For 30 years they shared the same quiet, tree-lined residential Oak Park neighborhood-exchanging happy hellos when they passed on the street the way good neighbors do.
Then, in the summer of 1991, one family on the block sought to open its house to tourists, and the cheery camaraderie gave way to cold stares and harsh recriminations. They`re enemies now-that family and many of their neighbors-or at least adversaries, trading insults in the press, questioning each other`s motives and threatening litigation.
The issue, in the narrowest sense, is simple: Should Bill and Jackie Dugal be allowed to offer pay-for-view tours of their magnificent Frank Lloyd Wright-designed mansion? The Dugals say yes, their neighbors no. The challenge for Oak Park leaders, as village president John Philbin puts it, is to determine how much of a man`s home is his castle.
”A man`s home is his castle, and I should be allowed to do what I want here so long as I`m responsible and within the law,” Bill Dugal says of his plans for his home at 333 Forest Ave. in the near western suburb. ”I will be responsible. It`s insulting to suggest otherwise. We have been good citizens of Oak Park since 1962. We would never do anything to hurt this home or this community.”
Many of his neighbors strongly disagree. They argue that tour homes-as with most commercial enterprises-would by their very nature shatter a covenant of civility that residents are obligated to follow.
”No man`s home is completely his castle; we all must obey certain standards,” says Kevin Murphy, who lives a block and a half away from the Dugals and is one of the founders of a group, Neighbors First, that opposes the tour-home proposal. ”This is a residential neighborhood. We have limitations on fence height or garage height or setback. We all gave up certain rights in order to live here in peace and relative tranquility.”
Each side poignantly expresses feelings of betrayal and anguish, and the issue has sharply divided Oak Park`s leaders, who have batted the matter around for more than a year. Philbin and other trustees support it; zoning leaders do not. Ultimately, the matter will be decided by the trustees; a lawsuit will probably follow, no matter who wins.
”You can`t win in a situation like this-no matter what you do, someone`s going to be angry,” says Marc Blesoff, one of seven members of the village`s Board of Trustees. ”You`re telling people what they can and cannot do with their homes. You`re making decisions that affect whole communities. There are few other issues so close to the heart.”
If there`s any consolation for Blesoff and his fellow trustees it`s knowing that Oak Park is not alone.
There was, for instance, the case of Glencoe resident Themis Klotz, a self-proclaimed ”scientist-artist” whose ”peace park,” a monumental anti- nuclear protest consisting of, among other things, a Pontiac station wagon covered by more than 40 tons of sand, kitchen cabinets, rusty water tanks and springs and cans, became a cause celebre until its court-ordered removal last April. ”There have been a lot of peace parks over the years, and they`ve all been beautiful,” Klotz told the Tribune`s Eric Zorn, ”so I decided one day, `Hey, beautiful peace parks haven`t brought us peace, maybe we should make them a little homely.` ” And although a curator for the Museum of
Contemporary Art testified that the collection constituted a work of art in the ”Nouveau Realist” school, the village prevailed with its ruling that the work was a fire and safety hazard
Then there was the effort by Arlington Heights officials to force resident Gene Lipow to remove a basketball hoop from his front yard. ”My neighbor claimed the hoop blocked his view and lowered his property value,”
Lipow says. ”I thought that was ridiculous. But it turned out the town ordinance prohibited such hoops, which was a shock to me, since I`d say at least 25 percent of the village has got them.”
Lipow asked the local zoning board to exempt him from the hoop ban, but they denied the request, whereupon Lipow launched a successful campaign to amend the law. ”We got calls and letters from strangers, almost all supportive,” Lipow says. ”How can you be against a basketball hoop in a driveway? It`s all-American.”
Even the rich and famous are not exempt from land-use squabbles. A few years back, former Bears quarterback Jim McMahon proposed to encircle his 2-acre wooded lot in Northbrook with a 6-foot fence, a fence he said was needed to keep out intruders. McMahon`s neighbors complained that ”the requested fence would be totally out of character for our area.” The neighbors won, and McMahon was forced to construct a smaller barrier.
And then, of course, there was the well-publicized case involving television personality Mr. T, who engendered the wrath of his neighbors by chopping down most of the trees on his Lake Forest estate.
”I was just dumbfounded,” one neighbor told reporters. ”I just could not believe somebody could be that destructive to something that took God maybe 60 years to grow. And they`re gone. Just gone.”
