As Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins’ lead singer and chief songwriter, walks around his empty, Victorian painted lady house in Lake View, he evokes no end of nostalgia.
He recalls the roughly 150 songs and the records that he wrote in the more than 100-year-old home since purchasing it in 1993. He reminisces about the “good luck” and positive energy that he says the house brought him, as his career rose from being a successful alternative rocker in 1993 to a full-out superstar today.
He rues the fact that a house into which he placed so much of his time, effort and money could no longer be a sanctuary for him, because of the attention it drew from fans.
But Corgan, who has just placed the house on the market for $1.05 million, is not just selling his house and moving to a more secluded or secretive residence in Chicago.
Instead, like Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow before him–two artists who opted to pack their bags and move out of the city that embraced them–Corgan is leaving Chicago for good.
To where, he does not know, but one thing he says is clear: if he had planned to return to Chicago to live, he’d be hanging onto the home.
In an exclusive interview on the eve of putting the home up for sale–because of his attachment to the house, he has debated doing so for many months–the affable, bald-headed, 33-year-old rock star talked about his reasons for leaving and described the restoration work he has done to the house.
He also demonstrated a clear appreciation for the original design of the Victorian and a deep desire to sell it to someone who will preserve it as much as possible.
To be sure, in today’s hot real estate market, there usually is no shortage of buyers for well-kept single-family homes, particularly in popular neighborhoods like Corgan’s, which is near the intersection of Southport Avenue and Addison Street. But Corgan insisted that he feels he “owes” it to a house that brought him so much peace to find a buyer for it who will respect its original design and higher aesthetic.
Like many homes of its vintage, Corgan’s house, which sits on a beautifully landscaped double lot at 3448 N. Greenview Ave., has a history shrouded in mystery.
Its exact construction date and architect are unknown, although “as best as they can tell,” he said, it was built after the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
“The first information we had was that the owner began paying taxes on the home in 1897,” Corgan said. “We know that somewhere in the Depression era, it was used as a boarding house.
“It had a kitchen upstairs, and multiple families moved in. The owner at the time made changes to the house to accommodate the multiple families, but these weren’t changes that reflected affluence.”
Ironically, the house’s various owners’ lack of wealth might actually have had a hand in preserving the home from modernization, Corgan said.
“There’s nothing worse than a house from the 1940s that has been 1970s-ized,” he said. “Nobody ever lived here who was affluent.
“Here, they managed not to strip away the original features. It’s very rare that you find that. Some houses you’ll see today have some quaint sentiment preserved in the corner, but that’s all.”
Marlene Granacki, who specializes in vintage properties for Re/Max Exclusive Properties and is Corgan’s listing agent along with Re/Max’s Anna Klocek, noted that the house retains all of its original molding–save for two back bedrooms–all original woodwork and much of its original stained glass.
When Corgan, who grew up in Chicago’s suburbs, moved to Lake View in 1986, he always had expected that if he ever achieved financial success, he’d buy a house in the neighborhood.
And when the Pumpkins began to take off commercially with their multi-platinum breakthrough album “Gish” in 1991, Corgan was thrust into the position of homeownership.
“In 1992, I was living in a parking garage and sleeping on a friend’s floor, and suddenly, I came into money,” Corgan recalled.
“A house like this was a dream come true. It was mind-blowing. I couldn’t imagine that someone like me could live in a place like this.”
Corgan instantly embraced the house, for reasons both cosmic and practical.
“From the first moment I walked into the house, I saw it as a comfort, as a safety,” he said. “Not to be overly metaphysical, but houses have a certain energy in them.
“This house is full of love. I don’t think anything ever bad happened in it, and being an artist, I’m sensitive to that.”
So Corgan set about restoring the house. He was aided by the fact that its front hall and living room required no restoration whatsoever, adding, “I’m not kidding you when I say that I didn’t have to do a thing to these rooms.”
On the south wall of the living room are two gorgeous green stained-glass windows that Corgan thinks are original because they are more leaded, rougher and have deeper glass. On the north wall of the house, next to the staircase, are bubble-glass stained-glass windows that are equally attractive.
Corgan placed a grand piano in the front bay window, noting that the light that streams into the house, particularly in the early-morning hours, make that spot especially conducive to songwriting. He was photographed there for a Rolling Stone article several years ago, in fact.
After passing through a second room on the first floor, which could function as a dining room, one reaches a back room, which Corgan used as a TV room and as a retreat for songwriting.
He said it likely was a formal family dining area in the house’s early days. Complete with a fireplace and a barrel-vaulted ceiling, the room was the “1910 version of a rec room,” Corgan said with a laugh.
Although the home’s kitchen is not large, Corgan said he suspects that the actual cooking in the 1910s and 1920s may have been done in the home’s full basement, allowing the first-floor kitchen to function as a food staging area.
“You have to put yourself in the mindset of what people were like back then,” Corgan said. “The basement was probably more informal, while the kitchen was a more formal room.
“The one concession I could see someone making to the house would be to enlarge the kitchen across the back porch. I don’t think that’s counterintuitive to the original design of the house.”
