by Ed Zotti
15 Riis has a great deal more in this vein, which space doesn’t permit my quoting, but here’s one last statistic: Of the 1.4 million people discovered by the 1890 census to be domiciled in Manhattan, Riis noted, an estimated 1.25 million lived in tenements (that is, buildings housing three or more families). Not all of these were abjectly poor, but Riis was of the opinion that virtually all of the approximately 1 million persons living in tenements below 14th Street were, and thus his book shouldn’t properly have been called an account of how the other half lived, but the other 71 percent.
16 Annexation continues apace today—witness Houston, which, thanks to Texas’s permissive annexation law, grew from 73 square miles and 285,000 people in 1940 to 579 square miles and 1,954,000 people in 2000. The champ with regard to land acquisition, though, is Sitka, Alaska, which, owing to a quirk of local law and the scale of the state—the three largest U.S. cities in area are all in Alaska—has only 8,835 people but encompasses 2,874 square miles.
17 This seems to have been a fairly general phenomenon, if you can trust playwrights. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) we learn that when Willy Loman purchased his house in what presumably is an outer borough of New York it was surrounded by trees and flowers; now in his old age it’s hemmed in by apartment buildings. This is generally taken as symbolizing the contraction of Willy’s hopes. Symbol nothing—in those days it was a flat description of events.
18 Not, I feel obliged to say, the current occupant of that office, who is a nice man giving every appearance of honesty. Even if he didn’t I’d still like to keep getting my garbage picked up.
19 If you’re not following this, a drawing of the house as it stood when we bought it may be found on page 50.
20 I don’t mean to suggest it was the only reason. Whatever might be said for the immediate neighborhood, the house on the whole was well situated, being close to the lake, Wrigley Field, and the L, historically the armatures of redevelopment on the north side of Chicago.
21 The price in the early 1990s. It’s a good deal more now.
22 Some longleaf pine is grown on plantations now, but takes decades to produce an appreciable amount of heartwood. Even then the grain is likely to be coarser, since new-growth trees have greater access to sunlight.
23 Before and after drawings of the house may be found on pages 50 and 51. To give credit where it’s due, I should clarify that the perspective rendering we saw initially was drawn by a talented illustrator named Bruce Bondy, who was working off Charlie’s plans. The original fax is the frontispiece of this book.
24 Oh, let’s not be coy. She’s my sister.
25 Yeah, I know, everyone thinks Wi-Fi has rendered such concerns moot. Wait till your kid’s MacBook elbows your PC laptop off the home wireless network. More generally, do you realize that, depending on which band of the radio spectrum your wireless network employs, you’re sharing the line with cordless phones, vehicle location devices, industrial plastic preheaters, microwave motion detectors, TV wireless extensions, cordless earphones, wireless gumball cameras, remote controls, ham radio, and microwave ovens, plus who knows what technologies yet to be invented? That every thought you commit to the airwaves will be vulnerable to any hacker with a radio dish and a laptop? (Sure, trust encryption. The Germans thought the Enigma cipher machine was impregnable, too.) On the upside, contrary to what some may claim, you have nothing to fear from sunspots.
26 The following was sent to me by Lisa, who worked at my newspaper. I thought to paraphrase it but find I can do no better than the original:
“When my boyfriend and I bought a small three-bedroom house [in the city] about ten years ago the first order of business was to gut the dungeon of a kitchen we had inherited. Somehow or another the boyfriend met and hired a couple of beatniks that he met in a bar in Wicker Park to do the kitchen job. He was particularly drawn to them because they were self-proclaimed communists that guaranteed the job at a very reasonable price. The drinking probably helped too. Of course the remodeling took twice as much time as promised—about three months of washing dishes in the bathtub and eating only what we could barbecue in the backyard. Our commies would show up to work for a couple of days then disappear to parts unknown for weeks. Typical contractor behavior, but we couldn’t figure out what they were doing in the meantime seeing how we were their only clients. Turns out our socially conscious, tree-hugging communists spent their off hours organizing protests against every organization that looked at them cross-eyed and spent a lot of time in jail as a result. We found this out when I turned on the six o’clock news just in time to see the cops arresting our contractors for disturbing the peace during the Promise Keepers Convention at Soldier Field. Seems this was their life’s mission. Not as part of a group or anything. Just the two of them and maybe a girlfriend once in a while. Remodeling was just a side job for earning bail money. They did a great job on the kitchen though.”
27 Not anymore. The second largest city in Poland, Lodz, has now grown to 789,000 people, which according to the Tribune exceeds the number of Poles in Chicago by a small margin.
28 It’s worth pointing out that the male love of destruction has nothing to do with testosterone per se. On one of my early trips to the Barn House I took along my eldest, Ryan, then three years old. Thinking to keep him occupied while I worked elsewhere, I gave him a little hammer and pointed him at a disposable stretch of wall, then proceeded to get tied up in a phone conversation. When I went to check on Ryan thirty minutes later, I was startled to discover that he’d laid waste to a good fifteen square feet of plaster and in the process had given himself a blister. I had to buy him work gloves.
