The Barn House (35 page)

 

A
ll fixer-uppers of old houses know theirs isn't an entirely sane pursuit, and that they must remain constantly alert for signs that flinty resolve has degenerated into obsession, for fear they'll next start counting sidewalk squares or keeping too many cats. I knew I'd crossed the line in the summer of 1996, when I took to sieving the yard.

As with many Barn House projects, straining the dirt wasn't what I'd meant to do originally. My initial thought was simply to get the property cleaned up to the point that it didn't look like hoboes lived there. That meant hauling away a considerable volume of accumulated junk, such as the scrap lumber and other debris I'd tossed out the back of the attic to the yard three stories below, where it had been festering in a vague pile for close to a year. As it turned out, that defined the outer limits of the gestation period of a now-familiar nocturnal mammal. Mary and I learned this when, on approaching the mound one evening (the day had been busy), we were greeted by a possum with bared teeth. This proved to be a mama guarding her young, whom we discovered jammed together like sausages beneath a tented heap of boards. We withdrew long enough for her to relocate the family, then finished hauling the junk to the trash.

The question, once we got down to bare ground, was what to do next. Owing to years of neglect, the press of piled-up rubbish, and the tramp of a thousand passing feet, the earth around the house had been compacted to the density of lead. After a half hour's ineffectual scratching with a cultivator—I might as well have tried to carve stone with a nail—I decided to rent a rotary tiller. Progress subsequently was faster but not fast. The whirling blades gnawed away slowly at the dense soil; I felt as though I were mining coal. Worse, every few minutes the tiller would buck and lurch in unexpected and often terrifying directions, signifying that I had struck some immobile subterranean mass. The tiller quieted, I'd commence excavating the obstruction with a spade. I unearthed a bewildering variety of objects in this way, possibly remnants of an ancient civilization, or maybe just an ancient interstate. There were lots of pieces of concrete, anyway, and quite a few plain old rocks. I set them out on the garage slab and later secreted them in the trash carts one at a time, so the streets and sanitation guys wouldn't beef.

But a lot of the crud didn't lend itself to efficient spadework. For one thing, there was an extraordinary quantity of broken glass, not to mention rusty nails, furnace slag, crumbled bricks, anonymous pieces of plastic, and a good deal else, most of which, I knew objectively, I should have simply let lie. I wanted it gone, though—it betokened a dark and benighted age, of which I wanted for some ineffable reason to purge every trace.

Thus the sieve. I fabricated it out of two-by-fours and quarter-inch wire mesh, as always using drywall screws for the frame plus roofing nails to batten down the mesh. The carpentry done, I set the sieve on a thirty-three-gallon plastic trash can and ladled in a couple shovelsful of contaminated earth, which I then proceeded to shake. This method lacked grace even by my low standards. The weight of the dirt was considerable at the outset, and to apply sufficient force one had to engage one's entire being in a sort of spastic rhythm, as though having a seizure, albeit of a slow and wearying sort. Eventually the sieve would empty out and I'd find myself staring at the leavings, faintly hoping to spot the Kimberly diamond or at least another 1891 dime but condemned always to disappointment, although I have to say that after a few repetitions a rusty nail became an object of consuming interest. Then I'd dump the refuse into a plastic grocery bag and start again.

After I'd been laboring in this manner for a day or so the Chief came by—he hadn't been to the house in a couple weeks. Heaving to a short distance off, he stared without speaking for a good thirty seconds, possibly the longest I'd seen him neither talking, smoking, nor engaged in useful work in the time I'd known him.

“What are you doing?” he asked finally.

“Sieving the dirt,” I said, indicating the bagged detritus now covering a corner of the garage slab.

“Going down to bedrock?” The Chief was never judgmental; he just liked to know what he was dealing with.

“Just the topsoil,” I said. “Eight inches.”

“Lot of people would just cover it up.”

“I know.”

The Chief pursued the matter no further, no doubt thinking I was best left alone till my compulsions had run their course. They did, but not quickly. Damned if I didn't run pretty much all the dirt within ten feet of the house through the sieve over the course of a week or so, filling scores of plastic bags with the leavings. That done, I flattened the filtered earth with a roller, seeded and watered, and by September had (temporarily, as it turned out) grass. I don't claim it was the right way, just my way, and as anyone who has done similarly knows, you paid a price sometimes for the privilege of pursuing it. But the plus side was, you were free.

