When student Meta Godsell and her three roommates set out to find an apartment where they could rest in peace, they never thought they`d wind up renting above a funeral home.
”No pun, but it`s really dead here,” cracks Godsell contentedly. Tired of being subjected to the lunatic rantings of their neighbor below, the foursome had heard enough. It was time to move. ”We went through hell,”
recalls Godsell, who minces no words in describing her distaste for her former dwelling. ”All night long he`d pound on the ceiling with a broomstick and shout obscenities. You could hear the plaster falling down. We hightailed it out of there.”
The quick exit, however, was stymied. Godsell and her roommates had a tough time finding an apartment to accommodate all four of them. ”We looked two to three times a week for at least three weeks straight. When this came along, we were really happy.”
And why not? The four-bedroom apartment, above Rago Brothers Funeral Home on Western Avenue, is huge. ”It`s got the biggest kitchen I`ve ever seen outside of a suburban home . . . and the price is right, $800 a month, heat included,” she says.
”When I told my mother we moved in here, she must have laughed for 20 minutes. To us, it was nothing. It didn`t even faze us.”
Livening things up
So goes the tale of cohabiting with commercial business. While the surface appeal might seem lackluster, appearing to require too many compromises, for the adventurous renter, the hidden perks can add some sparkle to the otherwise ho-hum blahs of everyday life.
Just consider Godsell`s situation. Some might wonder if living above a funeral home gives her the creeps. The answer is no. ”Very rarely have we ever seen anything going on,” she says. ”Since we`ve been here, I`ve only seen four funerals, tops.”
Besides space, privacy and affordability, the Rago Brothers` apartment has a few other pluses. Sorting the mail is one job that particularly tickles Godsell`s fancy. Since the postal service delivers mail to the address unsorted, the roommates have been treated to an unusual education while sifting through their mail. ”We browse through catalogues for caskets and what you put the bodies in,” says Godsell. ”Once we got these sample notecards that were really great. They were condolence cards that said, `Sorry your loved one has passed away.` They were really cheap and tacky, but we loved them.”
However, the student`s most eye-opening experience at the apartment happened on the morning on the day this interview took place. Godsell woke up to find the cast and crew of the film ”Only the Lonely” surrounding the building. Vaguely remembering her landlord mentioning something about the funeral home being used as a film site, Godsell was startled to see the 10-foot camera lights peeking through her dining room and kitchen windows.
”I went downstairs half asleep and saw all these boxes that said 20th Century Fox all over them. I looked up and there was John Candy. I thought, it`s too early in the morning and too weird for this. It was a little surreal, actually.”
A chance encounter
People who rent above commercial space don`t always make a conscious decision to do so. Copywriter Bob Volkman, who lived above Kelly`s Pub on Webster Avenue for 2 1/2 years, came upon what he fondly remembers as ”the greatest bachelor pad in Chicago” purely by chance.
Volkman and his roommate, Terry Griffin, had been looking for a place to hang their hats for all of about 15 minutes when they got the urge to wet their whistles. Armed with the apartment classified ads, the two ducked into Kelly`s and began perusing the prospects. ”Polly Kelly (the landlord) saw us and thought we had an appointment to see the apartment she was renting upstairs,” says Volkman. ”We cleared that up, but told her we were interested. After a quick look, we took it on the spot.
”You wouldn`t think it, but it was a nice two-bedroom apartment. They had gutted the place and put in new floors, walls and modern fixtures. You could say it was a luxury apartment.” However, he says, ”the ceilings were real tall and it was tough to heat in the winter. It got to be expensive.”
But the pluses definitely outweighed the minuses for Volkman. ”I always referred to it as a full-service bar. I lived there, ate there, drank there, banked there and shopped there,” he says. ”Being bachelors, we weren`t the best cooks, so we grabbed a lot of meals down there. We joked that we had a meal plan. We got to know the cook, Jeanie, and she always gave us a bigger helping than some of the other customers.”
