Polish Triangle: Don't let the pigeon drive the bus

Picture your route to work. Some of it could move more quickly, but in other places you intentionally stop to talk to friends, or pick up something to eat. Or it's not a destination but a point where you reflect on what's ahead.

For me that's the subway stop near my home. Not so much the subway itself—we share the tunnel with quite a few creatures but it's not like visiting the zoo. And not so much the entrance, where the stairway is getting patched checkerboard style with whatever tile's on hand, and when it rains you have to dodge the puddles.

Beyond the Blue Line entrance at Division is a small plaza, which is possibly even less notable. Milwaukee Avenue is the cross street, and in Chicago we love our diagonal intersections. North, Damen and Milwaukee is just up the street, the gateway to Bucktown, and people are all in a hurry to get somewhere and walking every which way, no matter what the traffic signals say. Here, where Division intersects Ashland just a bit short of Milwaukee, there's this triangle-shaped wedge of a plaza that floats in the intersection like a raft. People mostly avoid it, as if it would float away.

The station and its patchwork staircase are due for renovations, so I was describing this place to a Tribune reporter. It's not as welcoming an area as it should be, I said. There's a constant fight against pigeons. I went on at great length, but those 16 words are all that got in the paper. When talking to a reporter, always keep a sound bite handy. This isn't the one I would have chosen.

It's not fake news. The reporter started out the column calling it a gray pigeony place—if pigeony is a word, it's unknown to Google spell check—and the pigeons helped out by posing for the Tribune photographer. So this part of the story has the insistent coo of truth. But my point was to look beyond the subway station and give some love to what has long been called the Polish Triangle.

Planned renovation of Blue Line ‘L’ stops raises hope that a nearby park will be revitalized

Lessons from a neighborhood dairy

The Leona's restaurant at 1938 W. Augusta Blvd. is due to be razed, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks today recommended that the city allow the demolition.

A staff presentation suggested the 1920s dairy did not fit the East Village district, showing slides of my Victorian block as proof. The building's piecemeal construction also counted against it.

I've lived for 17 years in East Village, but I grew up in Milwaukee, and my grade school was a converted dairy. Like this building, it was built in sections over time. The dairy was actually the school gym: I played basketball there, I had band practice, I tried to learn the foxtrot. It served well as a school, and taught me something about city history.

This building is remarkably similar in structure. It stands as a lesson in Eastern European settlement of the West Town community and the commerce that kept it running. When I go to Leona's I look at the bones of the building and I see more than a restaurant. To my to mind it contributes greatly to the East Village landmark district, and I encouraged the commission (in just these words) to keep it in place.

Our new alderman, Brian Hopkins, also spoke for preserving the building. He'll have another chance in the City Council to defend a local landmark. 🦄

Woodstripper's Ball [and Chain]

Jazz Age musician Bix Beiderbecke, patron saint of woodshedders and woodstrippers (Cliff Wirth / Chicago Sun-Times)

At the Chicago Sun-Times, I talked myself into taking over the remodeling column.

After coming into the office every Monday morning with stories about hanging doors and patching concrete, my boss thought I should put my research to better use. I followed the great Les Hausner's first-person format, plus the frequent dashes and paragraph breaks. This Around the House installment is a sentimental favorite. It's for serious rehabbers: An out-of-town friend read the piece and asked me, "What was that all about?" But I still giggle over Cliff Wirth's illustration. [Published June 2, 1996].

It's back to Sundays with Bix.

Bix Beiderbecke, the young man with a horn, on the radio. Bix woodstripper slowly melting the plastic tuning knob.

Like the Paul Whiteman Orchestra cornetist, this stuff could just about cut through brass.

On and off for a year, I would get fidgety feet long before the first downbeat of Dick Buckley's Sunday afternoon as program on WBEZ (91.5 FM). I'd be off the davenport and scraping paint off the woodwork in our pre-Beiderbecke rowhouse.

The stripper calls again this summer, like the trumpet trio in "San." A clothes chute that we liberated from behind a wall needs to go naked. Same for the white sheets of paint behind our bedroom doors, and the weathered green window frames that look like an alligator's backside.

