The Barn House by Ed Zotti Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t flounder indefinitely. It was given a boost by the extension of the L to the community in 1907. But where before most of the development had been suburban in character—frame houses on large lots—now it was urban. Developers divided some lots and constructed Siamese two-flats—mirror-image pairs of brick apartment buildings having a common wall. Other lots were consolidated and large blocks of flats erected.
    The result was a jumble, neither urban nor suburban in character. The magnificent nine-paned window on Mrs. Carr’s entry stair had once overlooked a meadow; now it looked out on the brick wall of the neighboring two-flat eight feet away. The backyard and its stable stood in the shadow of a massive three-story apartment building that occupied a good portion of the frontage on the next street over. 17
    You see the problem. Here was a house that had been conceived of, perhaps naively, as a country residence, with servants and lavish appointments. Thirty years later it was obsolete, built for a suburb that had never materialized in a world that was long gone. However many people may have had servants in 1891, it’s a good bet no one in the Barn House’s neighborhood, or for that matter most urban neighborhoods, had them in 1920. Mrs. Carr, one may reasonably conjecture, had ridden in a horse-drawn carriage; her neighbors thirty years later rode streetcars and L trains. Few now had sitting rooms and fireplaces; they lived in efficiency apartments with kitchenettes. Wealthy people still lived in big houses—in Chicago they gravitated to a string of lakeside suburbs called the North Shore, which started out rich and stayed that way. But not here.
    Whoever owned the Barn House at this point—one presumes it was no longer Mrs. Carr—apparently decided to bow to the inevitable. In 1926, the building had been converted to a two-flat. (We deduced the date from old newspapers—the basement ceiling had been plastered to comply with a code requirement for fireproof barriers between floors of multiunit dwellings, and the newspaper had been stuffed behind the lath.) An additional kitchen had been installed on the second floor in the likely maid’s room. Perhaps during the Depression and certainly by World War II, the building had been further (and illegally) divided into as many as seven apartments, most consisting of a single room with its own sink, dead bolt on the door, and possibly telephone and doorbell—the basement was a rats’ nest of wires. We heard about crazy Walter who lived in the parlor, and a family that spent the war living in the front bedroom suite. Someone residing in the dining room had evidently owned a dog that was in the habit of begging to be let in; it had gouged deep scratches in Mrs. Carr’s door.
    Things had perked up briefly following World War II. A woman named Marge stopped by one day to tell us she had lived in the house as a child in the 1950s. Her family had shared the place with boarders at first, but by the time she left, around 1970, the house had reverted to single-family use. That suggests prosperity. The neighborhood as a whole saw a sizable influx of Hispanic immigrants, who moved into the big apartment buildings on the busy streets starting in the 1960s. But the older residents on the side streets for the most part stayed put.
    Some may have had occasion to regret it. The neighbors told lurid tales, which possibly were exaggerated, but it seems safe to say that during the 1970s the community became, if not a slum, certainly a little raffish. Crime by all accounts got significantly worse. Late in the decade, we were told, a notorious Mexican drug family had established a sales operation in the “bad building” behind the Barn House; how long this remained in business we weren’t able to ascertain, but drugs were available on a drive-up basis well into the 1980s. A drug kingpin, it was claimed, had lived in half of a