29 Howard the architect, who went on to become chief curator of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., told me many years later that numerous women’s shoes turned up in walls during construction projects at that institution, which was housed in a building erected in 1886. This led him to think either women in D.C. had some mighty odd habits or else carpenters thought shoes were a token of good luck.
30 I’m informed Brady Bunch haircuts have made a comeback in some quarters. So?
31 I had it coming. Once, on the first day of a fishing trip, I caught a fish and Bob didn’t. The next morning at breakfast I announced to our group that Bob and I had always had a friendly rivalry, but that midway through high school, by which time Bob was an inch taller than me and twenty-five pounds heavier, I had come to the realization that violence was immature. “From then on,” I declared a bit too grandly, “I resolved to outdo Bob based on intellect alone.”
32 Gus in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding thinks the answer to all of life’s little problems is Windex, and many have a touching faith in superglue and duct tape, but for lasting resolution of vexatious situations, in my opinion, you can’t beat drywall screws and a Makita cordless driver-drill.
33 A certain school of thought holds that cellulose is just as good as fiberglass and a lot cheaper. I’m willing to concede this may be true of new cellulose. Hundred-year-old cellulose, however, isn’t something I want leaking particulates into my breathing space.
34 Her spelling, not ours, which she adopted in eighth grade. She was Annie during most of the events in this book, but if I use that spelling now I’ll never hear the end of it.
35 This figure has now been exceeded by Detroit, which as of 2005 had lost 963,000 residents since its 1950 peak. War-ravaged cities have had greater losses; Berlin’s population as of 1946 had fallen 1.3 million from the prewar level. Undoubtedly the most dramatic example of urban decline is ancient Rome, whose population is thought to have fallen from roughly one million during imperial times to about 50,000 in the Middle Ages.
36 My friend Philip Bess, an architect and baseball fan, published an equally arresting illustration of urban decline in a booklet entitled City Baseball Magic: Plain Talk and Uncommon Sense about Cities and Baseball Parks (1989). The booklet contained two fascinating maps. One depicted the environs of Tiger Stadium
in Detroit in 1921, nine years after the park was built. The second showed the same neighborhood in 1986. The maps showed not just second showed the same neighborhood in 1986. The maps showed not just the streets around the stadium but the buildings, represented as black shapes. At first glance it was scarcely possible to believe the maps depicted the same district. In 1921, Tiger Stadium had been part of a densely built-up community, with buildings occupying virtually every lot. In 1986, easily three-quarters of the buildings were gone. Some close to the stadium had been torn down for parking; others had made way for an expressway cut through the heart of the area. Still others had been replaced by larger structures. But most had simply disappeared, presumably having been abandoned or burned out and demolished during Detroit’s long decline.
37 Austin had an unusual past. In the nineteenth century it had been part of Cicero, a thinly settled township that it shared with Oak Park and what would become the town of Cicero, future headquarters of Al Capone. In the late 1890s there had been a row over the extension of the Lake Street L into the township—the go-getter Austinites had been in favor, whereas the rustics of Oak Park had been opposed. After the usual machinations surrounding transit in those days (an ailing town trustee had been dragged from his bed at one a.m. to vote in favor of the extension, breaking a tie, after opponents had gone home), Austin prevailed. Out of spite, the residents of Oak Park and the rest of Cicero engineered a complex annexation election in 1899 in which, over the opposition of Austinites, they voted Austin into Chicago while retaining independence for themselves. This made Austin the only neighborhood I ever heard of that wound up in the city because it had been kicked out of the suburbs.
38 There were a few remnants of Austin’s early days as well. At the end of our block a large white frame building stood at the rear of a lot, where it served as a garage. One day when I was six or seven—this was in the 1950s—I looked up at the double doors in the upper story of the building and realized with a shock: That’s a hayloft. This is a barn. I felt I had discovered some priceless artifact of early human habitation, like the cave paintings at Lascaux.
39 Even the rich couldn’t always manage it. In Chicago after the fire, the wealthiest section of town was Prairie Avenue, a street of mansions south of the Loop. But the soot, noise, and congestion due to rail lines in the vicinity soon made living conditions intolerable. In 1882, Bertha Palmer, the wife of a wealthy hotelman and the queen of the local social scene, moved her family to a mansion on the north lakefront, then mostly undeveloped. Chicago’s other moguls soon followed, and by the turn of the century Prairie Avenue had emptied out. Many mansions were torn down or fell into disrepair and the district became mostly industrial. Mrs. Palmer didn’t have to move twice, however. Her north lakefront neighborhood, which became known locally as the Gold Coast, remained one of the wealthiest urbanized areas in the United States more than a century later. I cite this last point because it’s fashionable in some quarters to portray the rich as predators who take over a neighborhood for a time, then abandon it for the next urban bauble. On the contrary, observation suggests that, whatever predatory qualities the rich may have, once they settle into a place, they stay quite a while.