They tried to make me stop the rehab

Irony alert: There is no 12-step group for compulsive renovators, and I spend much less time remodeling than trying to forget about the last remodeling.

Hello, my name is Stephen and I'm a remodeler. I'm here this afternoon to help all of you who share my affliction: home improvement. What a cruel phrase. Renovation is a literal home wrecker. It hits you where you live, rips it apart and leaves you with nothing but the taste of sawdust.

Looking at all of you, I see the bruised thumbs, the odd burn marks, the hair flecked with paint spatter. I hear the wheeze of lungs beat down inhaling plaster dust and paint thinner. I know I'm the presence of recovering renovators. And in this mutually supportive environment I'm prepared to make a searching and fearless inventory of my compulsion.

How does it begin? We all know the pressures of life in Chicago. Workers in a high-pressure environment thirst for fellowship, and in early evening you see them rushing out of the high-rises to gather in dank basements. They say they just need to raise a few, but we know what's going on. They'll be raising more than just a few sheets of drywall cleaning up their musty, flooded rec rooms.

Reporters especially face cruel deadlines, hear gruesome stories. At the end of the day they want to let off some steam, and letting off steam is the only way rid yourself of ugly, flocked wallpaper. In one night I'd go home and finish off a couple of cans, but I was convinced I would quit as soon as I got the paint color right. As you’ll see, I was just making excuses. The walls would never look right.

Years ago I confided to my editors about how I'd go home frustrated and start pounding holes in the wall. Today this would send you straight into an employee assistance program, but newspapers had more of an old-school approach back then. I got an assignment to write about how simple it was to build a niche in your wall to display art or collectibles. For years I continued to write about destructive behaviors – teardowns, reconfigured floor plans, emerald ash borers. My enabling editors kept me from facing the consequences, till I finally hit bottom: the big kitchen remodel.

It started simply enough. The kitchen was always the job I was going to do next, except I couldn’t really start on the kitchen till I had finished the basement, and I couldn’t keep a dry basement without first doing some tuckpointing, but once I started replacing the masonry I knew water was seeping in from the top down, and it was time to tear off the roof. And as long as I was working up there, wouldn’t it be great to add a deck and a bedroom with vaulted ceiling!

Once I was finished with the deluxe master suite and its whirlpool tub with skylight views of the O’Hare flight pattern, I had to address the fact that there was not an inch of granite in my kitchen. Homebuyers in the trendy neighborhoods are stone in love with granite -- it must be something in the ultrapurified water. Cable TV channels throw the word granite into conversation every few minutes just to keep viewers hooked: “Chef Bobby Flay scores extra points for presentation by setting his bowl of albondigas soup on that beautiful granite countertop.” “Accessorize the outfit with this designer purse, which has the luxurious sheen of a granite countertop.” “Dartmouth’s front four allowed only four sacks all season for the Granite State.” “Meanwhile, on the far side of the island, the Mishegoss team was taking their good fortune at Tribal Council for granite.” Granite would be the rock upon which I would build the ultimate kitchen. I had already built the penultimate kitchen, and by the time I finished the new bedroom, deck, roof, brickwork, drain tiles, sump pump and rec room, the cabinets were out of style.

I needed new cabinets that stretched to the ceiling, with a separate stairway to the top shelf. I needed storage for the everyday dishes, and the occasional dishes, and the thought-it-was-a-good-idea-at-the-bridal-registry dishes. I needed a double oven and a triple-track lighting system and quadruple GFI outlets in satin nickel. I was blind to a compulsion I I couldn’t control even with an X10 home automation system, an iPhone app and a Bluetooth-enabled refrigerator that sent Peapod an order whenever I was low on chicken nuggets.

I sold my furniture, my books, my music collection – I had to make room for the new appliances while I was installing the hardwood floor. Rooms were stacked floor to ceiling with cabinets waiting to be installed. Fortunately they were big enough to store the kitchen table in the meantime. My house looked like the final scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I managed to clear a path to the door past the power tools and scaffolding. My wife was making Christmas cookies on a hot plate. Yet a new kitchen was nowhere in sight. As I wired the 50 amp service for the convection oven, I realized I was powerless. I needed help. Finally, I surrendered to a higher power: a general contractor.

