The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  I spoke with Tom the trumpet player on the phone a few times after he departed the Barn House; for a time I believe he was working for a small ad agency downtown. We made tentative arrangements to get together a couple of times but for one reason or another these fell through. He had no permanent phone number and I was never able to call him. I haven’t spoken to him in years.

  I referred Lee to some friends who were looking for an electrician to do some wiring in their two-flat in Lincoln Square. They were delighted with his work but scandalized that he charged so little and occasionally pressed more money on him. I got an e-mail from them some time later: they’d called to ask him about another project but were told that he was dead.

  The Chief and I see less of each other than we used to but still make a point of getting together around the holidays to have dinner. Having long had the idea that the Chief was barely scraping by financially, I pressed him finally and established that he made his living trading securities and such on his own account. His shrewdest investment was buying a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade in anticipation of its going public. His net worth today is in excess of $2 million.

  Mary and I are still together, although I’d have to say working on the house permanently strained our relationship—it would have strained any couple’s. The job had been interminable. The house was under construction continuously for more than three years, with major projects for nine years after that. I didn’t paint over the carpenters’ pencil marks in the upstairs bathrooms until 2005, twelve years after we’d bought the house. We’re not done even now. Was it worth it? My answer is much the same as James’s: I’m happy to have done it once. The kids have been a great joy to us—Ryan is preparing to enter college as I write—and because of them I’d say, yes, the long struggle was worthwhile. But nothing could make either of us go through it again. I think anyone who has endured a project like ours would agree the cost was far higher than planned, in ways you didn’t expect. I’ll tell you one thing, though—after all these years Mary’s still a knockout.

  One spring morning not so long ago my doorbell rang—it was my neighbor George. He’d been out walking his dog and noticed Ned’s front door was open, which struck him as odd. He wasn’t foolish to worry. Earlier there had been an incident a few blocks away in which (as we heard the story) a fellow pretending to deliver flyers tried the front door of each house he passed till he found one that was unlocked. On entering, presumably bent on robbery, he surprised an elderly man, whom he bludgeoned to death.

  I phoned Ned’s house; there was no answer. We called the police. On arriving, one cop went around the back while the other drew his revolver and entered the front door. After some minutes the cops returned; they’d found no one inside and nothing amiss. Later that day I got a call from Ned, who was at work. He had left the door open for the exterminators, who had neglected to shut it on departing. “Thanks, neighbor,” he said. No problem, I replied, feeling moderately virtuous, but knowing I could just as easily have been calling him and saying I saw smoke.

  APPENDICES

  Appendix A

  The two ways to wire a three-way switch, or anyway the two I know, are shown opposite. (The purpose of a three-way switch, for those who have never paid attention to such things, is to allow you to turn the lights on at one location and off somewhere else, as when walking down a hall.) The second way isn’t recommended, and may violate modern electrical codes for reasons I’m not about to go into. But it’ll work, and if it’s what you’ve got in your old house and you don’t feel like redoing the wiring when replacing the switch, it beats sitting in the dark.

  CONVENTIONAL THREE-WAY SWITCH

  THREE - WAY SWITCH IN ED’S PARENTS’ HOUSE

  Appendix B

  When lights are connected in series, a single wire runs from power source to switch to bulb #1 to bulb #2 and back to the source. When lights are connected in parallel, each is connected independently to the source, with the wire running from source to switch to bulb and back to the source. It seemed pretty obvious to me that if the juice ran through one bulb you’d get full brightness, whereas if it ran through two you’d get half. It sure wasn’t obvious to my old man, but then again he didn’t have Charlie’s illustrations as an explanatory aid.