40 I recognize that Native Americans weren’t crazy about having been cast as savages either.
41 That there’s a smallish (if vocal) pro-gentrification camp in the academy I freely allow, but we’ll return to such matters later.
42 The closest I’ve found is This Damn House! by Margo Kaufman (1996), which describes a home with apartment buildings on either side of it and street people napping on the lawn, which makes it pretty urban in my book; but the locale is Venice, California, a beach town about twenty-five miles from downtown Los Angeles.
43 Broadway, as one might suppose, is one of numerous city streets throughout the United States named after the famous thoroughfare in Manhattan. Originally it had been called Evanston Avenue, after the Chicago suburb toward which the street leads. Evanston was named for John Evans (1814-1897), a doctor who helped establish the first insane asylum and school for the deaf in Indiana; Mercy Hospital in Chicago; the Illinois Medical Society; the Illinois Republican party; and Northwestern University. Having been appointed the second territorial governor of Colorado, Evans was instrumental in the development of that state and helped found what is now the University of Denver. A fellow like that is worth naming things after. One concedes that Evans was instructed to resign as governor of Colorado after a massacre of Native Americans on his watch. However, that wasn’t why Evanston Avenue was changed to Broadway. In 1913, in one of those spasms of Second Cityism that periodically grips Chicago, a north-side business association succeeded in getting the name changed during a reorganization of city street nomenclature, apparently with the aim of lending the avenue an aura of glamour and excitement. I won’t say this hope was entirely ill-founded, but results were a long time coming.
44 I’m thinking of “trattoria.” You have to admit it makes sense.
45 A currency exchange in Chicago is a street-corner establishment that cashes checks and provides other routine financial services. Such businesses are apparently unique to Chicago and stem from the days when Illinois law prohibited branch banking.
46 The restaurant did, in fact, call itself a trattoria.
47 I found this out on the Internet. You can find out anything on the Internet.
48 I mention this in recognition of the fact that Edgar Bergen’s heyday is long past. Fame in the United States being a fleeting thing, it’s perhaps also advisable to state that Candace Bergen’s most recent claim thereto was having starred in the title role of the TV sitcom Murphy Brown from 1988 to 1998.
49 I hadn’t then been introduced to the mystical HVAC concept known as “flow,” the practical import of which is that it doesn’t matter where the registers and returns are located, as long as flow—that is, air movement—is thereby obtained.
50 I don’t mean to suggest, incidentally, that purple primer is unique to Chicago, but it’s far from universally required.
51 His actual words, and I’m quoting as closely as I can remember, were, “Oh, my. We’ll have to do something about that.”
52 It’s not just people in Chicago who think this way. Once while walking in the mountains near Tucson, Arizona, I stepped on a rusty nail. The doctor at the emergency room asked if I’d been given a tetanus booster recently. I couldn’t remember. Learning that I was from Chicago, the doctor asked, “Are you a Democrat?”
53 I had lived in Chicago too long to be overawed by City Hall. In the late 1980s the city and the state of Illinois agreed to build a pedestrian tunnel under the sidewalk connecting City Hall to the state office building across the street. The city began digging on its end and the state began digging on the other. When the workers met in the middle they found that the floor heights of the two halves of the tunnel differed by nine inches—not bad if you were boring through Mont Blanc, but this was a tunnel of maybe seventy-five feet. It turned out that the engineers designing the tunnel had consulted old blueprints, which commonly express floor heights in terms of a standard downtown reference point known as the “city datum.” At least that’s what the drafter of the plans for the state office building had done. The dope who had prepared the plans for City Hall, however, had expressed the floor heights with reference to the bottom of the building. The tunnel workers fudged the difference with a ramp.
54 I learned this from studying the works of Dan Holohan, who has published books about maintaining old heating systems and operates a Web site, heatinghelp.com. Dan was kind enough to answer a few questions for this book and I have no reason to doubt anything he says. However, had I read his books before embarking on the installation of the heating system in the Barn House, I would never have had the nerve to start.
55 It’s doubtful we could have gotten some at any price. Judging from its slightly yellowish cast, we guessed that the original foundation blocks were Joliet limestone, which derived its color from i
ts high iron content and the quarries for which had long since closed.
56 An oddity of bricklaying, or at any rate of Polish bricklaying, is that one commences by placing a layer of tar paper on top of the concrete footing, and then putting the first course of bricks on top of that. The purpose of the tar paper, I suppose, is to prevent ground dampness from seeping into the bricks (concrete blocks are notoriously prone to moisture problems, and require not only tar paper but an application of sealant after the wall is erected). However, the result is that the bricks are not, strictly speaking, attached to the foundation, but rather are sitting on top of it. I noticed this after the bricklayers had finished their work and pointed it out to Jerry, who hadn’t previously