Mr. T refused to explain why he slaughtered the trees, telling reporters only: ”This is my idea, my plan, my money, my land and my secret.”
Lake Forest officials responded with an ordinance that requires residents to obtain a village permit to chop down trees 12 inches in diameter or larger that stand within 35 feet of a property line. Violators face a fine of some $500 per tree.
Property-rights spats have also divided condominium neighbors. For example, residents in one North Side condo building recently tried to evict a couple who were raising a pet pig in their unit. The couple (with, presumably, their pig) eventually moved to the suburbs.
Generally, such disputes are resolved by local zoning boards. The cases may wind up in court, although legal scholars say there`s no definitive ruling one way or another to govern them. The legal notion that a man`s home is his castle stems from an argument delivered by Sir Edward Coke, the 17th Century British jurist. Coke wrote that ”the house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defense against injury and violence as for his repose.” What makes these cases so hard to settle is that each party generally feels, as did Coke, that some inalienable property right is at stake.
”It`s hard to settle a fight in which everyone thinks he`s right,” says Brenda Huff, resource assistant for Evanston`s Department of Human Relations. ”You`d be surprised how angry people can get over what you or I might think are little things.”
Huff tries to mediate such disputes to prevent them from winding up in court. ”A lot of times you`ll find that an issue is being used by neighbors to continue some long-standing feud,” Huff says. ”People are angry over something that happened years ago, so they end up arguing over whether a fence crosses the property line.”
Or a flower bed. ”I had one case where a resident complained because his neighbor`s flower bed crossed the property line,” Huff remembers. ”It didn`t seem so bad to me, since the flowers were beautiful and they made the back yard look great. But the complainant ended up pulling up all the flowers that came over onto his yard and throwing them on his neighbor`s property.”
The Dugals of Oak Park, who declined to have themselves or the inside of their home photographed, had no such long-standing neighborhood feuds-or at least none that they could recall.
As Bill and Jackie Dugal tell it, the story begins in 1962 when they were looking for a house large enough to accommodate their growing family of six
(soon to be seven) kids. They were well off but not wealthy (Dugal is a salesman of adhesive and tile products; Jackie is a homemaker), and the $80,000 asking price of the mansion on Forest Street was well within their means.
”We needed a big house to fit our family,” Bill says. ”But I loved this house for other reasons. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a $6,000 home. This was my dream house-a castle.”
It was also a mess from years of decay and poor upkeep. The roof leaked, paint peeled, junk cluttered the rooms. ”Our friends thought we were crazy to buy such a run-down place,” he says. ”No one said, `Someday people are going to come from miles to view this house.` The idea would have seemed absurd. The previous owners told me that Wright was the architect, and I said, `Who?`
Really, I didn`t know who Frank Lloyd Wright was.”
The Dugals came to appreciate Wright`s genius, particularly his elaborate devotion to detail. Such as the intricate terra-cotta carving that wound around their chimneys or the dark brown woodwork that contrasted so brilliantly with the white plaster to give the interior the look of a baronial estate.
”We renovated the place, making sure not to change any of Wright`s intentions,” Bill Dugal says. ”Wright was a master of detail. The windows are filled with hundreds of panes of glass, many of which are set with color inserts, each designed by Wright. And the lawn is breathtaking, especially if you view it from the second-story landing.”
They began reading up on Wright and discovered that their home was uncharacteristic of the master`s work. It was his only Tudor-style mansion, one of his few buildings with a pitched roof. Wright designed it in 1893 at the request of Nathan G. Moore, a wealthy lawyer. Another Wright home stood next door, a few others down the street. The architect`s own Home and Studio- now an unoccupied museum-was around the corner on Chicago Avenue. Without realizing it, the Dugals had moved into one of the most architecturally rich neighborhoods in the country.
It was also a quiet, peaceful, residential neighborhood. The kind of place, Jackie Dugal says, ”where you want to raise your children.” They joined a church, and Jackie became an advocate for special education in the local schools. They helped organize neighborhood block parties. They made friends. The neighborhood kids played football on their front yard.
”Ask someone who grew up in Oak Park in the `60s and `70s about the Dugals, and they`ll know us,” says Bob Dugal, one of the Dugal`s four sons.