  LIGHTS WIRED IN SERIES (HALF - BRIGHTNESS)

  LIGHTS WIRED IN PARALLEL (FULL BRIGHTNESS)

  Appendix C

  Charlie has done his best with this one, but no question it’s graduate-level wiring. It helps to know that (a) in house wiring, there’s a “hot” wire and a “neutral” wire, notwithstanding that we’re talking about alternating current here; (b) for safety, the neutral wire is grounded—that is, it’s electrically connected to the earth, typically by means of a wire attached to the house’s cold water supply pipe, which is buried in the ground; (c) in a properly wired house, the metal housing of a fluorescent light fixture is also grounded, either by conduit (in Chicago) or a separate ground wire (most other places); (d) many old fluorescent light fixtures had a ballast that sometimes melted and shorted to the metal housing; (e) in a correctly wired lighting circuit—that is, with the switch on the hot side—a shorted ballast trips the circuit breaker and the lights won’t turn on; but (f ) in a lighting circuit wired by a goof such as myself at age fourteen—that is, with the switch on the neutral side—a shorted ballast provides an alternative path to ground and the lights won’t shut off. The heavy dotted line in the illustration indicates the current path.

  Appendix D

  The drawing below depicts one of the subtleties to which the Chief and I were introduced by Lee the electrician, which had to do with wiring a string of outlets. This will make little sense unless you know that: (a) outlets typically have two screws on either side, to which the wires are attached (many outlets also have push-in wiring terminals, in case you’re in too much of a hurry to use the screws, but these don’t change the argument); (b) in ancient days, it was customary when wiring a string of outlets to attach the wire from the upstream outlet to one screw and the wire from the downstream outlet to the other screw, to save a minute or two of installation time; (c) this was perfectly safe provided the two screws were connected by a fat metal strip, as was the case for many years; (d) however, at some point—I’m chagrined to say it was probably around the time I was born—manufacturers quit using a fat metal strip in favor of a thin metal bridge, which could easily be broken off in case you wanted to separate the two sockets electrically; (e) from then on, daisy-chaining outlets together by connecting the wires to the screws was unwise, because the full current load was carried by the thin metal bridge, and if the load was unusually heavy—for example, if you had a toaster at the far end, as shown in Charlie’s illustration—the bridge might overheat or melt, overheating being the more serious problem due to the danger of fire. The correct procedure is shown on the left side of the illustration—connect the two wires directly with a short lead to the outlet. I ought to have learned this in year one of my electrical studies rather than year twenty-eight, but at least I learned it.

  WIRING MULTIPLE OUTLETS

  ED ZOTTI is a longtime journalist and editor of the syndicated “Straight Dope” newspaper column by Cecil Adams. His articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from architecture to pigeon racing have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has published six books and is the recipient of a Citation for Excellence in Urban Design from the American Institute of Architects. Ed lives in Chicago with his wife, Mary Lubben, and his kids, Ryan, Ani, and Andrew.

  If you’d like to comment on this book, visit Ed Zotti’s blog at www.edzotti.com.

  1 Those having an interest in such things will find a diagram in Appendix A.

  2 Those believing they’re better equipped to handle this than my old man may inspect the diagram in Appendix B.

  3 To a carpenter, a soffit is a boxlike piece of framing hung from the ceiling, commonly found above kitchen cabinets. (Another frequent use
is to conceal air-conditioning ducts.) Soffit lights are built into the soffit to provide task lighting for the counters below.