I realize my environment is beyond my control. Such is the power of the Home Depot. My room addition addiction is now in the hands of others, and I will wait for them to show up for work, one day at a time.

Another Frank Lloyd Wright affair

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was once the proverbial prophet without honor in Oak Park. Early in his career, Wright showed bad form in skipping town with a client's wife. Last year a writer from Oak Park, Nancy Horan, found the story intriguing enough to imagine it from the woman's perspective. I read her book Loving Frank as my wife and I planned our own intimate association with Wright. We would live in one of his houses, if only for a day or two.

When I first came to Oak Park 30 years ago, Wright was re-emerging from obscurity nearly 20 years after his death. His turn-of-the-century early work were known mostly as the inspiration for the ranch house, and neighbors told me that for a long time his sprawling single-story commissions were viewed as no different from any other home in the comfortable Chicago suburb. Except that local roofers kept patching their leaks.
javascript:void(0)
But in 1978 the village had seen enough tourism potential in Wright to publish a guidebook to his homes, and a housewalk was organized to show Wright buildings that were on their way to becoming museum pieces. In the local weekly newspaper, the Oak Leaves, I reported with some fascination that "they have color TVs and children and dogs, like other homes." In Oak Park it was easy to buy into the Wright mystique.

In the '70s Wright's architectural office was being restored and opened for tours. That's where volunteer docents told me of the Cheney scandal, which did not involve Haliburton, an energy task force or a quail hunt. Wright built a low-slung rambler of a single-story home on East Avenue for Edwin and Mamah Cheney. Then he left his wife and split with Mamah for Europe, where he would publish a portfolio that influenced the emerging Bauhaus designers. Horan paints the couple as hounded by scandal-mongering press, which struck me as 21st-century embellishment until I read the actual news coverage. In 1909 the Chicago Tribune called the affair "an affinity tangle of character unparalleled even in the checkered history of soul mating."

Oak Park is home to 34 Wright structures, according to the most recent catalog of his homes, plus another 11 in neighboring River Forest. Wright designs had a name, the Prairie School, with carpenter-Gothic examples scattered throughout the Midwest. Wright moved his architectural practice to Wisconsin so I saw a lot of Prairie homes growing up. The Prairie School had a required reading list of Emerson and Thoreau, the better to recognize patterns from nature in his art-glass windows. There was even a typography based on his drawings, which influenced the Oak Park map I drafted for my wedding invitations.

Wright originals were not particularly lucrative for the architect. A running theme of Horan's book was Wright's continuous borrowing to finance a globe-trotting lifestyle and high-profile divorce. The architect made ends meet selling art prints he picked up cheap in Japan. Wright also designed massive wood furniture in the Arts & Crafts style, which in the 1970s was eagerly being bought up by Domino's Pizza baron Thomas Monaghan. Craftsman sofas built like workbenches were an acquired taste, though, and I had found one of its mass-market descendants for my college apartment at the Goodwill shop off campus.

The townhouse Brenda and I bought in Oak Park was across from the Unitarian church Wright designed, and we considered selling postcards to tourists scaling our front porch for a better camera angle. We could imagine living in a Wright house — the oak benches actually were pretty comfortable — but not paying for one. Wright homes now all have million-dollar price tags, even the so-called bootleg houses Wright designed while moonlighting from the Louis Sullivan firm. A Phoenix house he designed for his son is listed for $4 million.

This past March, Brenda spotted a New York Times article about Wright homes available for overnight rental, and was taken with the idea of living in a Wright house, if only for a couple of days.

So we planned a road trip through Pittsburgh to visit Fallingwater, Wright's best known house — a river runs through it. We booked a tour of another Wright curiosity: Kentuck Knob is maintained by the British lord who once owned Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House south of Plano. He lives there only a few weeks a year but keeps Claes Oldenburg sculpture and a piece of the Berlin Wall on the premises.

And we'd stay in a Wright home somewhere off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Acme, PA. Mapquest could get us to the Dairy Queen in Donegal, where we could call for directions: turn right at Brady's Restaurant, when you see a fork in the road bear right, open the gate yourself and don't kick up too much gravel.

At the end of the rocky road was a ranch house on steroids, very long and low. We parked under the carport and let ourselves in. It was a time trip to the 1950s: a red Formica kitchen with built-in oven; a greatroom with stone fireplace and shag carpeting, and not Wright built-is but House of Teak knockoffs. This wasn't a museum piece, it was Graceland. What had we gotten ourselves into?

Owner Tom Papinchak arrived and filled us in. We had just taken a coals-to-Newcastle trip: Duncan House was built outside Lisle in DuPage County.

Wright's engineer in the 1950s, Marshall Erdman, was one of the early manufacturers of prefabricated homes. Duncan House was a 1957 attempt at a Wright prefab, a ranch house on steroids but modest by Wright standards. The Wright prefabs were a failure: Multiple changes to the stock plans ate up Erdman's profits. Only 11 were built.

Elizabeth Duncan saw the prefabs in a magazine and convinced husband Donald, an electrical engineer, that they could afford a stripped-down version in cinderblock instead of limestone. After Don Duncan died the 2-acre lot was subdivided, and four years ago the house became another DuPage County teardown. It escaped demolition, though. Crews dismantled the house, labeled the parts and packed them on semitrailers for a 500-mile trip East.

There the pieces sat for two years. An attempt to reconstruct the house as a museum ran out of money. (See a pattern emerging?) Papinchak, a contractor in the rebuilding effort, finally bought the warehoused house and spent a year piecing it back together, upgrading to a stone facade in the process.

He rebuilt Duncan House on the grounds of yet another failed Wright project, a subdivision of Wright homes that stalled after the architect's death. This would be the third house, joining two designed by a Wright apprentice. A year after the home was completed, Papinchak's plan to turn the grounds into a conference center appeared to be faltering as well. Catering supplies and gift-shop goodies were packed in the basement.

Secluded it was, but not exactly a resort. We could use the microwave and toaster oven but not the wall oven or range. The mattresses were hard. The wireless connection worked if the computer was docked against the wall. Cabinets were bare but for odd pieces of trimwork, their location labeled in Magic Marker.

Yet, spending time there, it was obvious the architect knew how his homes would be lived in. Thirty years ago, the owner of one of those Oak Park Wrights told me about "a constant play of light through the windows." It kept changing day and night. Learning firsthand what she meant made this an affair to remember.

Homes and arts in Beverly: Rodeo Drive it's not

Kathy Halper, Walter Burley Griffin


In my twenties I would drive up and down Sheridan Road looking at untouchable homes, wondering how the other half lives. In the Beverly neighborhood, large homes from the same era take the high ground on Longwood Drive.

But part of the Southwest Side's charm is that the other half is close at hand. A brick two-story on a quarter-acre lists for $285,000, a block from a Colonial on a half-acre at $675,000.

Southwest Side city landmarks include Longwood Drive, a pre-Chicago Fire Italianate, a smattering of Frank Lloyd Wright homes and a street renamed for his Prairie School acolyte Walter Burley Griffin. Houses on this stretch of 104th Place can list for close to $1 million, or half that for the Griffin home pictured here. The carpenter vernacular homes that surround them are charming too, and current listings include foursquare on an oversized lot.

Unlike their haughty North Shore counterparts, it was easy to picture yourself in any of them. The Ridge Historical Society website notes that swanky Beverly Hills was not named for the Chicago neighborhood.

An equally diverse yet grounded grouping rings the atrium activity room at the Beverly Arts Center, where a Chicago Artists' Coalition group exhibition is in its final days. Gabriella Boros and Millie Marnin foreshadow lives of struggle for their young subjects, while Kathy Halper place children in domestic scenes on wallpaper-pattern backgrounds, offering the same latent fury but with more hope.

Unsettling subtext is totally lacking in the upstairs installation by Perry Pollack. Its announcement claims Perry's work "avoids the gravitas and clichés of the art world," but the cool minimalist constructions steer straightaway to those twin destinations.

It's the end of the boom as we know it, and I feel fine

At the Happy Village tavern, a neighbor confessed he's watching the real estate market from the sidelines, waiting to buy at the market's low point. From that barstool perch, the parade may already be passing him by.

The sales pace in West Town is indeed off 30 percent from last year. Yet property values have risen 3 percent, according to the Chicago Tribune's Market Pulse analysis of property transfers.

West Town's median price of $400,000 is up 20 percent in five years. The sales numbers pace 2003 levels. Prices increased this year in 24 of the city's 77 census areas, including nearly all lakeshore communities.

The Illinois Association of Realtors' Chicago area statistics show values down 3 percent overall — hardly a free fall. Condo prices were up by a greater percentage. The typical sales commission wouldn't cover the difference between the median-priced condo and midpriced home.

The overall picture masks some sad individual cases, as this week's foreclosure report suggests. So-called sub-prime loans have fallen down the rabbit hole, and many families with them. In the first three months of the year, foreclosures started on 6.35 percent of adjustable loans in that higher-risk category, nearly triple the overall rate.

Foreclosures ran apace in only seven states, however, with the Great Lakes trouble spots (Michigan, Ohio and Indiana) starting to shore up. It could get worse. It could get better. Or, as the regional gaps suggest, it's all about location. Many neighborhoods will stubbornly hold their own as bystanders await their collapse.

Last word on landmarks

What's left to say about the East Village Landmark District after a year of debate? With one final hearing left to attend, I put my reporter's training to work and pulled the clips.

In 1989 it was feared that the Wicker Park landmark district, as reported in the Tribune, would boost property values so high that gentrification would displace the district's residents. A few years later, the calculus involving South Side neighborhoods was whether they were viable enough to reap the economic benefits of landmark status.

How strange that the debate over landmark protection is now whether it will retard development.

Local history suggests that communities thrive or wither for factors quite apart from landmark protection. Benefits are limited to the districts' intended purpose: to protect the characteristics that make a neighborhood unique and invite its growth. Neighbors propose landmark designation not for how it will make their property more valuable, but for what they value in the neighborhood.

Reflections on East Village

Comments for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks at a City Hall public hearing later today:

I live on one of the last blocks of East Village where all the 19th century houses are still standing and the renovations have respected the 19th-century streetscape. That's why property values on this block were rising years ago, when homes were being priced for the value of the building, not the value of the land.

The streetscape may not remain intact for long, so my hope is that new construction takes a lesson from this older block that seems so comfortable in the postmodern era.

A decade ago when we moved here, East Village was already a hotbed for builders. The best of the new construction reflected its surroundings, literally. The new brick buildings with their multistory windows reflect buildings from the 1880s that were making what was then equally bold use of glass and masonry. The marketing appeal of the new homes is "Where luxury is standard," but the cornice and lintel details of their older neigbhors are a luxury they can't afford. These modern designs will lose their impact if the old homes disappear and strip them of their original context.

That's an artistic judgment but the loss would have a financial impact too. The historic districts that rose in Lincoln Park in the 1970s not only improved the older buildings there but the design of the structures that filled in around them. The marketplace has rewarded that foresight.

East Village is relatively late to preservation, and the evidence of that is in the shrinking size of the district. There's simply less to preserve. The two- and three-flats described in the commission's documents are largely gone, and the blocks that remain cohesive consist largely of six and eight-unit buildings constructed with two-flat facades, plus side and rear entrances.

These buildings tell the same story about the immigrant past of the neighborhood I used to call Polonia. They take well to rehabbing and are selling as condos for the same prices as their newly built neighbors. There's no reason not to encourage more such development under a landmark district.

View from the street: Putting down roots

How did you choose your home? Your first impressions were formed before you ever stepped inside. You drove through the streets, walked past other homes, and pictured life in the neigborhood. Even if the home was going to get a complete makeover, you had to take its surroundings on its own terms.