”There`s me, Bill (who`s now Father Bill), and there`s Jack, Jimmy, Mary Ellen, Kathleen and Patti. We all got involved in the community, and we all made friends.”
At one point in the 1970s, they invited their next-door neighbor to sleep over for a while, after his home had been destroyed by a fire. ”I gave up my room for him, but it wasn`t a big deal,” Bob Dugal says. ”It`s what good neighbors do.”
Over the years, the neighborhood changed a bit. House prices soared. Tourists and architectural buffs began making the pilgrimage to visit the great works of Wright. In 1990 about 70,000 tourists passed through the Home and Studio, eventually finding their way to Forest Street, where they would amble along the sidewalk, cameras around necks, eyes opened wide, trying not to gawk. ”There are sidewalk tours all the time,” says LaVonne Brown Ruoff, who lives across the street from the Dugals. ”You could be sitting on your front porch, and a dozen people would come by snapping pictures. You feel on display.”
For a while, Bill Dugal thought about opening his house for tours but decided against it, since he ”didn`t have the time or energy to get the idea off the ground.”
Village leaders shared his vision. They saw tourism as a plentiful source of tax revenue for a village straining to keep pace with mushrooming expenses. ”We don`t have a strong retail or industrial base, and we don`t want to become too dependent on property taxes,” Blesoff says. ”It seems obvious to use our architectural heritage to encourage the growth of tourism.”
Many residents, particularly those on Forest Street, viewed the idea with apprehension. They were proud of their homes, but they didn`t want rubberneckers clogging their sidewalks. In 1987 someone floated a proposal for horse and buggy tours through the neighborhood, and the residents revolted-with the Dugals leading the charge. Jimmy Dugal, by then a doctor,
testified that horse manure would attract disease-carrying flies. And Bill Dugal fired off an angry letter to city leaders, whose text, ironically, would one day be turned against him.
”We put up with tourists littering our streets and yards, climbing on and chipping brick from our decorative fences,” he wrote. ”We put up with 50 to 100 staring people looking into our yard about every 15 minutes, when we are trying to entertain our family and guests on the front porch on a lovely Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Our everyday activities are constantly interrupted with busloads of convention tourists in a constant flow Monday through Friday and tourists ringing our doorbell frequently requesting entry into our homes. Tourists climb up on the side of our house and look in our windows every day. . . . We have all spent a great deal of money and time to restore our old homes, and we continue to maintain them so Oak Park can show off to the tourists from all over the world. There is no benefit given to any of these homeowners by the Village of Oak Park.”
The proposal was defeated, but the town`s eagerness to promote tourism never abated. And in 1989 Jimmy and Bob Dugal decided to dust off their father`s old idea about opening the home to tours. ”For years we never got any advantage from our home`s architectural value,” Bob Dugal says. ”It`s only fair that we be allowed to in a responsible way.”
It seemed like a good idea. Funds generated from ticket sales would help offset rising property taxes and maybe make the family some money. And there was another reason for opening the house to tours. Three of the Dugal children (Bob, Father Bill and Patti) have recessive ataxia, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. Father Bill, a working Catholic priest and Bob use wheelchairs. ”We don`t like to say this, because we don`t like to talk about our personal life, but tours would enable us to keep the house in the family as a place for Bob, Bill and Patti to live long after we`re gone,” Jackie Dugal says. ”We also wanted to raise money for research to fight ataxia.”
In the spring of 1991 Bill Dugal asked village president Philbin about the idea. ”I gave him a call,” Bill Dugal says. ”We`re not close friends, but I know him. After 31 years, I know a lot of people in this town. I wanted to know the procedures for getting a tour home approved.”
In essence, Dugal was asking to operate a commercial enterprise in a residentially zoned community, Philbin explained to him. That would require a zoning variance (or a special-use permit) from the board of trustees. ”We realized we would need neighborhood support,” Bill Dugal says. ”We went around to some of our neighbors and told them what we wanted to do. There was no great objection. One neighbor, Murphy, said, `Great idea.` ”
”I remember telling people about our idea at a block party,” Bob Dugal adds. ”They were all encouraging.”
On May 15, 1991, the Dugals officially requested a special permit to open the home for tours and operate an architectural bookstore there. In August the trustees held a hearing on the matter, attended by about 50 residents.
