The Barn House (42 page)

It seems clear enough to me that gentrification broadly speaking is a relatively old phenomenon, aspects of which were evident in the mid-nineteenth century;
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that it's a common though by no means inevitable consequence of urbanization occurring throughout the world; that notwithstanding its being fundamentally a product of cities it can be found in rural as well as urban areas; that even in our hubba-hubba age it's a leisurely and complex process not easily started or stopped absent radical measures; and that—pivotal point—it isn't inherently good or bad except to the extent, and I assure you I say this without irony, that practical advantages accrue to stability and don't to catastrophic decline. While it would be foolish to claim a gentrified neighborhood will never deteriorate, it's much more likely in my view to manage urban challenges successfully than a community to which people have no attachment other than convenience. I'd go so far as to say that, in a dynamic society like the United States, a city will either gentrify or die.

The point is worth emphasizing. In their early days big cities and their neighborhoods follow a predictable arc—an initial boom, a period of prosperity, then (with rare exceptions) decline, typically in tandem with the expiration or departure of the industries that were the reason the community was built in the first place. In this last stage, the housing stock deteriorates, local problems mount, and flashier accommodations become available someplace else. Departing residents are replaced by progressively poorer ones, perhaps some newly arrived ethnic group. (I once heard a suburbanite say he was thinking of selling his house—Koreans were starting to move in.) If the process continues unchecked for a long time the community becomes a slum, and if things really tank the city empties out and the buildings crumble or are pulled down. Examples of towns that have reached this extreme state can be found throughout the world.

In some neighborhoods in some cities, though, the process of decline reverses. The impetus varies. In the imperial capitals of Europe, the bohemian element settled in districts offering access to prospective patrons. The housing stock, however dilapidated, may have some intrinsic charm. The neighborhood may have amenities, such as proximity to downtown or a body of water, or it may offer a pretty prospect. It may simply look urban—as I say, I'm convinced this was the determinant in much of Chicago. The main thing is, people come to feel that a place is special in some way and begin to invest in homes and businesses. Perhaps they're simply locals who've made some money; probably more often they're newcomers.
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The result is the same either way: Eventually the neighborhood is perceived as more desirable (quaint, edgy, what have you), property values begin to rise, and—again, we need to be blunt—departing residents are replaced by more affluent ones. The neighborhood has begun to gentrify.

Gentrification is a block-by-block process. Maturation, in the sense that I use the term, operates at the level of the city (or at least the neighborhood) as a whole. It has two elements, one visible and one not, to both of which gentrification contributes. The visible element is urbanity—the city's beauty, vitality, and amenity. Gentrified neighborhoods are attractive, bustle with life, and offer the multitude of conveniences great and small that one expects to find in a fully realized urban place. The invisible element lies in the attitudes and expectations of those who live and work in the city. Some are there mainly because of circumstance—they were born there, that's where their job or family is, and so on. Others are simply consumers, taking advantage of what the city has to offer and giving little back—a good many affluent residents of gentrified neighborhoods fall into this category.

But some—these are the essential ones—are there because of the city itself. They make an emotional investment in it, and quite likely a financial and personal one as well. They fix up a house, plant a garden, raise a family, join a community organization, volunteer. Not all these people are gentrifiers, but a lot of them are. No great city can arise without a sizable core of this group, who enjoy urban life and are willing to put themselves to some trouble for its sake.

And cities always mean trouble. The giddy day may come when your chances of getting robbed, beaten, or killed aren't significantly greater in the city than in the suburbs, and poverty and homelessness are only unpleasant memories. Even then, though, cities will remain more crowded and unpredictable, filled with people whose language you don't know and whose culture is different from your own. There will always be more dirt, more noise, more crazies, more congestion, more risk. For those of a certain sensibility cities also promise a richer life, but it comes at a price, and not all care to pay.

Some cities mature more quickly than others. A few so dominate the life of a wealthy nation that their emergence as metropolises is all but assured—New York and London are in this category. Others are blessed with spectacular sites, pleasant weather, or similar advantages. San Francisco, for example, whatever its economic ups and downs, has long been sustained by the conviction of its citizens that they live in one of the favored places of the earth.

Others—I expect this is true of most declining industrial cities—take longer to find their place. I think what sustains the city folk who live in these towns isn't so much the gritty reality that may then surround them as the
idea
of the city—what it might someday become. It's the equivalent of buying an old house because it has potential. Few share that vision in the early going. It's only in the final stages that the path seems easy, if things ever get to that point.

Chicago was in this last category. In its early years it was the classic American boomtown. Founded in 1833 and largely destroyed in the 1871 fire, it nonetheless had become the second-largest city in America by 1890, leading boosters to believe it was destined to become the preeminent city on the continent, and possibly the planet. The idea wasn't as off the wall as it now sounds. The “white city” created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition captured the imagination of the globe; during the 1920s the city would surpass Berlin to become the fourth largest city in the world.

The 1909 Burnham plan gave magnificent expression to these lofty ambitions. It's a remarkable document to read even now, proposing a sweeping program of civic improvements befitting a world capital—islands in the lake, wide boulevards, grand civic buildings. Okay, maybe it was delusional, but you can see why people got caught up in it. As depicted in Jules Guerin's glowing watercolors, Burnham's fantasies look tantalizingly real. It's easy to imagine the reaction among Chicago's civic elite:
This rocks. Let's do it all.

