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

four-flat across the street; the owner had sawn out much of the floor separating the upper and lower units, presumably in the interest of creating a dramatic architectural effect; one can easily imagine drugs having played a role in this process, if only as a source of inspiration, but whether the owner sold them can’t be said to have been conclusively shown.
    I was told gangs dominated the high school a block away, which was easy enough to believe, since as far as I knew gangs at the time dominated pretty much every city high school. Graffiti became noticeably more prevalent, as did vandalism, break-ins, robbery, shootings, and other common features of late-twentieth-century urban life. A woman was said to have set up shop as a hooker in an apartment building across the street; on inquiry I found that, neighborhood gossip notwithstanding, her occupation hadn’t been definitely established, and some were of the opinion that she’d merely been friendly, taking home a succession of scuzzy male companions, one of the scuzzier of whom shot up the lobby on one occasion and the last of whom (I’m not sure if it was the same guy) had stabbed her seventeen times. In 1986, a few years after the murder at Mike’s house, a teenage boy living across the street had been accosted a few blocks from home by gang members demanding his bicycle. When he refused to surrender it they shot him; he collapsed on some porch steps and died. That was the version Mike told in his newspaper account of the incident, anyhow. Another was that the boy had been selling drugs in a rival gang’s territory and was killed in retaliation.
    I make no claim that all this was dramatically worse than any other city neighborhood experienced at the time—far from it. In some neighborhoods on the south side, I knew from my brief stint as a wire service reporter, you could get an equivalent amount of action in a long weekend. But it was a lot for the north side—certainly enough to make one think: You know, the suburbs don’t sound so bad . But the residents hadn’t done what was arguably the smart thing and fled. Instead they’d organized a community patrol, which consisted of people driving around after dark with CB radios scouting for crime. Mike had refused to cooperate with what he considered vigilantes. That was putting matters a little strongly, I felt, but it had been a rough era. Mike told us about the previous owner of his house, whom he knew as Emil the Turk. Emil had been accustomed to beating his wife. On one such occasion the wife had called the police. The police arrived; Emil slipped them fifty dollars; they turned around and left. Emil picked up with his wife where he’d left off.
    Our neighbor Ned told me the police had visited him one day after he’d mistakenly tripped the burglar alarm. The policemen admired the woodwork in his house and told him he was lucky so much of it was still there—in years past the local alderman had sent them around to strip the finery out of unoccupied old houses. 18 Ned himself had had to travel to Wisconsin to buy back a beveled-glass window that a previous owner of his house had carted off in 1947.
    The Barn House hadn’t been plundered in this way, merely abused. Virtually every fine thing in it had been damaged or destroyed through carelessness or neglect. At some point, probably during the two-flat conversion of 1926, someone had gone around the basement bricking up the “joist ends”—the space between the top of the foundation wall and the flooring immediately above. The bricks were meant to be a fire-stop. But the bricklayer had used a type of mortar that expanded upon drying, pressing up on the floorboards above and causing the finished flooring around the perimeter of the rooms on the first floor to buckle. The dining room floor had been finished in oak veneer, with a parquet border of complex design. The buckling of the planking beneath had