The Barn House (12 page)

Yet when presented with a modest challenge—namely, an influx of black people in the 1960s—the incumbent residents of Austin had bolted for the exits. The core of the community changed from virtually all white to 90 percent black between one census and the next. In a few city neighborhoods racial turnover had no visible impact other than a change in the predominant skin color of the residents, but in others, including Austin, it was accompanied by rapid physical decline. In the years following my family's departure in 1966 our old block had deteriorated to a shocking degree. Washington Boulevard, just down the street from our house, had once been lined with handsome courtyard apartment buildings; within a decade or two half the ones on our block had been torn down. Many of the buildings on the main commercial artery, Madison Street, were boarded up or razed. Similar scenes played out all over the city's west and south sides, and in other cities throughout the United States.

A familiar story, I know. Still, it seemed to me, looking back at what had happened, that the deterioration of places like Austin hadn't been at root a consequence of racial change. Race merely brought the matter into higher relief. The real problem was that most of the people who lived in cities didn't particularly want to be there. The city was just a way station en route to some distant dream. When I was a child there were Chicago neighborhoods that were even then on their third or fourth waves of immigration. People moved in, built a community, and then, having attained a degree of middle-class respectability, cleaned out their closets and left. The city was a convenience, like an old car or a starter house, and if everyone bailed when the going got tough, well, what else would you expect?

In those days, from what I could see, only a few people lived in the city because they genuinely wanted to: (1) the rich, who could afford the choicest real estate and insulate themselves from urban inconveniences;
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(2) the bohemian element, which had been sizable in Chicago at one time, although its numbers had dwindled by the time I began to notice such things, which is to say, the early 1970s; (3) gays, who constituted a highly visible community by the same period; (4) kids just out of college; and (5) Italians. Okay, maybe the Chinese, too, but I spent more time in Italian neighborhoods, several of which had persisted since the late nineteenth century, which for Chicago was unusual. Why Italians lingered while others fled warrants further investigation, but we'll leave that for another book.

There was one additional group that I was only dimly aware of as a child and didn't become fully acquainted with till after college: people who fixed up old houses. As a kid I attached no special significance to this sort of thing. My family fixed up old houses and I thought everyone did. Only gradually did I realize this wasn't so, and that the practice was mainly limited to a few neighborhoods, most prominently Lincoln Park on the north side, much of which consisted of picturesque (or at least potentially picturesque) brick town houses built not long after the fire. Having discovered the phenomenon, I knew at once that I'd found my life's work, or anyway an important part of it, and that someday I'd find such a neighborhood and fix up an old house myself.

I should acknowledge here that considerable controversy has attended the process of fixing up old city houses, as evidenced by the terms used to describe it. The expression “urban pioneering” first surfaced in the 1950s, enjoyed a vogue in the 1960s, and turned up in magazine articles well into the 1970s. The term suggested plucky frontiersmen establishing civilization in the wilderness and was objected to for that reason, inasmuch as it cast the previous residents in the role of the savages.
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By the 1980s the expression had largely been supplanted by “gentrification,” with its odor of class struggle. The word had been coined in 1964 by the British sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the influx of professionals into the working-class districts of London. Glass saw this primarily as a matter of the moneyed set displacing the proletariat, a phenomenon of which she did not approve. Her attitude has largely carried the day in academia. You'll spend a long afternoon at the library before you find a sociologist with a positive word to say about gentrification.
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Criticisms of gentrification often ran to extremes, but there was an element of truth to them. While it would be an exaggeration to describe gentrifiers as callous exploiters, they tended to be a bit, shall we say, self-indulgent. When I leafed through old-house magazines in the years before we bought the Barn House, I was struck by how often those who restored antique homes seemed to be childless (at least children didn't figure in the accounts) and had jobs that gave them the time and discretionary income to pursue what was essentially a hobby. I read about people who planed their own wood, rebuilt houses using antique nails, replicated high Victorian parlors with ornate wallpaper and tasseled curtain tiebacks.

That wasn't for me. At an early stage I'd formed a different idea. I wanted to fix up an old house, sure. But my real ambition was more modest, or so I thought: I wanted to live an ordinary middle-class life in the city.

At the time we bought the Barn House it was an open question whether such a life was going to be possible. Again, don't get me wrong. It's not that the city was on the verge of collapse; as I say, some parts of it had unquestionably turned around. In the course of preparing a magazine story I'd obtained a computer disk from a local planning agency with the fine-detail returns from the 1990 census, known as census tract data. Then I persuaded a fellow with a computer mapmaking business—I tell you, I went to town on this piece—to use the data to generate a color-coded map of Chicago showing the up-and-coming areas of the city, as indicated by rapidly rising property values. By far the largest district was a roughly rectangular area comprising the Loop and environs plus the north-side lakefront. In all it took in about twenty square miles, a not inconsiderable portion of the city, and one that closely corresponded with my windshield impression of the improving parts of town.