”We told them that we planned to have several 45-minute tours a day,”
Bill Dugal says. ”We weren`t sure how much we would charge-$5 or $6; those kinds of details would be worked out. We would have tour guides run the tours. And we would limit tours to the first floor. We don`t want people walking through our bedrooms.”
Some residents immediately objected, but others were cautiously supportive. ”I was willing to be accommodating,” says Al Young, who lives down the street from the Dugals. ”I got up at that first meeting and said,
`Why not set up some reasonable regulations and give them a one-year trial run?` ”
The Dugals, however, dismissed Young`s suggestion as impractical. As Jimmy Dugal explained, the project required a large investment of time and money. He and Bob had already formed a company, Historical Properties Inc., through which they intended to market items related to the house, including framed posters.
”You can`t go into something like this with only a one-year trial basis,” Bill Dugal says, reiterating some of the points his son made at the meeting. ”The insurance alone costs $30,000 a year. You have to be able to wait it out. And the regulations some of these guys suggested were ridiculous. They wanted us to keep it closed on weekends. Now how can you operate a tour house without weekend tours?”
It was Jimmy Dugal`s response that ignited the first embers of neighborhood opposition. ”Bill says he told my husband about the plan, but Bill never really got specific,” says Patty Reilly-Murphy, a neighbor of the Dugals`. ”He sort of ambled over one day, and in the middle of talking about how the Cubs were doing, he said something like, `Oh, by the way, we might be doing this.` Then when we went to that first meeting and heard Jimmy Dugal outline their complete plans, we felt betrayed. I didn`t want to oppose them. I liked them. My legs were trembling when I walked down the aisle to the podium, and my voice was trembling when I first spoke in opposition. I felt terrible to speak out against my neighbors. But I had to-they made me do it.” The next official hearing on the matter was a September meeting of the Plan Commission, an advisory body that reviews zoning matters. By then many neighbors in and around Forest Street had come out against the plan-as was apparent from the hostile testimony at the meeting.
”If a special use is granted for (the Dugals), that same use can not conceivably or legally be denied for (others),” testified Kevin Murphy, a lawyer who lives in a Wright-designed home down the street from the Dugals.
”What was once a community of neighbors would increasingly become a collection of buildings. The welfare and character of that neighborhood will have been sacrificed.”
Toward the end of the meeting, the Dugals` lawyer, Gene Armstrong, asked that hearings into the special-use request be suspended to allow the village enough time to examine the broader issue of tourism. It was an unusual request that caught the neighbors by surprise. One month later, Philbin appointed a 20-member ad hoc task force, which included Kevin Murphy, to study the issue and suggest regulations that would ”help us achieve an equitable balance between the business of tourism and residents` needs.”
Many opponents figured they had been bamboozled by a cunning legal maneuver. ”I have to give Armstrong credit-it was a brilliant stroke,” Kevin Murphy says. ”We were all pretty sure that the Plan Commission was about to vote against the Dugals. They were buying time. It also changed the debate. Suddenly, it wasn`t an isolated zoning matter but part of a much broader discussion on economic development and how to make tourism work for Oak Park.”
The delay did not diminish either side`s resolve. Both sides believed their inalienable rights were being trampled. ”Our homes are OUR castles too,” says Reilly-Murphy, who is not related to Kevin Murphy. ”As it is, we already can`t do all of the things we would like to with our homes. All of our family activities have to take place in the back yards because of all the tourists. Our kids can`t ride their bikes on the sidewalks. On Sunday it`s a steady procession of motorists driving by ogling. My husband and I paid a lot of money for our house. We sunk our life savings, energy and emotion into it, and now the village is saying: `Come on, take a gamble. Let`s see if tour homes work.` I really resent them doing that.”
Reilly-Murphy and her allies began meeting regularly. They settled on a name, Neighbors First. They began digging into the matter, and the more they discovered, the angrier they became. They were convinced that the Dugals were hypocrites-particularly in light of the horse-buggy letter-willing to deny others the very residential tranquility they had enjoyed.
”I believe their main motivation is money,” Kevin Murphy says. ”They could probably get $1.8 million, if they put their house on the market. That would leave them, after paying their capital gains tax, $800,000. Which would yield them about, oh, $40,000 a year, if deposited in an interest-bearing account. Compare that to what they would get from a tour home. About 70,000 people visited the Home and Studio last year. It wouldn`t take much to get a lot of them to walk around the corner to the Dugals`. Charge them $6 admission, and you have about $400,000. Sell them T-shirts, posters and books and you can double that.”