  4 Maybe not. See Appendix C.

  5 An Italian beef is a sandwich made of spicy sliced beef on Italian bread drenched in juice. Having eaten this delicacy most of my life and assumed it was a staple of Italian national cuisine, I was surprised to learn in college that it was available only in Chicago. This was like finding out Chicago was the only place that had girls. Why Italian beef hasn’t found a wider audience is an abiding mystery. The cheese steak, as I suppose most inhabitants of the East Coast know, is a sandwich consisting of chopped grilled steak with melted cheese on Italian bread, which originated at a place I know only as Pat’s in Philadelphia. Like Italian beef it’s exceedingly tasty, but, also like Italian beef, will kill you if consumed in excess, meaning oftener than maybe once a year. However, I venture to say anyone departing this vale of tears as a result of Italian beef or cheese steak overdose will die with a smile. 6I include this recognizing that even among confirmed city dwellers mass transit is more tolerated than enjoyed, but it remains one of the quintessential urban experiences, and riding it is not without, shall we say, opportunities for personal growth. One night during freshman year at college I and my room-mate Mike (a different Mike) were riding the L, as the rapid transit system in Chicago is known, when a large middle-aged man across the aisle began addressing us in a loud but incomprehensible voice, owing to the fact that he was stone drunk. Growing agitated at his evident failure to communicate, the man restated his proposition several times in a progressively more belligerent tone. Still no go. Mike, a nice Jewish boy from suburban Philadelphia, looked completely terrified, and I felt a little anxious myself. On the third or fourth iteration, however, it dawned on me what the man was saying. “Right!” I shouted back. “Joe Louis! Joe Louis was the world’s greatest fighter!” Delighted at having made himself understood, the man broke into a grin, shook our hands, and staggered off at the next stop.

  6 I hasten to say this wasn’t literally the case. So far as I knew, the kids in what was known in the neighborhood as the “bad building” behind us weren’t affiliated with the Latin Kings street gang; they were freelance delinquents. Even that may be putting it too strongly. While staving in my neighbor’s garage door with a truck couldn’t be dismissed as youthful hijinks, experience suggested that many of the balls, toy cars, and like items that went missing were carried off by five-year-olds unclear on the concept of private property. I still wonder what happened to those four plastic lawn chairs, though.

  7 One recognizes that with the funguslike spread of Starbucks to the suburbs this isn’t as true as it used to be.

  8 Some city people, it must be said, are in denial about this. No disrespect, but New Yorkers are by far the worst offenders. I talked once with a fellow who had moved from Chicago to Brooklyn for career purposes, and who was having a hard time making the adjustment. “People come up with the weirdest rationalizations for living here,” he said. “I wanted to buy a frying pan, and a guy told me, ‘Well, one thing about New York, you can always find a frying pan.’ And I thought, I should hope to God.”

  9 Although there is still a large retail establishment located in the building formerly occupied by Marshall Field’s, the store itself, alas, is no more, having been sold to another company. I forget the name of it.

  10 Crime and neglect by no means exhaust the list of urban perils. In 1992, the year before we bought the Barn House, gas utility workers in a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood called River West opened a valve on a pressure regulator they were overhauling, inadvertently sending a surge of high-pressure gas through the mains serving the surrounding neighborhood. Within a short time eighteen buildings had blown up, killing four people. Although it soon dawned on the gas workers that the howling sirens, explosions, fires, and chaos surrounding them were quite likely their fault, they didn’t shut off the gas for forty minutes pending instructions from their superiors. A few months later, only a few blocks away, a disused freight tunnel passing beneath the Chicago River collapsed, allowing hundreds of millions of gallons of water to flood into the city’s extensive freight-tunnel network, which had formerly been used for deliveries, ash removal, and so on, and connected with the basements of most larger pre-World War II buildings in downtown Chicago. The flood knocked out several electrical substations, caused losses of nearly $2 billion, and rendered a portion of the city’s subway system unusable for three and a half weeks. An investigation determined that the tunnel roof had been damaged almost two years previously by a contractor driving pilings into the riverbed near a bridge. Although an inspector had detected the damage almost immediately and recognized the danger, the city bureaucracy didn’t consider the matter urgent and the tunnel had gone unrepaired. My point isn’t that the people in charge of the municipal infrastructure in Chicago are unusually incompetent—hey, we all make mistakes—but that when things go wrong in an urban context, it’s not just those immediately involved who feel the heat.