One of the house’s most unusual features is a dark lincrusta wallpaper–an embossed wall covering originating in England that mimics tooled leather–along its principal staircase. Most lincrusta coverings that remain in old homes have been painted over, making Corgan’s all the more remarkable.
“I was not crazy about it, but the last thing I would do would be to tear it down,” Corgan said of the lincrusta. “It’s not my style, but I’m not going to fight the house’s aesthetic.
“And details like these showed the incredible original condition that the house was in, and the amount of money that somebody put in to this house back in the 1890s.”
Upstairs, Corgan showed his remaining two preferred songwriting venues–on his bed in the master bedroom, and in another bedroom, in which, he self-effacingly notes with a wave of the hand, he wrote “a lot of hits.”
The master bedroom overlooks the front and south sides of the house and allowed in so much natural light, he said, that he soon ripped out all the curtains. It also was the room where a serendipitous experience occurred, about a year and a half ago.
“I woke up out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night and immediately went to the window,” he remembered. “I saw a fire beginning inside the house just to the south, and I called the fire department.
“Within five minutes the whole place was on fire. They said it was very possible that I saved somebody’s life. I have no idea why I got up when I was sound asleep. I’ll attribute it to God.”
One small upstairs bedroom likely was used as a kitchen when the place was a boarding house, Corgan said. Near the two other back bedrooms is a less formal rear staircase, which Corgan learned was probably used by the children of the house’s early inhabitants.
“The house had formal aspects and accommodations, and less formal ones, and you can’t fight that,” he said. “And as I lived here, I started to use the back staircase more and more regularly, and the front staircase less regularly.”
Back on the first floor, Corgan notes the house’s natural air flow that comes from keeping the windows open. It keeps the house cool with no need for air conditioning on any but the hottest days, he said.
Corgan also points around to the many first-floor light fixtures that are believed to be original, and notes the difficulty he encountered in trying to find artisans who could restore the interior and exterior of the house.
He considered narrowing the entryway between the first two rooms on the first floor, and putting vintage pocket doors between them.
“Any time I ever talked to anybody about that project, it was like crazy money,” Corgan said. “There really aren’t a lot of people out there whose primary job is to do that kind of restoration. Contractors told me it’d be cheaper to just tear the house down.”
Outside, Corgan painted the house purple with dark purple accents. After doing some research, he and his then-wife discovered that most owners of Victorian painted lady houses use exterior colors that are “a psychedelic nightmare.”
“We wanted to find a balance between the true painted lady and the aesthetic of our neighbors, so we would not be an eyesore.
“The guy who originally painted the house for us wanted to paint it green, which was a traditional color, but the colors he wanted were not happening with me. We settled on a deeper purple.”
Corgan spent much money and time restoring the house’s front porch, replacing its wood and redoing its upstairs railings and capitals.
Behind the house is a brick, detached garage that can hold as many as five cars. Corgan said at one time, he considered completely gutting the now-partitioned garage, soundproofing it and converting into a work space for the Smashing Pumpkins.
In spite of Corgan’s instant attachment to the house, his feelings toward it changed not long after he moved in, when Chicago magazine surprised him by publishing a photo of the house in its October 1995 issue.
“To me, it was beyond irresponsible,” said Corgan, who to this day grants no interviews to Chicago’s staff. “It’s hard to estimate today with the Internet, but there was a definite change that was immediate and devastating after the photo was published. I think the picture was the literal difference.
“You can give out an address as 42 Mulberry Lane, for instance, but when you have a picture and you can stand and look at it, it’s direct, irrefutable information. To a 15-year-old, this was important information to have.”
Since the photo was published, Corgan said there has “literally been one incident per week,” often in the middle of the night, in which fans visit the outside of the home and behave inappropriately.
Some incidents required calls to the police, and in an unpleasant but necessary move, Corgan said he had to install a tall iron fence around the property because too many fans were going onto his front porch.
“It’s a disservice to my neighbors,” he said of fans’ attention. “This house brought me peace, but with my crazy life now, it couldn’t be a sanctuary to me anymore, and that broke my heart.
“If I could pick up this house and move it onto 15 acres somewhere, I would. But with the trappings of celebrity that exist today, I just can’t live in this kind of property now. It literally crossed the line into the impossible. I feel I have to move.”
Despite all the problems, Corgan said he harbors no animosity toward his fans, taking a kids-will-be-kids attitude toward teenagers. In fact, he said the upside of all the attention indicates that his band’s popularity has made a solid impact on its listeners, and that “the energy goes on.”
Having been on the receiving end of negative press, he said he felt the article paved the way for the public to reach into his “last refuge.”
“I would have left four years sooner if it had not been for the house itself,” Corgan said. “If anything, it says that the person who bought a house like this at age 26 didn’t want to be a rock star with dogs and gates, locked inside a castle.”
Corgan said he’s not sure yet where his next permanent residence will be. He’s currently living in temporary housing in Chicago–“I wanted to make sure I wanted to leave,” he said–while he makes his decision.
He currently owns a home in New York, and there is some speculation that he might move to Los Angeles or even overseas.
No matter what, Chicago is losing its most visible rock musician, the victim of a heavy heart.
