The Barn House (43 page)

Not that it'll be easy even so. The economist Richard Florida, one of the relative handful of gentrification advocates in academia, has made a name for himself in recent years writing about the “creative class,” which he conceives of as the inheritor to the urban bohemian tradition, except that this crowd has ambition and will generate tomorrow's wealth.
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The creative class, Professor Florida contends, is drawn to places having, among other things, historic architecture, diversity, and recreational amenities—qualities that broadly overlap with those of gentrifying cities. Declining towns hoping to restore their economic vitality, he argues, should try to attract the creative class by providing amenities, encouraging diversity, converting old buildings into artists' quarters, and so on. The state of Michigan has gone so far as to establish a “cool cities” program to foster such initiatives by its municipalities. Professor Florida's work has been much criticized—among other things, no close correlation has yet been demonstrated between concentrations of the creative class and economic growth. But I think he's right in intuiting that artists and other creative people play an important role in urban maturation. What's unfortunate is the implication in his work that government initiatives can coax a city to mature within some predictable period of time. Our experience in Chicago suggests the outcome is chancy even under the most favorable circumstances, and progress sure won't be fast.

Chicago wasn't the first and certainly won't be the last American city to mature, but I think it represents an important mile-stone in one respect: It was a city of unexceptional advantages by modern lights that succeeded by making the most of what it had. Let me put the matter bluntly—if you can make a great city out of Chicago, and I say this with all affection, you can make one out of anything. Here was an industrial town built on a muddy plain in an almost comically harsh climate, with neither an ocean nor mountains nor proximity to the great centers of population on either coast, which endured racial strife, political corruption, and devastating losses of people and jobs—yet by dint of stubborn exertion over a span of generations turned itself into one of the foremost urban centers in the world. Surely there's a lesson in this for towns that still struggle. Rare is the American city lacking any spark whatsoever. One evening a while back my brother-in-law Joe, a college professor in Ohio, drove us through Public Square, the centerpiece of downtown Cleveland. By day Public Square is said to look a bit tattered; by night, different story.
Whoa,
I thought.
Cool.

 

I
n 2007, while concluding the writing of this book, I went back to visit James and Diane, the couple renovating the old house on Chicago's south side, whom I hadn't spoken to since the early 1990s. I purposely saved this task for the end, for I suspected their story—and that of their neighborhood—would be in many ways more remarkable than mine.

Any doubts about the extent of Chicago's having pulled itself together will dissolve after a tour of the city's south lakefront, which James was kind enough to provide. Admittedly things aren't quite as far along as on the north side. He and Diane still lived in their old house in North Kenwood/Oakland; just like ours, it still wasn't done. Their lives in the thirteen years since I'd seen them last hadn't been entirely easy. James, who'd quit his job as a high school teacher and become a contractor, had bought an old mansion on South Michigan Avenue some years previously and begun renovating it. Someone had broken in and stolen the house's nine carved wooden mantelpieces—“it was like somebody sticking a knife in your gut,” he said. But burglary was the least of the neighborhood's troubling events. On a July evening in 2002, down the block from James and Diane's house, two local ne'er-do-wells drove through a stop sign in their van and crashed into a group of teenage girls sitting on the front stoop of a house. Three of the girls were injured and one later died. An infuriated mob of onlookers pulled the driver and his passenger out of the vehicle, grabbed pieces of the shattered steps, and beat the men to death.

On the whole, though, signs that the neighborhood was improving outnumbered those that it was getting worse. Purely from the standpoint of appearances the area had improved to a startling degree. The proximate cause of the change was the city's decision to raze more than eighteen thousand units of public housing, including virtually all the projects in North Kenwood/Oakland. In 1994, not long after writing about James and Diane, I'd gone to one such project a few blocks from their house to do an interview for another story. As was often the case in Chicago, the building was one of a mass of public housing developments built side by side, stretching along Pershing Road for half a mile. Most of the buildings were low and barracks-like—these were the Ida B. Wells Homes. At the end of the long rank stood four grim high-rises, Darrow Homes, in one of which the housing authority had established a satellite office, my destination. As I approached from the parking lot I noticed many windows in the four towers were boarded up with plywood, some with scorch marks on the bricks above. None of the high-rises had handles on the exterior doors—to enter, you had to knock and wait till a security guard admitted you. Once inside you passed through a dim hallway where silent figures watched out the windows. The offices upstairs were cheerful enough, but suspended in front of the windows were enormous sheets of half-inch Plexiglas, meant to shield the occupants from flying glass or worse should violence erupt outside, which I gathered it frequently did.

It seemed obvious on first sight that the housing authority couldn't continue like this, an impression that a review of its records and reports only deepened. Huge numbers of the dwellings under its nominal control were vacant and uninhabitable; repairing them would cost more than a billion dollars. The likelihood of obtaining that kind of money to restore the status quo was nil. It was time, I wrote, for the CHA to prepare for the inevitable downsizing to come. Pretty much everyone else felt the same way. A plan to replace most family public housing in Chicago with mixed-income developments was announced in 1999, and soon thereafter the first public-housing high-rises were razed.
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The housing market in North Kenwood/Oakland, long moribund, had been slowly coming to life in the 1990s, but once public housing began coming down, the process visibly accelerated. James spent the better part of the day driving me around the neighborhood to show me how much had been done. We began at the former public-housing site on Pershing Road. Power shovels were methodically demolishing what remained of the Ida B. Wells Homes. Darrow Homes was long gone, replaced by two- and three-story town houses and apartments laid out on a conventional street grid and comparable in appearance to what you'd see on the north side. Many of the homes were occupied; many others were still under construction. Piles of sewer pipe were spaced out at intervals across the newly cleared prairie where streets were to be built—the original streets had been ripped out decades earlier to create “superblocks” for public housing, a once-fashionable idea that had fallen into disfavor. But the city wasn't now trying to create some facsimile of suburbia. Rather, the neighborhood was being reconstructed roughly along the lines it had had when first built.