  11 Most masonry buildings constructed in Chicago prior to 1975 used a type of brick variously known as “Chicago pink” or “Chicago common.” These bricks, which are basically beige but have an attractive reddish cast to the clay from which they were made, haven’t been manufactured since the closing of the old brickyards. They remain highly prized, however, and command a substantial premium at salvage yards—as of 2003, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, it was two and a half cents a brick.

  12 I learned about the Krupa connection from Charlie the architect, about whom we will hear more later. Charlie was a jazz buff—I learned that when I inquired why it was taking him so long to prepare baseline drawings of the Barn House. Turned out Charlie was spending long afternoons at the house discussing jazz with the previous owner. Charlie assured me I wasn’t being charged by the hour for these colloquia. Whether his firm was paying him by the hour I didn’t ask.

  13 No one knows why a Queen Anne house is so called, nor does there seem to be a consensus on what its defining features are. There was a queen of England named Anne, who ruled from 1702 to 1714; her reign saw the introduction of a style of furniture characterized by (a) walnut construction, (b) cabriole legs (that is, legs shaped like an elongated S, usually having a paw foot or claw-and-ball foot at the bottom), and (c) intricate decoration. I learn this from the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Britannica goes on to say, with reference to houses, that the Queen Anne was also a “red brick architectural style of the 1870s in Great Britain and the United States [having] no real connection with the original Queen Anne period.” Red brick was confined strictly to the chimneys in the Barn House, which was otherwise of frame construction, as are most Queen Anne houses I’ve seen, including the majority of those thus described in every reference book other than the Britannica. The American Heritage History of Notable American Houses (1971) observes that American interest in the so-called Queen Anne style was apparently inspired by certain English buildings seen at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, but notes that the open halls and large fireplaces of those structures recalled the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, not that of Queen Anne. The History further says that “the style was soon transformed into an American vernacular characterized by light frame construction, irregular outlines, verandas and balconies, steep-pitched roofs, and large, open interior spaces [plus] the inevitable porches covered by sloping eaves,” which, as far as the Barn House is concerned, is a little more like it. I mention all this merely to suggest the difficulties faced by architectural historians when confronted by the work of uneducated vernacular carpenters with no sense of system.

  14 A house owned by some friends showed an even more extreme division. It was a beautiful old place in Chicago’s north suburbs—a mansion really, with dark wooden wainscoting, stained-glass windows, a massive fireplace, and enormous rooms clearly intended for entertaining on a grand scale. But the house was oddly designed. If you walked up one staircase, you found yo
urself in a large bedroom suite—but it didn’t connect to the rest of the second floor, except through a concealed door at the back of a closet. The other half of the second floor had its own staircase. Downstairs, we learned, a large pocket door made it possible to divide the first floor into two halves, each with its own door into the kitchen. Our friends had been told that the house had originally been owned by two spinster sisters. They could only guess that the two loathed each other, each living separately in her own half of the house, joining the two halves of the first floor only when they entertained. 4How many households had servants in the 1890s isn’t precisely known. One book I read claimed the number was only 20-25 percent, implying that this fraction was small. But it seems to me that, assuming you had roughly equal numbers of servers and served, the theoretical maximum had to be in the neighborhood of 50 percent, making 25 percent a pretty impressive total. Then again, the fact that a house was equipped for servants didn’t mean there actually were any. My parents’ house in Oak Park, for example, had a butler’s pantry in the dining room that backed up on the regular pantry in the kitchen. The two were separated by a small sliding panel at counter height. The idea apparently was that the cook would place dishes of food on the counter in the kitchen pantry, whereupon the butler would enter the dining room pantry, slide open the panel, extract the dishes, and serve the guests. This was in a house of perhaps eighteen hundred square feet as originally constructed, hardly large enough for one servant, let alone two, and in any case there were no servants’ stairs, maid’s room, and so on. My guess was that the butler’s pantry enabled you to pretend you had servants, only you had given them the night off. Conceivably you might go through the motions of passing dishes through the pantry a few times, but undoubtedly you’d eventually concede it was simpler just to walk through the door.