The Barn House (17 page)

The water-supply piping was less problematic than gas from the standpoint of leaks, and for a time I considered doing that. I had a pretty thorough general knowledge of plumbing arcana. I could speak with confidence of P-traps, street elbows, and unions (the steel kind, not the labor organization); I had gone to the plumbing supply store as a boy, looked the counterman in the eye, and ordered couplings, hermaphrodite fittings, and two-inch nipples—plumbing terminology isn't for the easily embarrassed. But that was just the start. Plumbing, I knew all too well, was an esoteric art. There was the mysterious matter of the “wet vent,” which I understood in a general way, but not so I could pass the journeyman's test. I had caulked the joints of a four-inch cast-iron soil pipe with the exotic fibrous vegetable known as oakum, a vinelike commodity that I imagined had been harvested from the mighty baobab by pygmies in the rain forest, as a prelude to having my father and George seal the joint by pouring in molten lead heated to 700 degrees Celsius in a miniature furnace. But I had never poured the lead myself, and given that we needed to install a good deal of cast-iron soil pipe in addition to the gas pipe, I felt that now wasn't the time to learn. I'd have time to acquire one new trade but not two, and the one had better involve work I couldn't otherwise get done, or only at exorbitant expense. I've earlier alluded to my difficulties with heating contractors. I resolved to do the heating myself.

I knew little about heating systems, but the topic held a primitive fascination for me. The Barn House was a veritable museum of heating technology. Originally it had been heated with a gravity warm-air system, by far the simplest type of central heating, which operated by convection. Comparable systems had been used in ancient times. One needed a heat source at the base of the house and a system of flues. The heated air became buoyant, rose through the flues, and warmed the rooms. When the air cooled, it sank and returned to the heat source via a central return duct. One enjoyed a steadily circulating air flow for as long as the heat source kept operating, without the need for fans or other expedients. In consequence, according to one gushing account I read, the system was “wonderfully silent.”

It's fair to say the version in the Barn House was also wonderfully ineffectual. The flues had to run through the center of the house rather than the exterior walls, lest the rising air cool off too quickly. No heat was provided near the windows, where heat loss in winter months was most severe. So far as we could tell, in the Barn House there had been only one duct to the second floor, to the sitting room that adjoined the master bedroom. The master bedroom itself had been heated by a fireplace. The rear bedroom, from what I could tell, had had no heat source at all.

A heating system like that might suffice for some balmy Sunbelt town, where the locals spoke of the coming ice age when the temperature dipped below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but this was Chicago. Mrs. Carr had shivered through the winters for only six years. In 1897, she had replaced the original heating plant with a gravity hot-water system—we knew the date, you'll recall, because a train schedule from that year had been stuffed around one of the radiator pipes. Radiators had been installed and holes for the pipes drilled through the floors. The pipes themselves were exposed to view. Few traces of the gravity warm-air system remained by the time we bought the house other than patches in the flooring where the registers had been.

A gravity hot-water system also worked by convection, electric pumps not having become practical when the technology was first devised. A boiler in the basement heated water, which became buoyant and rose through supply pipes into radiators in the rooms above. Having shed its heat, the cooled and now denser water returned to the boiler via a separate set of return pipes. The system worked solely because of the difference in density between hot and cold water; it had no moving parts.

A gravity hot-water system had the considerable advantage that it worked. Its disadvantage, if one judges from the literature available today, was that it required an extensive practical knowledge of fluid dynamics. In order to ensure balanced delivery of heat to radiators on different floors, one might tap off the side or the top of the supply pipe to take advantages of minute differences in the heating gradient of the water in the pipes (or so I read today—there was no evidence that whoever installed the Barn House's heating system had been aware of such niceties). None of this was of importance now; an electric pump had been installed long previously, and the water now flowed through the system because the pump forced it to. But I didn't know that yet. I didn't know anything. My ignorance of what lay ahead was complete.