Notable though this sprawling construction project was, it had been set in motion by public money. More remarkable, I thought, was the frenetic building activity on the nearby streets—the neighborhood was in the midst of a housing boom, most of it privately financed. Next door to James and Diane's house there had once been an empty lot; now there was a newly completed four-story condo building—a large sign in front boasted of granite countertops and marble master baths with heated floors. Looking out their back porch thirteen years earlier I'd been able to see all the way to Drexel Boulevard, where the El Rukn temple had once stood. Now the view was blocked by a three-story condo building across the alley. Plans were afoot for a residential project to fill the larger of the remaining vacant lots on the street. James had paid $22,000 for his house in 1979; I asked what he thought it was worth now. He guessed $700,000.

The sweep of the work was astonishing—there was new construction on almost every block south of Oakwood Boulevard. I don't know how many condos were newly completed, under construction, or promised with billboards on the street corners, but the number was surely in the thousands. On blocks where most of the older structures had survived, new infill housing stood on once-vacant lots. Other blocks had been almost entirely rebuilt. In most cases an attempt had been made to replicate the general features of the original buildings in the neighborhood. Though a few buildings were as ugly as anything you'd find on the north side, on the whole the quality of design was high and the construction substantial.

James, to hear him talk, wasn't entirely happy about the changes in the neighborhood—his chief gripe was that some of the new housing wasn't sufficiently upscale for his taste. He pointed out a few modestly scaled subsidized housing developments salted in among the more extravagant homes. Other buildings had stylish brick façades facing the street but vinyl siding everywhere else. (Recalling my sister's house, I assured him this sort of thing wasn't unheard of among white folks.) James had been restoring a house not far from his home; now he'd gotten wind of a plan by the city to buy up the block and allow a developer to put up high-rises—the property offered unobstructed views of the lake.

Eventually we crossed 47th Street into the portion of Kenwood that had been under the protection of the University of Chicago. The day was sunny, and the trees and other plantings were unusually lush due to abundant summer rain, and that plus James's evident satisfaction and my own modest expectations may have prejudiced me—perhaps I shouldn't have been as dazzled as I was. But I think anyone would have been impressed.

Those on the north side of Chicago have the idea they reside in the plush part of town, and it's true you can find pockets of mansions and such; recent years, moreover, have seen the erection of numerous upscale apartment buildings, town houses, and single-family homes equipped with eurostyle cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and that kind of thing, and persons surrounded by such luxe appointments may conclude they're living pretty large. The fact remains that the north side as initially built had been the abode mostly of the middle and working classes, and even today consists in the main of apartments and houses of economical design on unpretentious streets.

The south lakefront, in contrast, had been built for the rich. Virtually the entire area east of State Street between the Loop and Hyde Park had been, at one point or another, and omitting the usual institutional, commercial, and (in later days) industrial uses, a dense stand of luxury housing in an era when luxury meant something. The most prestigious streets—Drexel Boulevard, Michigan Avenue, King Drive, and others—had been conceived of as pleasure drives with wide parkways lined with trees, walkways, and planting beds. The houses themselves were eye-poppingly ornate, the majority of them graystones, which in Chicago was the term for a multistory masonry home with a limestone façade, often of elaborate design. In the twentieth century arson, abandonment, vandalism, urban renewal, and other plagues had taken an appalling toll on the south side, but Kenwood south of 47th Street had had relatively few demolitions. Now it had been restored.

We drove around for quite a while; James knew the area well. On street after street we saw meticulously maintained mansions, row houses, and apartment blocks—for sheer breadth of opulence the north side had nothing to compare. James pointed out the mansion where Louis Farrakhan lived, another formerly owned by Muhammad Ali. Senator Barack Obama lives in the community; the headquarters of Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH is located in a former synagogue at 50th street and Drexel Boulevard. Later I would look up the census numbers—the neighborhood, which is 70 percent African-American, has a median home price of close to $350,000, compared to $300,000 in our north-side community. The gentrified portion of Kenwood, in short, is wealthy and predominantly black. Few inner-city neighborhoods can be so described.

We continued into Hyde Park, which for fifty years has been Chicago's only stable, substantially integrated neighborhood (it's 40 percent black). It too was now mostly gentrified.
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We stopped for a few minutes at Robie House, the celebrated Frank Lloyd Wright- designed mansion on the University of Chicago campus, now largely restored. I asked James what he thought about what he and Diane had gone through. “It's not something the average person can endure,” he said. “You have to be a little bit crazy to do what we did. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? No.” Still, he thought, “growing up in the country”—he'd been raised in Arkansas—“coming to the city, looking at the architecture . . . it inspired me. This is the fulfillment of a dream.”

I was curious to see what kind of people were moving into the new homes on the south lakefront, so a few weeks after my tour with James I went to see Kendall, a fellow parent at FXW School whom I'd worked with on the annual fund-raiser. She'd recently moved with her family into a condo two blocks from James and Diane's house. On her street as elsewhere in North Kenwood/ Oakland the signs of old and new were incongruously juxtaposed. The air was filled with the sound of hammering and heavy equipment; down the street a power shovel was digging up an old foundation. A sign on the corner offered directions to the sales office for a new condo development. Directly across from Kendall's condo, on the other hand, was an empty courtyard apartment building with boarded-up windows surrounded by a chain-link fence. Orange stickers on the gate read NOTICE OF WATER SERVICE TERMINATION for nonpayment of $42,000. They were dated six weeks before.