The Barn House (30 page)

I had nothing to do with the block party, but I knew a few of the people involved in organizing it. Many were graduates of the University of Notre Dame or St. Mary's College, its neighbor in South Bend, Indiana.

Growing up, I confess it had never quite sunk in that Notre Dame was in Chicago's orbit.
⁸²
I realize this bespeaks a certain obliviousness on my part. I had of course heard of Notre Dame, Ara Parseghian, and the golden dome; I'd seen
Knute Rockne: All-American
, with Pat O'Brien and Ronald Reagan. Just for that reason, I thought of the school as a remote national icon, like the Washington Monument or Fort Knox. This impression was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that Notre Dame was in Indiana, which Chicagoans from childhood (to be precise, from their first car trip to Michigan) regard as a primitive backwater on a par with Chad or, perhaps more aptly, the desolate reaches of eastern Germany—a wilderness of swamps, rusting industrial infrastructure, and deserted towns, overhung by a stench that would kill a goat.
⁸³
South Bend, it's true, was a pleasant enough hamlet well beyond the most toxic industrial zone, but that only heightened the sense of antipodean isolation. My mother had taken me on an excursion to Notre Dame when I was nine or ten; it might as well have been on the banks of the Seine.

I was obliged to take a different view of things on graduating from college and settling on the north side. Domers, as Notre Dame alumni called themselves, were an inescapable part of the Chicago social scene—far more so than graduates of my alma mater, Northwestern, or the University of Chicago. This stemmed in large part from their indomitable will to party, which Lord knows wasn't a major motivator for the U. of C. Maroons.

Sociability, of course, isn't unusual among the collegiate set; what distinguished the Domers was their ability to put it on a commercial basis. At some point during the 1980s I became acquainted with what I thought of as the boat people, the nucleus of which consisted of two Notre Dame graduates who shortly after moving to Chicago had begun entertaining themselves and their many friends by organizing parties. Several of the more memorable events were held on rented boats, which spent the evening plying the local waterways. Cruise boats in Chicago were not then numerous. As I heard the story, which may have been colored a bit by beer, the principals found themselves beneath a table toward the end of one of these revels and vowed to establish a boat company so they could have waterborne junkets whenever they felt like it. A week later, sobriety evidently having done nothing to diminish the charm of this notion, they flew down to Florida to inspect a boat they eventually bought. A year or two after that they commissioned the construction of a custom party . . . well, yacht would be putting things too grandly, but it was a nice little craft. In 1987, Mary and I, by no means party people, nonetheless thought it would be a hoot to get married on this vessel.
⁸⁴
Today cruise boats in Chicago constitute a sizable fleet.

These were the people Jack Wall had enlisted to help revive his tumbledown parish. They were well suited to the task, and not just because of their proclivity for parties. If gays and artists were the shock troops of gentrification, Domers were the occupying army. They filled entire apartment buildings in downtown Chicago. (Well, maybe not entire buildings, but I know of one where they were so numerous it was commonly known as the dorm.)

A few Notre Dame alums didn't merely live in downtown apartments, they built them. In the mid-1980s a large downtown housing project had been constructed a couple blocks from Old St. Patrick's by a team of local developers, one of whom was a former Notre Dame football star. The venture was a typical Chicago production from beginning to end, involving massive public subsidies, a mortgage default, and years of protests after the developers tried to evade federal rules requiring that some apartments be set aside for low-income tenants (they coughed up a few in the end).

But eventually the buildings filled up. Virtually no one had lived in the area previously; now it was home to several thousand people, at least a few of whom were children. In 1989, Father Wall hired a Roman Catholic sister named Mary Ellen Caron to begin preschool and kindergarten classes for thirty-five youngsters in two rooms in one of the apartment towers. The school grew with surprising speed. By the time we enrolled our kids just five years later, more than four hundred students attended and classes were being held in multiple buildings—some preschool classes were conducted in a former Catholic high school on the near north side that had shut down a few years previously. Starting a few days after we moved into the Barn House, Mary had been taking Ryan and Ani there each morning on the L, after which she continued downtown to work.

The school was everything we could have hoped for, with a bright, enthusiastic staff, a well-thought-out curriculum, and an exemplary commitment to diversity. Though the majority of children in the school came from upper-middle-class families, the most popular kid in preschool was Francisco, whose parents were cops—the dad, a mounted patrolman, rode over on his horse one day and let the kids pet it.