The one other type of central heating system then in common use was steam. It was never used in the Barn House, although my neighbor Ned's house had it; I mention it solely because it was cool. The ingenuity of steam heat appealed to me. It depended on the fact that water when boiled expands to sixteen hundred times its liquid volume. (Or maybe seventeen hundred times; every time my brother-in-law the Ph.D. figures this out he gets a different answer.) The steam penetrated to the farthest reaches of the system without pumps. You could heat the largest house, or for that matter an apartment building—most apartment buildings constructed in Chicago before World War II are heated with steam to this day. Another advantage of steam was that it required no special skills on the part of the pipe fitter. It was merely necessary that the single pipe connecting each radiator to the furnace (or rather, judging from Ned's house, to the basement supply loop) ascend continuously en route, so that when the steam gave up its heat in the radiator and condensed, it would flow back down to the boiler as water. The steam, meanwhile, would continue to flow in the opposite direction—all of this occurring, mind you, within the confines of
the same pipe.
As I say, it was ingenious. Supposedly it was also more dangerous than a hot-water system, since the steam operated at higher temperatures and pressures than a hot-water system and presented a greater likelihood of a boiler explosion.
⁵⁴
While this may have been so, a likelier mishap in my observation was that all the water would boil off, with unhappy consequences. I knew a guy rehabbing a steam-heated house—a Victorian town house of baronial splendor, it made the Barn House look like a chicken coop—who went on vacation one winter and left the place in the care of a buddy. Unfortunately he had neither installed a system to replenish the boiler water automatically (Ned had one of these), nor conveyed to his friend the resultant necessity of refilling the water by hand. The boiler ran dry, the heat stopped, and the water supply pipes froze and burst. I wasn't present to view the result, but I gather it wasn't pretty.

Radiators, whether heated by water or steam, presented some problems. They were big and clunky. They took up floor space and were difficult to move. They collected dust. They were in the way when you wanted to paint the room or install carpet or flooring. The valves sometimes leaked. Trapped air had to be bled out of hot-water radiators periodically; the steam ones hissed when the heat came up. They were a bitch to paint.

Their only real advantage was that they provided the best heat. In a well-designed system, the force of the water flow didn't diminish appreciably over a long pipe run. (In part this was a matter of decreasing the pipe diameter with distance, taking advantage of the Venturi effect to increase the water's velocity.) Rooms in the far corners of the house stayed as warm as those near the furnace. The system was quiet—at night all you could hear was the faint whirring of the pump. It didn't blow dust around the house. The room temperature didn't fluctuate markedly as the furnace cycled on and off—the hot water in the radiators kept the room warm even after the pump stopped. If you came in some night chilled to the bone you could sit on a radiator to warm up. Plus we already had the furnace and most of the radiators.

We also wanted central air-conditioning, and that meant ducts. But since the ducts would only be used for cooling, and since the exterior/interior temperature difference in the summer was 25 degrees at most, versus 70 degrees or more in the depths of a continental winter, one could be a lot more casual about locating the registers.

I was, in my way, quite systematic. I wanted to have the heating system properly engineered, to avoid hot and cold spots. Charlie recommended an engineer named Kent, who had done work for his firm. Kent, a taciturn young fellow with a mustache, had come out to the house and spent a day measuring radiators, inspecting the furnace, and making notes on a legal pad. I gave him a copy of the blueprints, and later sent him detailed information about each room in the house on a form he had given me: dimensions, size and orientation of windows and exterior doors, type of insulation, and similar matters. I gathered that he entered all of this into a computer program that calculated heating requirements.