In the spring, while perusing village documents on the case, Kevin Murphy stumbled across a June 4 memo, written by Philbin to village manager J. Neil Nielsen as a cover letter to the original Dugal proposal.
”Stop the wheels on this one for a bit,” Philbin wrote. ”I have had extensive discussions with both Dugals, senior and junior. I told Bill Sr. that when I got the letter, I would not put them through a bureaucratic toe dance and shoo them off for a variation or a special-use permit. First, for one of our most major structures, we would do some quiet informal review of our ordinances and codes to see what the possibilities were. We cannot tell the Plan Commission what to do, but we can make sure Dugal knows what to expect and isn`t blind)sided ELLI Before this goes any further, I`d be most comfortable if Legal would review various issues and get back to me. At that point, I will advise Bill Sr. what to expect.”
Philbin says he wrote the letter to help Dugal ”from falling on his face publicly and wasting a lot of time.” But members of Neighbors First accused Philbin of discarding his objectivity on behalf of a friend. ”This is special-interest legislation for the benefit of one resident at the expense of many others,” Kevin Murphy says. ”Philbin and the other trustees are so desperate to promote tourism that they don`t care what happens to us.”
The neighbors assailed the Dugals as greedy, money-grubbing vultures. And they barraged the local papers with letters and articles, including a witty, little essay by Al Young in which he imagined Oak Park in the year 2001, should the Dugals prevail.
”Parking is a bigger problem in Oak Park with so many tourists,” Young wrote. ”We tore up a good part of the garden in the back and poured in a couple of truckloads of gravel. On a good day, we can clear a couple of hundred dollars in rental.”
In February, Young and about 50 others marched down Forest Street, past the Dugals` home, waving signs that said ”Mommy, I want to play in my front yard,” and chanting, ”Not for money, not for show, house museums just say no.”
Bob Dugal watched the march from the sidewalk, but the rest of his family stayed inside.
”It made me sick, some of the things they`re saying about us,” Jackie Dugal says. ”We`re not bad. The old-timers know better, particularly that neighbor that we took in after his house was damaged by fire. And some of the new people, well, maybe they haven`t been around long enough to know what Oak Park is really like.”
”They keep saying we`re going to squeeze 50,000 people into our house-that`s ridiculous,” Bill Dugal adds. ”We couldn`t possibly do that with 45-minute tours. We wouldn`t want that many people anyway. It would destroy our house.”
In March 1992 the ad hoc committee issued its report, recommending among other things that ”private homes in residential districts should not be permitted to open for public inspection for a fee.”
But the trustees overruled the committee and drafted an ordinance permitting and regulating tour homes. After hearing hours of testimony, the Plan Commission voted against the proposed ordinance. But, again, the Plan Commission, like the ad hoc committee, is only advisory. The village board of trustees has the final say, and they seem determined to give tour homes a chance.
”I appreciate the work of the ad hoc committee and the Plan Commission,” Blesoff says. ”But sometimes we take their advice, and sometimes we don`t. They deal with only little chunks of the puzzle. The board has to deal with the whole picture-and that means balancing the needs of residents against the larger revenue needs of the village.”
The Dugals will probably apply for a home-tour permit if there is a new ordinance. Their request will then be shuffled over to the Plan Commission for a public hearing. The Plan Commission`s recommendation will be passed back to the village board, who will hold, yes, another public hearing.
”By then a lot of what will be said would have already been said many times before,” says Gene Armstrong, the Dugals` lawyer. ”But if you want to live in a democratic government, people have to have their say.”
Both sides vow to fight until the end. Neighbors First employed a new strategy when one of its founders, Gene Ruoff, applied for a home-tour permit. ”The proposed ordinance says you can`t have tour homes within 500 feet (of each other),” Ruoff says. ”So if the village allow the Dugals to open but not me, then they would be violating my right to due process. I could seek an injunction against his permit while I proceed with a suit for mine.”
Of course, the board could call Ruoff`s bluff and grant him the permit he doesn`t really want. But his request would not be the last. Kevin Murphy might seek one, as would others who live in architecturally significant homes. Soon the whole block would be filled with tour homes-they`d have to pave their back yards for parking, just like Al Young forewarned. And the war between neighbors would continue for years.