Remarkably, the city came fairly close to doing just that. Although it would be a stretch to say Chicago was rebuilt as drawn, the plan's main features, particularly those having to do with the central business district and lakefront, are easily recognizable in a modern aerial photo of the city. Even more remarkably, the work was accomplished without the leadership of a dominant, long-lived personality comparable to New York's Robert Moses. Burnham died in 1912. Walter Moody, managing director of the Chicago Plan Commission and a tireless promoter whose
Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago
was drilled into the city's school-children for years, died in 1920. It didn't matter. The work was taken up by others and pursued with minimal interruption for close to fifty years—a period marked by wars, gangland violence, municipal corruption, and prolonged economic depression. The last major portion of the lakefront park system—virtually all of it was built on landfill—was completed in 1958. The result was nearly twenty miles of beaches, harbors, and open space, plus numerous museums, monuments, concert venues, a zoo, and numerous other cultural and recreational facilities, an achievement unique among Great Lakes cities and not bad for any town anywhere.

Long before 1958, however, Chicago's larger hopes had faded. Sure, it was big and rich; following World War II the city was home to the largest concentration of heavy industry in the world—its factories and mills employed 668,000 people at their peak in 1947. But it hadn't become the world's or even the country's largest city—its population peaked in 1950 at 3.6 million, less than half that of New York. More important, it lacked a mature city's sense of itself. In a 1952 series of
New Yorker
essays that hung the city with the indelible nickname “the Second City,” the journalist A. J. Liebling acidly described Chicago's shrunken ambitions: “The city . . . has the personality of man brought up in the expectation of a legacy who has learned in middle age that it will never be his.” The lakefront parks and other great civic works concealed what Liebling described as “a boundless agglutination of streets, dramshops, and low buildings without urban character”: “what [you] see is like a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it.”

It took most of the twentieth century for Chicago to grow into its clothes. The process started earlier than most realize and was excruciatingly slow. The vanguard then as today was the now-familiar collection of artists, musicians, gays, bohemians, and the like who began congregating in down-at-heels neighborhoods with lots of character and cheap rent. On the north side gentrification arguably got under way in 1927 when the former Art Institute of Chicago students Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller began converting a decaying Victorian mansion at 155 W. Burton Place in Old Town into artists' studios. (The eccentric complex, one of a block of similar buildings recently nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, is a sight to see—suffice it to say it wouldn't have met the secretary of the interior's guidelines for historic preservation.
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) This and a few other projects established Old Town as an artists' enclave, and things spread gradually from there. My father had done some plastering in the late 1950s for a couple renovating an old house on the near north side overlooking what was then known as Bughouse Square, famous for soapbox oratory by the Wobblies and such; my impression is that the pace of gentrification in Chicago began to quicken around that time.

Other deteriorated north-side lakefront communities followed suit. In the mid-1970s—by my reckoning, close to fifty years after gentrification in Chicago began—the rehabbed portion of Lake View, which had a large gay population and was then called New Town, consisted of a corridor along the lakefront roughly three-quarters of a mile wide. By 1990, I calculated following the release of census data from that year, the gentrified portions of the city accounted for about twenty square miles, less than 10 percent of its total area, but evidently, in retrospect, close to the tipping point. Beginning in the mid-1990s, as we've seen, property values began to rise sharply, a construction boom began, and neighborhoods all over the city blossomed. In 1990, I think, even an optimist would have to say that Chicago had a ways to go. By 2005, in important respects, it had arrived.

In emphasizing the importance of individuals in the city's revival I don't ignore the fact that larger forces were at work. Most of these are well known. As manufacturing employment in Chicago evaporated (as of 2006 only 85,000 factory jobs remained in the city, an 87 percent decline), professional and other white-collar employment rose, and there's no denying that city life tends to be a yuppie predilection. Plenty of other demographic changes arguably also favored urban life—the increasing numbers of singles and childless couples, greater affluence, higher levels of educational attainment, and so on. The city's sheer size worked in its favor. Globalization unquestionably had some impact, especially if one understands the term to include increased immigration, which was the major driver behind the rise in population in Chicago and some other cities during the 1990s. The city had become an international trading hub specializing in exotic financial instruments; as in other global centers, wealthy traders and financial services executives pumped a lot of money into the local real estate market. A central-city housing boom began in the mid-1990s and continued at least through 2006; although at first we thought this was limited to Chicago, in hindsight it was clearly a national phenomenon—Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and several other older big cities all built large numbers of new homes at roughly the same rate.
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But I don't think any of these things was decisive. The switch from a manufacturing to a services-based economy, for example, was a nationwide phenomenon, occurring in many ex-blue-collar towns, or at least in their metropolitan areas. Yet only a few came back. Likewise the housing boom, although it transformed Chicago and some other places, passed many cities by. Broad economic and social trends contributed to a rising tide that raised a lot of urban boats from the mid-1990s onward—but you had to have a boat that would float.

I think the main factor separating Chicago from less fortunate places was a purely local one—the city-guy mafia. I don't mean by that just the civic leaders and real estate developers who pushed various projects and initiatives along, although their role was obviously important.
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I mean the depth and breadth of city people who desperately wanted to make the town work, and who were linked by a tangled net of relationships of whose extent few had any inkling and whose power astonished us all. A common observation in Chicago in those days was that it was the world's biggest small town, and that everyone knew everyone else (by which was meant, though the matter was never expressed in these terms, that all the city people knew each other)—as if this were a local peculiarity. My guess is that it wasn't, and that in fact it's a characteristic of mature or maturing cities everywhere. One might invent a more felicitous term than “city-guy mafia”—no doubt something along the lines of urban metanetwork would make more of an impression on the Ph.D. committee. But it's a real phenomenon whatever you call it. Without it, nothing is possible; with it, everything is.