The Barn House (47 page)

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.

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.

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.

I recognize that Native Americans weren't crazy about having been cast as savages either.

That there's a smallish (if vocal) pro-gentrification camp in the academy I freely allow, but we'll return to such matters later.

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.

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.

I'm thinking of “trattoria.” You have to admit it makes sense.

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.

The restaurant did, in fact, call itself a trattoria.

I found this out on the Internet. You can find out anything on the Internet.

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.

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.

I don't mean to suggest, incidentally, that purple primer is unique to Chicago, but it's far from universally required.

His actual words, and I'm quoting as closely as I can remember, were, “Oh, my. We'll have to do something about
that.
”

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?”

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.

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.

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 its high iron content and the quarries for which had long since closed.

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

given the matter much thought. We pondered the newly constructed wall for some moments without coming to any conclusions. Later I realized the whole house was built the same way—the floor joists, and thus the building (both the old part and new), weren't bolted to the foundation wall; they just perched on top of it, held in place solely by friction and gravity. Granted, it wasn't like somebody was going to tip the foundation up on one end and let the house slide off. On the other hand . . . well, one remembered
The Wizard of Oz
.

Another advantage of copper pipe, in my limited observation, is that it doesn't plug up with lime scale to the extent that galvanized steel does.

Admittedly that isn't much of an issue with radiator piping, where the same water recirculates year after year and the lime content isn't constantly replenished.

Lest you think I hallucinated this article, it appeared in the issue of September 1984, pages 48 and 49. The mention of the handsaw was particularly odd—by the 1980s this tool had largely gone the way of the typewriter and the vinyl record. I still have a couple, but mostly for use by the kids.

Channellocks are a type of adjustable wrench.

The preeminent example of a tool in search of a project is surely the chain saw, which in my observation turns up surprisingly often in suburban garages—remember Mr. T?—but unless you're a lumberjack is to tools what the Hummer is to cars.

Having learned a few tricks—the handy item known as a repair coupling was a particular revelation to me—I can do it faster now.

I should clarify, perhaps unnecessarily, that 14 percent isn't the highest conviction rate for a class of public officials in the state of Illinois. Of the past nine individuals who have concluded terms as governor, four have been charged with felonies and three convicted, one admittedly for crimes committed after leaving office. The fifth, the notorious Rod Blagojevich, was impeached and removed from office in 2009, following his arrest on federal corruption charges.

Chicago aldermen for many years have had de facto control over zoning changes within their wards due to a custom known as “aldermanic privilege,” in which they automatically approve each other's zoning requests when they come up for a vote in city council. Some aldermen now decide zoning controversies based on straw votes at community meetings, but aren't required to do so, and accusations of shady dealing are often heard to this day.

The park district continues to be a rewarding place to work. In 2005, another parks official was indicted for accepting kickbacks worth $137,000 from a landscaping company.

Too much of this can be tedious, but in the interest of completeness I should say that in 1986, as part of a long-running federal investigation of city licensing and inspection practices called Operation Phocus, more than sixty-five people were indicted, including (I quote from the
Chicago Sun-Times
) “consumer services and building inspectors, firemen, police officers, businessmen, lawyers, park district workers, an ex-alderman, a state senator, and a judge.” The accused included thirteen of eighteen inspectors in the city's consumer services department, who were charged with shaking down small-business owners for amounts ranging from $10 to $2,500. Inspectors weren't the only city employees supplementing their incomes. During the late 1980s, thirty Chicago police officers pleaded guilty to dropping off corpses at friendly undertakers in return for payments ranging from $25 to $75.

An indication of public expectations in this regard is the fact that during the 1990s a steady trickle of entrepreneurs was arrested for extorting payoffs from small-business owners, the catch being that the bad guys weren't city inspectors, they only claimed to be (one had worked in the city clerk's office for six weeks). One supposes the victims might have been a little more diligent about demanding identification, but come on, it was Chicago. A guy came in saying he was a city inspector and demanded a bribe. What more proof of bona fides did you need?

Actually, there are two standard widths, sixteen inches and twenty-four inches, the former by far the more common. When exactly these spacings became routine practice I don't know. Howard told me he'd restored an 1869 house in Evanston that had been framed on twenty-four-inch centers, and for all I know they date from the introduction of balloon framing in 1833.

That said, let's not get ridiculous about it. Some historians—the late Carl Condit, for one—claim a balloon-framed house could be built by a single carpenter. It's possible, though in my opinion not easy, for an unassisted carpenter to erect a
platform
-framed house, to be described shortly in the main text. However, the longest wall in the Barn House consists of twenty-nine two-by-sixes each twenty-seven feet long. I suppose it could have been raised in sections, but I'd like to see one guy do it by himself even so. I'll bring the doughnuts.