Volkman relied on his downstairs neighbor for other services, too. ”We used to use the bar like a bank. It came in handy. You could just run down there and cash checks,” he says. And the pub was good for package deliveries, which could be dropped off with the bartender; Christmas gifts (one year Volkman bought official Kelly`s Pub T-shirts, sweaters and hats as presents); and a highly prized free parking space smack dab in the middle of one of the city`s most congested areas.
”People would ask if it was noisy,” chuckles Volkman, ”but I`d say you`ve got the `L` next door, so you don`t even think about the bar.”
Noisy neighbors?
Renting above commercial quarters isn`t for everyone. Since most commercial property is located along main arteries, a tolerance for the hustle and bustle of strret life is often essential. And, on occasion, the noise and confusion can be even closer to home, emanating, that is, from the commercial next-door neighbor.
When stand-up comic Alan Altur moved into his new apartment, no one told him the joke would be on him. In an effort to save money, Altur left the quiet comfort of residential streets behind to move in with his comedian cohorts on busy Lincoln Avenue.
”It was kind of an adjustment for me,” he says. ”This was the place I used to come and listen to music and see movies. Now, here I am in grubby jeans toting my laundry past people driving up in Rollses dressed to the nines.” But the biggest adjustment came a few months after Altur took residence, when the vacant storefront below was transformed into the Montana Street Cafe.
”They knocked holes in the walls, put up ducts, pulled out radiators and sandblasted the place. They did a major overhaul,” says Altur. ”At one point, our apartment was like a dust bowl. I still have things that have dust on them that I need to get cleaned.
”Sometimes the noise would start early in the day. It wasn`t as big a problem for me since I work during the day, but for my roommates who liked to sleep in, it was tough.”
Altur, however, is quick to point out the positive side effects of the hassle. The apartment underwent some of its own remodeling and emerged from the mess with a centralized heating and air-conditioning system. And now that the restaurant is open, ”it`s like none of this ever happened,” says Altur, who hasn`t heard any noise or smelled any funny food odors from the cafe down below.
Is there a particular type of person who rents above commercial space?
Juliana Kelly, property manager for Centrum Properties, says that folks who rent at Centrum`s 747 N. Wabash Ave. building ”aren`t run-of-the-mill people. It may be a coincidence, but they seem to be a more adventurous type of crowd. A creative group with flexible careers. Many are in the entertainment industry, work night jobs or are students.”
One tenant is a cat breeder, although the cats have to remain off the premises. Another is a professor at Loyola University.
”When it comes down to it,” Kelly says, ”people are there because they like the location and convenience (regardless) of whether it`s above a retailer or a restaurant.”
And what about the landlord? Are there problems finding renters who are willing to live side by side with commercial businesses? Susan Coleman, advertising director for the Apartment People, an apartment matchmaking service, doesn`t think so. In some cases, says Coleman, ”it`s part of their criteria. Some renters want to be above commercial space.”
Coleman mentions a musician she placed above a flower shop in Roscoe Village. ”He had a lot of expensive musical equipment and wanted someone around while he was working at what he called his `average day job.` At night, he wanted to bang on his drums till 4 in the morning” without worrying about what neighbors would say.
She also confirms that renters usually can expect reduced rents for these types of apartments. ”Usually $150 less per month for a two-bedroom,” she says. The units tend to be larger, too. Most of the apartments found above commercial space are housed in three- or six-flats running somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 square feet, rather sizable when compared with units in strictly residential apartment buildings.
Ah, but there`s a flip side to the coin. Commercial businesses are not always as tolerant as their residential counterparts during working hours. One journalist found out the hard way when she rented above a Barrington beauty salon a few years back. She came home one night and discovered a note scrawled in desperation from the shop`s owner. It read, ”Please! Your dogs are driving us crazy.” Flustered, the tenant had no choice but to get rid of one of the barking culprits, a 10-pound miniature dachshund. ”I felt nailed to the wall. I couldn`t be there during the day to supervise them,” she says.
Living upstairs from a commercial business can have its good points as well as its bad, but no one can accuse these one-of-a-kind rental gems of being boring. As Meta Godsell so eloquently put it, ”Man, this is a story;
something I`ll tell my grandchildren about someday.”