I ought to emphasize that Father Wall, a deeply religious man, was trying to attract people back to the church in organizing the school and other parish programs, and hadn't had as his primary aim the resuscitation of Chicago. That was just how it worked out. I should also clarify that not everyone who played an important role in the resurgence of the parish and its school was a Domer, Irish, or in some cases even Catholic. (The original group organizing the world's largest block party, for example, had gone to Marquette University, a Jesuit school in Milwaukee.) Better simply to credit the city-guy mafia. The essential fact remains that, at a time in our lives when our children's education had become a matter of urgent concern, and the thought of the suburbs might have wafted through our minds, a first-class school had materialized out of thin air. The speed with which things had come together evidently surprised Father Wall, too. Without really meaning to, and with no scheme of empire in mind, he had tapped into Chicago's formidable Irish Catholic-dominated establishment. An early effort to attract young adults involved asking prominent Chicago Catholics to speak on the role of faith in their lives; you can guess where that led. The mayor and his wife became supporters of the school at an early stage, sent their kids there, and were honorary cochairs of the school's annual fund-raiser—we watched with fascination during the silent auction as a clutch of real estate developers outbid one another to join the mayor's foursome for a round of golf. (The winning bid, if memory serves, was upwards of $10,000, a small sum in some circles but impressive in Chicago.)

The school, eventually renamed the Frances Xavier Warde Schools and popularly known as FXW, was the first real indication we had that trying to raise a family in the city might not be the nightmare we had feared. We became friendly with the parents of our children's classmates. Some were rehabbers like us; others lived downtown, either in lakefront high-rises or new close-in residential developments, many built on old railroad yards. Some were professionals; one couple owned a legendary Italian lemonade stand on the west side not far from our old town house. Quite a few, it occurs to me now, were traders.

We were fortunate the school thing was working out, because the house still monopolized much of my attention. In November the floor finishers showed up. We moved out while they were at work, having been warned that the noise and dust were intolerable, but I returned each day to the house to move radiators and such and keep an eye on things. As always, the workers were Polish, although these men weren't the same breed as the carpenters—anyway, the firm's owner wasn't. He showed up on the first day accompanied by a much younger blonde in a fur coat, tight jeans, and high-heeled boots, evidence to my eye of a different set of priorities. He spoke minimal English, but his manner suggested that a certain amount of time had been allotted for the project and delays wouldn't be cheerfully brooked.

It was my project and my money, of course, and I indicated via Tony, who was on hand to translate, that certain repairs were essential. Assurances were duly made, but after the bosses departed it was just me and four men whose English was mainly limited to
okay
and
reparation
, which I took to mean “repair.” With hand gestures I managed to communicate with the group's carpenter, who turned out to be an adherent of the right way—one learned to recognize the brethren through secret signs, in the manner of early Christians—and we got as much done as we could.

It helped that I'd planned ahead. In the front hall, for example, there were those two large holes cut in the handsome heart-pine flooring for heating registers, then inelegantly patched with mismatching wood after the registers were removed. Early on I'd noticed that a peninsula of heart-pine planking extended from the front hall a few feet into the rear hall, presumably a vestige of some forgotten room reconfiguration. Soon after the commencement of work I'd had the peninsula sawed off even with the hall doorway and the excess planking removed and stored. Now I had the flooring-crew carpenter use the salvaged material to replace the ugly patches, which he did with admirable precision. When later refinished, the patched sections were indistinguishable from the rest of the floor.

Once repairs in a given room were complete, sanding immediately commenced using massive floor sanders having the appearance of vacuum cleaners designed by the Russian army. Fat cables sprouting from the handles trailed across the floor and down the basement steps. A friend experienced in such matters had warned me not to inspect the electrical hookup:
You don't want to know
. But of course I did. I found that the floor guys had removed the front cover from the main electrical panel and jammed giant screwdrivers into the 240-volt terminal blocks above the main breaker; the sander cables were hooked to the screwdrivers with enormous alligator clips. The nearest circuit protection was in the alley; an accident would not only vaporize one or more floor guys, it'd kill the power to half the neighborhood. I retreated back up the steps.

The final step in finishing was applying stain and varnish. I'd selected a common stain called golden oak. Calling me over to consult, the floor guys gave me to understand that they thought the color was a little dark—they wanted to know if I wanted to dilute it with mineral spirits.
Sure
, I said. They mixed up a batch and poured some on a section of newly sanded floor. It looked like India ink. Did I approve? They might as well have been brain surgeons asking my opinion of the sutures.
Go ahead
, I said, hoping not to be appalled. Once rubbed in—the process was extraordinarily fast—the stain proved to be indeed dark, but not objectionably so. Charlie, who visited later, went further: “It's perfect,” he said. Though I had had the impression of having narrowly avoided disaster throughout, when the job was complete I had to confess the workmanship was impeccable.

 

Y
ou'll excuse me, but we have a few practical matters we need to discuss before proceeding further: