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Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
THE FAMILY HOUSE has left the family. Built in 1898, the two-story frame house was sold last fall for far more than I would have guessed and probably more than it was worth. The 1200 block on...
...That square mass of concrete replaced a wraparound wooden porch once the scene of childhood dramas, story-telling, doll play, a world outside the house but inside the yard...
...No preservationist sprang to save it, nor did a young family appear, eager to renovate...
...The last O'Brien has left Carmen Avenue...
...The back porch, with glider and chairs, was mostly family territory, except when my mother, leaning over the porch rail, traded state secrets with the woman next door leaning over hers...
...Then, that bit of land became my father's territory: flowers bloomed, shrubs were planted, trees fed and pruned...
...Care of the yards, back, front, and side, were the bane of my uncle's life until he retired to Florida...
...He had lived on Carmen Avenue most of his life, growing up farther down the leafy street in a house long ago sold to strangers...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS 112 n DISSENT / Spring 2004...
...The 1200 block on Carmen Avenue in Chicago's uptown area is a mix of wooden and brick houses along with low-rise, three-story, apartment buildings—most of them owner-occupied...
...Chicago two-flats, once ubiquitous, are a tribute to the value put on home ownership and thrift: the owner and mortgage-holder living in one apartment, the rent-paying tenant in the other...
...There is no grass to mow or shrubs to trim, no liminal territory, thresholds where inside and outside, private and public subtly mingle...
...Now, he is gone, his garden too, and soon his house...
...His children, and his nieces and nephews, lived on his street, went to his school and church, even had some of his teachers, looked at the same houses, trees, sometimes knew the same neighbors...
...If the new building at 1257 resembles its mates up and down that block, there will be no yard for gardening, no sequestered space for children to play, no front stoop for summer debates, and no back porch for lolling about, making idle gossip...
...Civil rights, unions, Korea, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, romance, and gossip filled the summer nights as pressing points were argued up and down the stairs and back and forth between the iron banisters...
...Gradually these houses are being torn down and replaced by condominiums of four and six apartments in which everyone becomes a mortgage holder...
...Front yards, side yards, back yards disappear...
...porches are no more...
...Though my father had been a working man all his life, this planting and tending seemed to come naturally, seemed to be part of the cultivator and peasant that he really was...
...Were buyers put off by the drab, brown-shingled exterior, an economy my uncle made to avoid painting, or by the concrete stoop, another economy...
...In adolescence, the steps of the concrete porch served as debating posts for sorting out the world with friends and schoolmates...
...Yet as a New York apartment dweller, I know that life without yards and porches is a life without a wide threshold where public and private subtly mingle—a life without an all-important in-between...
...O'Briens of three generations lived there for more than sixty years, beginning with my uncle and then my father, and ending with my sister and her children...
...His children have moved on...
...Possibly, younger, less familial residents of this new building will engage in distinctively "public" forms of city life— block association meetings, exhibits at the Art Institute, swimming at Foster Beach, maybe even local politics...
...Our old house, 1257 Carmen, awaits the demolition crew...
...Deep lots and wide frontage make these frame houses attractive to developers, who have bought up several on the block and replaced them with square brick buildings built to the property edges...
Vol. 51 • April 2004 • No. 2