From that point on work proceeded sporadically. All the space in the house was now usable to some degree. Major projects remained, but we'd complete them as time and money permitted. In the meantime, we decided, we were going to return to the surface world.

T
his may not be the average person's idea of light recreation, and I won't say it was invariably mine, but not long after making the above resolution I took an afternoon off to hear the
New York Times
architecture critic Paul Goldberger give a talk to a local civic group entitled “Is There Still a Need for Cities?” Unshocking answer, given the speaker and audience: yes. I don't recall much of what he had to say, but toward the end he made a declaration along the lines of:
We who live in the city embrace diversity because, let's face it, in the city diversity is pretty much constantly in your face.
(I'm sure he phrased it more eloquently than that, but as I say, the details are vague.)

I was skeptical of this line of argument at the time. I was willing to believe it was true of New York, particularly the twenty-five-ring circus known as lower Manhattan, but it didn't seem all that obviously true of Chicago. The venue in which Mr. Goldberger had given his talk was a block or two from North Michigan Avenue, which, while undoubtedly one of the world's more imposing shopping streets, was no paragon of diversity. In the 1970s, Chicago had had the reputation of having two downtowns—State Street, the city's original retail district in the Loop, was for black people (it was the era of blaxploitation movies, which attracted a lot of teenagers), while North Michigan Avenue across the river was for whites. The division was never as stark as it was sometimes portrayed and had become less so over time; still, you saw a lot more minorities on State than you did on Michigan, and the idea that city life was inherently conducive to tolerance struck me as smug.

As time went on, though, I had occasion to reconsider. In 1996, the North Michigan Avenue business association asked me to edit a “vision” plan for their street, which had been the beneficiary of considerable vision already. Originally it had been a narrow residential thoroughfare called Pine in what was then a quiet (because inaccessible) part of town. The 1909 Burnham plan had proposed turning it into a grand ceremonial boulevard. This took quite a while. The major public improvements, including widening of the street and an ornate double-deck bridge over the Chicago River, were completed in the 1920s. Energetic private development ensued for a time, among other things producing a famous quartet of buildings flanking the Michigan Avenue bridge (Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building are the best known) that the architectural historian Carl Condit, whose class at Northwestern I'd once taken, described as “the foremost skyscraper enclave in the world”—a large but not indefensible claim. Unfortunately, due to the Depression and World War II, large-scale commercial construction then pretty much stopped, with some lots remaining vacant or given over to marginal uses well into the 1960s. Development resumed in a big way with the construction of the one-hundred-story John Hancock Center, which was completed in 1969, and within another twenty-five years North Michigan Avenue had been largely built out. Now the street had become a tourist attraction and the business association was trying to deal with the usual problems attendant on success—crowding, insufficient parking, and so on.

The committee in charge of the vision plan had come up with a pretty good first draft, I thought. Among the factors contributing to Michigan Avenue's success they'd cited density, mixed uses, and a pedestrian-friendly environment—either they'd been reading their Jane Jacobs or had arrived at similar conclusions on their own, a good sign either way. The sad fact was that a previous generation of civic leaders in Chicago and elsewhere had been depressingly oblivious to the qualities that made cities citylike. In the Loop, for example, hundreds of street-level shops had been demolished in the 1960s and 1970s due largely to a crack-brained zoning code that encouraged the construction of office buildings with empty glass lobbies. No doubt the more enlightened view now prevailing among North Michigan Avenue business people derived from the observation that there was money in it—lively streets drew more shoppers. All the more reason to wonder what had been going through the minds of everybody else.

At times, though, Michigan Avenue could be a little too lively, or so some felt. One issue the plan attempted to grapple with was street performers. Sidewalk entertainment had been illegal in Chicago until 1983, the authorities having taken the view that only vagrants performed in public for pocket change. Dogged argument had been required to make the city understand that 90 percent of the industry worked on this basis. The law having been amended, musicians, dancers, and other artistic sorts doing their thing in the public way became considerably more plentiful. Some performers were amazingly good—Mary and I spent part of a charmed summer's evening at the Water Tower off Michigan Avenue in the 1980s listening to a talented a capella quartet that went on to a successful career in the clubs.