In the fullness of time a cylinder arrived in the mail containing several large sheets of rolled-up onionskin—a schematic of the house marked up in Kent's brisk hand, showing the locations of the radiators and the routing and diameter of the pipes. I spread them out on the table, studied them, and—Charlie had likely warned Kent about this—proceeded to redo them. Kent had estimated the heating capacity of the individual radiators and assigned them to different locations based on the needs of the rooms. But he hadn't taken into account the
shape
of the radiators. He had tall ones standing next to low windows, wide ones in places only narrow ones would fit. He had, moreover, drawn the main supply pipes in the basement on the assumption that the furnace would be in the front of the house, whereas I had now decided I wanted it to be in the middle. I also had various ideas about minimizing the visual clutter of the pipes, and leaving enough room to mount the air-conditioning ducts, and other technical minutiae concerning which there is no need to bore the reader. The upshot was that I got out my own roll of paper and, as I had done so often before, redrew the plan.

Meanwhile I set about purchasing more radiators. This entailed going to the secondhand radiator yard out on Milwaukee Avenue and dealing with Peter, an enormous monosyllabic Ukrainian in his twenties who was perhaps not Fulbright scholar material but compensated by having impressively oversized muscles of the sort formerly seen in
Li'l Abner
cartoons, which were undoubtedly handy in his line of work. Here again I had the sense of having been transported to another age. Cities had been built by the likes of Peter, mighty men who accomplished monumental tasks—you try taking a radiator apart—using appropriately scaled tools, in Peter's case the biggest pipe wrench I had ever seen. Peter presided over a forest of used radiators of all descriptions, removed from buildings that were being wrecked or renovated. Some of the radiators were small—these were still being manufactured. But mostly I was interested in the big ones, which to my knowledge hadn't been made since the 1960s. The largest specimens, dating from the era before wall insulation, contained more steel than you found nowadays in some cars. One took a selfish pleasure in purchasing these mammoth fixtures; it was like owning the Brooklyn Bridge. I strode happily around the radiator yard selecting a half dozen radiators of the proper size, arranging with Peter in a couple of cases to add or subtract fins.

The requisite number of radiators having been assembled, the next job was to move them to the desired locations in the house. Initially I had hoped to get the carpenters to do this. They were built like trucks, and had already helped me move the furnace from the front chimney to the rear one, a formidable project. But Tony and Jerry begged off. Some of the radiators were crushingly heavy and had to be moved to different floors. They felt trying to manhandle them up and down the narrow steps was foolish. “Somebody could get killed,” said Jerry.
Some people have no sense of adventure,
I thought. But there was no arguing with them. I wondered aloud: “What am I supposed to do?”

“Rent a crane,” Tony suggested.

A crane? They let civilians rent cranes? I figured I'd have as much luck leasing an aircraft carrier. However, on looking in the phone book later—the phone company in those days published a separate volume of the Yellow Pages for commercial users, a copy of which I providentially happened to have—I found that there was in fact a category of listings entitled “Cranes—Rental.” Before I could begin phoning, though, Tony called up with a reference of his own. Inside of half an hour I was talking to Cleo, who was—who knew such people existed?—a freelance crane owner-operator. The rate was $85 an hour, four-hour minimum. He could come out in a few days.

If ever there were a good time to bring in a crane, this was it. The rear of the house had now been demolished and the debris hauled away, but construction hadn't yet begun. The house's backside was open to the weather, covered only with a tarp at the end of the day; it would be easy to swing radiators in and out. The only problem was getting the crane onto the property. The driveway at the side of the house was too narrow. Tony suggested taking down the rear fence and having the crane enter the backyard from the alley. It sounded like a sensible idea to me.

We were scheduled to move the radiators on a crisp day in early November. Tony had earlier detailed a couple of carpenters to dismantle the back fence. I'd been down the street on an errand when Cleo arrived with his crane; he had maneuvered it into the backyard on his own. As I walked up the driveway, I could hear a hissing sound from the rear of the house. Coming round to the backyard, I saw the crane. It was close to the house, with its boom raised and its jacks lowered. It had four immense wheels, each the size of a ten-year-old child. In the cab was a stocky man whom I took to be Cleo. He didn't look anywhere near as cheerful as a man who owned his own crane might reasonably be expected to be. A glance showed why. The hissing sound, now quite loud, was coming from the crane's front tires. They were both punctured.