That's no longer the case. Now many home buyers can come to an old neighborhood and envision it as a clean slate. The reason is that the road to a bigger house now starts with tearing down a smaller one. Putting down roots is not what it used to be. Today I'm taking you to my neighborhood for a tour of what's going up, what's coming down and their uneasy relationship.

Crain's Chicago Business this month marked my community near Division and Damen as something of a Teardown Ground Zero. It's where the the most demolition permits in the city were issued last year, and the most new construction permits. Crain's listed 62 addresses with both -- some down my street, some just around the corner.

Last summer, the Metropolitan Planning Council sent interns out to catalog the side streets of my immediate neighborhood, East Village, and they found new buildings on 1 out of 4 lots. Two thirds of the time they were as big as the zoning code allowed.

These are brick condominium buildings with spans of glass out front bigger than any drapery you could buy to cover them. So it's easy from the street to see some well-appointed and comfortable kitchens -- visit and you might never move from your chair at the granite countertop. The marketing studies I read at work call new residents in this ZIP code the "affluentials," and buyers responed to for-sale signs out front saying "Where luxury is standard." But beyond the kitchen, the rooms are large but simple.

The brick facade is all that hints about what stood there before. But the contrast with previous homes and previous generations is documented in a proposal for an East Village Landmark District. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks found three distinctions in the dwindling number of older homes, and the first was history. Before it was East Village it was Polonia, my Chicago relatives' old neighborhood.

Four out of five people were foreign born or children of the foreign born. They lived in small buildings with small apartments. The two-flat I bought had rooms barely big enough to fit a bed and hang a change of clothes. The simple facilities explain the presence nearby of an old park-district bathhouse, now converted to offices. The residents worked in factories along the river and traded with Polish shopkeepers on Division Street, or later Puerto Rican shopkeepers on Chicago Avenue. Some are still doing business among the boutiques. The L wasn't underground but rattled down Paulina Street en route to Logan Square.

The second noted feature is the architecture. No famous architects here, although you can walk few blocks to Ukrainian Village -- which is where East Village found its name, not in New York -- and see churches by Louis Sullivan. Here the worker housing is well crafted. Windows aren't floor-to-ceiling but they're still larger than any double-hung windows you could find to replace them. There's a course of limestone to mark each floor, a Victorian tin window bay or roof cornice, and iron fenceposts ornamented with flower designs -- luxuries you can't afford in new construction. New owners remodel inside -- there are granite countertops here too -- but the ceilings were always high and the old millwork details turn every doorway into its own Greek Revival forum.

After the history and the architecture, the landmark commission remarked on "distinct visual unity" from the street. Immigrants were building a neighborhood to impress relatives back in the Old Country -- the more modest two-story buildings often had a third course of brickwork just to make for good photos sent back home.

But as time goes on it's getting harder for the street to keep that cohesive look. The smallest houses on the street, cute worker cottages with gingerbread detail, were some of the first teardowns. The buildings that replaced them rose five stories high, dwarfing their neighbors. That brought a change in zoning citywide, too late for the cottage owner who now has a bathroom skylight with a condominium view.

The landmark district drawn early this year has grown smaller as the city eliminates blocks that no longer fit the late-1800s theme. My house is on one of the remaining blocks, but if the City Council approves it won't be forcing me to make historically correct quarter-million-dollar renovations. Repairs won't require more than a trip to the Home Depot, but getting a building permit would require that the changes visible from the street stay in character with neighbors.

As a reporter I wrote years ago about teardowns. By now you could write the story too, full of old-timers' regrets about the torrid pace of change ... and the McMansion that replaced the merely modest. After less than seven years back in the city, I don't have their familiar complaints about familiar places.

I like the new buildings and new faces. But this week I gave the district my duly notarized approval. The neighborhood's history, the architecture and the streetscape are as much a part of my life as are my neighbors, and I'd hate to lose either. I put down my roots alongside theirs, and now we're intertwined.