real estate prospects, not that either of us had a clue, because he thought old houses were cool and it’d be fun to fix one up, and who were we to disabuse him? Perhaps he’d come looking for a party, but the city had sucked him in.
We had many such conversations with friends and neighbors—the local real estate market fascinated us all. Property values had continued their extraordinary climb; by the early 2000s many of us were paper millionaires and a few were just millionaires. A couple several doors down moved out of their house and invested well over $300,000 in a gut rehab that took the better part of a year; they moved back but decided they wanted to cash in, believing the run-up in price was a bubble soon to pop, and sold for $1.14 million, which they found disappointingly low. The new owner promptly commenced another round of renovations that he intimated cost around a half million dollars, among other things necessitating the demolition of a brand-new kitchen equipped with stainless steel Sub-Zero fridge and granite countertops; only a few months after the work was completed his firm transferred him to London and he sold for $1.75 million. Three blocks away someone bought a house roughly the same age as ours for $980,000, then tore it down so he could build new. (I liked the old place well enough, but admit the new one, which plays off its neighbor across the street in terms of color and mass, is a cunning piece of art.) Our own house was appraised at $1.6 million, almost two and a half times what we’d put into it.
We were baffled by these staggering prices. We’d been reading for years about overheated property values in coastal cities, but in Chicago they were new. We wondered where all the tycoons had come from who could afford to spend millions on a house.
It wasn’t until we took to vacationing in rural Michigan, of all places, that I got an inkling what was up. In 2000, we began sending our kids to a summer camp in the northwest corner of the state,97 a classic midwestern landscape of dunes, water, and forest. After delivering the kids Mary and I spent a few days at a bed-and-breakfast in a hamlet called Beulah on the shore of Crystal Lake, which was separated by a narrow isthmus from Lake Michigan. Beulah, permanent population 367, was the archetypal upper midwestern beach town, consisting of sun-washed clapboard houses (on our street, anyway) with front porches overlooking the two-block-long downtown, a little park, and beyond that the beach. I thought it charming—possibly the least pretentious municipality I’ve ever encountered. 98 Only gradually did the realization steal upon us that it and the surrounding region were among the most beautiful places on earth.
We were far from the first to realize this, we soon realized. Browsing around the area for a few days, we found not the Wisconsin Dells-type collection of T-shirt shops the vacations of our youth had taught us to expect, but rather a surprisingly urban level of amenities—good restaurants, bookstores, art galleries, and so on. Come lunchtime, for example, while I don’t doubt we could have found a burger and fries if we’d tried, more commonly our sandwiches featured basil pesto and portobello mushrooms and other such stuff, none of which would be considered out of the ordinary in the city but was something of a surprise in the sticks. Upscale establishments of this sort, moreover, weren’t confined to one or two towns; rather, there was an entire circuit, extending from, oh, Manistee up through Frankfort to Glen Arbor, and I guess if you were determined to take it that far, Charlevoix, Petoskey, and Mackinac Island. What’s more, so far as I could tell, all this bustling enterprise had been accomplished without the intervention of national chain stores (the Starbucks nearest to Beulah of which I have definite knowledge was in Traverse City, forty miles away), marketing consultants, or—you’ll excuse the hubris—us, by which I mean people from Chicago.
This requires a word of explanation. Chicago’s influence extended a considerable distance into Michigan. The southwestern corner of the state, notably a string of Lake Michigan vacation towns that the real estate agents had succeeded in getting everyone to call “harbor country,” was part of metropolitan Chicago for practical purposes; you could pick up a Sunday Tribune at the corner grocery as far north as Saugatuck. Crystal Lake, however, was a six-hour drive distant. At the breakfast table in our B&B in Beulah, the other guests were from places like Flint and Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, or sometimes Toledo or Phoenix or Gillette, and while they enjoyed our tales of walking to Wrigley and fireworks on the lake, we were clearly visitors from a distant shore. That’s not to say we felt like intruders or in any way unwelcome; on the contrary, we were delighted at having been invited to a party that had been organized by someone else.
What puzzled us for a long time was who had organized it. I had the naïve idea at the time that a prospering hinterland required a prospering city—but Chicago was too far away. Detroit . . . well, our companions at breakfast, or at any rate the Michiganders, generally spoke of Detroit as one would of the departed at a wake. We met quite a few people from Ann Arbor, which from all accounts was thriving, but it remained a town of modest scale. Grand Rapids was larger, but still seemed insufficient to support such a formidable economic superstructure.
The truth (or so it seemed to me) didn’t dawn on us till we began talking to the proprietors of some of the little restaurants and bakeries we frequented. Mostly they were young and well-educated, having graduated from the state’s big universities. Equally important, they were entrepreneurs, looking to start small businesses, and northern Michigan (“up north,” in local parlance) was where they’d gone. My impression was that the decision had involved no close calculation of the prospect of X number of individuals with Y disposable dollars showing up. Mostly they just liked it there, opened a business, and hoped customers would show up. The young entrepreneurs were the product of an urban environment—you didn’t learn about portobello mushrooms and snappy logo design kicking cowpies on the farm—and had taken a path that in principle wasn’t far removed from that of an urban rehabber. The fact that they hadn’t wound up in the city was irrelevant. They’d fallen under the spell of a place, made the choice to live there, and endured whatever hardships it entailed.
What I deduced from this was that a rural area could gentrify just as a city did. That in turn shed some light on real estate prices. When Mary and I browsed the vacation-home listings—strictly for amusement, since we could barely cover the mortgage on the house we h
ad—we were struck by the enormous variation in pricing. A villa with a hundred feet of frontage on Crystal Lake might list for a million dollars, for example, while humbler dwellings not far away were going for relatively trifling amounts. Price disparities like that were common in the city, but we’d assumed they reflected differences in crime and poverty. Now we realized a simpler phenomenon was at work. People with money had set their sights on the limited number of properties they considered desirable—old houses on Chicago’s north lakefront, lakeside cottages in Michigan—and had bid up the price.99