Other performers drew a more ambivalent response. Many of these fell into the category of what we might call inner-city entertainment—your robot dancers and so on. They tended to concentrate on the busiest corners, drawing large crowds and blocking store entrances, which annoyed merchants. A few sniffs may have felt a bunch of ghetto kids detracted from the ambience. But for most people the main issue—certainly this was true of the bucket boys—was noise.

The bucket boys were synchronized drummers. (They are now, anyway. The earliest drummers in my recollection had played solo; whether this had given way to the now-standard team approach by 1996 is lost in memory's fog.) Urban percussion, of course, has a long history. As far back as I could remember Chicago had had informal aggregations of conga players who performed in the parks during the warm months, often on the lakefront. The performances were hypnotic and went on for hours, commonly attracting hundreds of people. The drummers weren't in it for the money—I never saw a hat being passed, at any rate. One had the sense of eavesdropping on some ancient rite.

At some point, presumably after 1983, drum-centered ensembles began showing up on State Street and Michigan Avenue. Mostly they used professional-looking drum sets; once in a while they were joined by horn players and other musicians. In contrast to the conga sessions in the parks, these performances generally were intended as moneymaking ventures, with a conspicuously displayed receptacle containing some coins and bills.

The bucket boys hoped to make money, too, but their equipment was more basic—they played on upended five-gallon plastic buckets using drumsticks. I've heard this practice originated in New York, although it's not like the technology took a Stradivarius to perfect. If we neglect the annoyance factor, the bucket boys were actually pretty good, with precisely coordinated stick-and headwork and deft handoffs between soloists. The fact that a few of the guys were exceptionally buff and sometimes played shirtless no doubt added to the appeal amongst the frivolous. To me there's no question the lads had talent, though I concede there's a diversity of views on this subject. But there's also no doubt they were loud.

Cities are unavoidably noisy places, as anybody who lives in one knows. Much of the din you simply tuned out. Mary, for example, was genuinely surprised when I informed her one day that our favorite outdoor Mexican restaurant, which we'd patronized for years, was located perhaps fifty yards from an L line, where the trains clattering past made enough racket to loosen your teeth. She hadn't noticed—possibly because, what with the many buses, motorcycles, and beaters lacking mufflers regularly passing the location in question, nothing short of a pipe bomb would have really stood out.

Human noisemakers were more difficult to ignore. Anyone who worked in downtown Chicago during the 1980s, for example, remembers the fierce-looking giant who played saxophone near the Michigan Avenue bridge. He had his defenders, I realize, and possibly there was some late-period-Coltrane thing going on that I lacked the capacity to grasp, but whatever delights his work may have conveyed to those at the top of the food chain, it sure sounded like a car wreck to me.

The bucket boys weren't in that category, but the extreme decibel level they generated, plus the fact that they could go for twelve hours at a stretch, strained the patience of the most devoted music lover. Although they showed up periodically on State Street or at the ballparks and other popular venues, Michigan Avenue was the 100 percent location in Chicago crowd-wise, and that they favored most of all.

So there was simmering unhappiness, of which I thought I detected some trace in the vision plan. I was apprehensive—this was Chicago, after all. In the old days a controversy pitting high-rise residents and prominent business interests against street kids would have been resolved in about ten seconds, and how different things were now I wasn't altogether sure. The North Michigan Avenue association had formerly had a reputation for archconservatism, and even now had a low tolerance for gaudy signage and other perceived breaches of propriety. The draft plan, it's true, offered the mild proposition that a committee be formed to study the matter; perhaps I was being paranoid, but I wondered if this were merely a placeholder for an argument yet to be joined, with advocates of a clampdown waiting for their moment. I dropped the mild suggestion into my new draft after some polishing, submitted the finished document to the review committee—not a bashful group, from what I'd seen—and braced for the reaction. Surely someone would demand sterner measures to deal with annoying street performers—more regulation, possibly a ban.