I didn't need computer maps to tell me that the city was considerably livelier than it had been when I was a child. I lived in several gentrified communities in Chicago before I got married; one of them was a district on the north lakefront then called New Town. It was a bustling, noisy neighborhood, popular with gays and kids who had just gotten their first jobs in the big city. The streets were crowded with yuppies in running shoes, hookers, men in leather vests and nipple rings, and little old ladies pushing wire shopping carts.

Nonetheless, it seemed to me that something was missing. One day in the mid-1980s I interviewed the proprietor of a local independent supermarket and his wife. He was a pillar of the business community and spoke with satisfaction of improvements in the neighborhood. At the end of the interview I asked him about something that had been on my mind—whether he could see raising a family there. He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Not really,” he said finally, then turned to his wife, a woman of considerable chic, if I may say so. Her answer was brisk: “No.”

You see where I'm headed with this. By the early 1990s fixing up an old house wasn't unusual. Fixing up an old house in the city wasn't exactly unheard of either, although it put you in more rarefied company. Fixing up an old house in the city with an eye to raising a family there, however—I don't claim nobody did it, but you were definitely out on the fringe.

Mary and I wondered what we were getting ourselves into. Life in the city was all very well when you were young and single with nothing at risk but your own hide and a security deposit. Putting your family and a considerable fraction of your lifetime income on the line was a different matter. We had no illusions about making a fat, or for that matter any, profit on the Barn House, but we weren't so wealthy that we could afford to squander our money. Schools, crime, recreational opportunities for the kids—we had only the vaguest idea about such things. Our own urban childhoods offered no guide. The city had changed enormously during our lifetimes. When I was growing up, an elaborate social infrastructure built around Catholic parishes had greatly simplified the job of raising a family; how much of this remained we didn't know, but we suspected much of it was gone. Who knew what burdens we were foolishly about to assume?

If we were on the cutting edge of anything, we had no sense of it. On the contrary, I was struck by how little interest there seemed to be in ordinary urban life, as distinct from the bright-lights-big-city version, even among those who might be expected to harbor some fondness for the less traveled road. As a writer interested in seeing what other writers had to say, during the time we worked on the Barn House I read or at least browsed through a dozen book-length narratives about building or renovating some habitable place—the sort of topic that naturally inclines the literary imagination to ponder the makings of the good life and the putting down of roots. All the books were written by American authors over the past twenty-five years. Not one was about a house in the city.
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Curiously, most of the books weren't about houses in the suburbs, either. Typically the house was in a small town—preferably a small college town, with a good library, a coffee shop, and witty neighbors—or else out in the country. In that respect the books largely coincided with the view of most Americans, who according to surveys preferred rural or small-town life, or at least thought they would. Few fantasized about the city, whether writers or not.

As for TV, that mirror of the times—well, if you were a city guy whose lifestyle coincided in some way with that depicted on
Seinfeld
, in its fourth season when we bought the Barn House, or
Cheers
, then in its last, TV had you pretty well covered. In the matter of fixing up old city houses, however, different story. I won't say home improvement shows never featured houses in the city; more commonly, though, and you'll forgive me if I generalize here, they featured residences in suburbs or small towns, with city houses dragged in whenever the producers felt the need for something exotic and couldn't come up with a house built of termite droppings.
This Old House
, if memory serves, once featured a house in London that required a system of pumps and reservoirs to compensate for the nonexistent street pressure—apparently the municipal water supply consisted of hollowed-out Elizabethan logs. Interesting, sure, but the unspoken and perhaps inadvertent message was that the city was not a place where ordinary folk lived. In 1990, Bob Vila had spent a season of his
Home Again
program renovating a two-flat in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, presumably because his sponsor at the time was Chicago-based Sears; the opening show had him driving around the neighborhood with a local real estate agent, who pointed out various properties that had sold for what were then substantial sums. Peering through the windshield at the unprepossessing street scene, Bob struggled to remain noncommittal, but his expression plainly said:
You've got to be kidding.

To a large extent it was a matter of appearances. Assuming you weren't after the urban noir look, cities, or at any rate Chicago, weren't very telegenic. Suppose we wanted to video the drive to the Barn House. Things would begin well enough. We would cruise up Lake Shore Drive, which wound through a park with Lake Michigan on one side and a wall of high-rise apartment buildings on the other—as gorgeous an urban panorama as one could hope to find. The impression of elegance would persist for several blocks once we got off at the Barn House exit and headed inland past more high-rises and patrician old apartment buildings. Then we would reach a commercial street called Broadway.
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Here urban fantasy gave way to urban reality. A partial list of sights en route to the Barn House at the time we bought it included: