Perhaps a useful definition of a healthy community is a group of people who disagree on many things but all agree on one.
The eight middle-aged men and women at Cafe Penelope at Ashland Avenue and Jackson Boulevard had plenty of disagreements over their Sunday brunch recently.
They argued about how dangerous the neighborhood was in the early 1970s, when they bought the run-down 19th Century mansions on Jackson. After hearing several tales of robberies and vandalism and neighbors fighting back with baseball bats and crowbars, somebody said, “Come on, take it easy. You’re making it sound worse than it was.”
The neighbors bickered about who should get credit for saving the block from the urban-renewal wrecking ball all those years ago–who pulled which political strings to get landmark designation for the block, and who got the city funds to restore the street to its former glory.
They even carped about basic physical features of the block they’ve lived on and loved for almost 30 years. “Whose idea was it to put in the double rows of trees?” asked resident Carolyn Stewart, who’s tired of trying to get grass to grow in the shade. “That was wrong.”
But when you consider the size of the idea these people agree on–and have agreed on since most of them were in their 20s–all their differences fall away like paint chips.
To these people, the block of Jackson Boulevard between Ashland and Laflin is the center of the universe.
They’re committed to the block in a way that’s impossible to understand unless you know how they saved it, and why.
`Why can’t we buy it?’
Jackson Boulevard was first developed in the 1870s, and it thrived for the next 30 years as a place where upper-middle-class professionals lived in style.
But by the 1960s, the houses were in various states of decay. They were run mostly by women who packed the places with male boarders–in some cases, 20 or 30 to a house. Some of these women also were madams in what then was an out-of-the-way red-light district.
In 1973, the block was slated to be demolished for urban renewal. That was the year Chicago political consultant Phil Krone and about a half-dozen other young people got it into their heads to save Jackson.
They came together by kismet. Krone had been out driving with his wife, Joan Powell, when they turned down Jackson. She remarked at the charm of the houses. “They’re all coming down,” Krone told her.
Powell already had her eyes on one of the houses. “Why can’t we buy it?” she asked. “I think if we bought here, others would come.”
When Krone and Powell started talking to the owners on the block, they learned that an Associated Press editor named Coleman Mobely was already looking into property there. So was Bill Lavicka, a structural engineer. They began to talk about who else they could get to invest in a house on Jackson.
Before buying anything, Krone met with then-Mayor Richard J. Daley. To demonstrate the potentially cozy beauty of the block, Krone cut the ends off a shoebox and, on the inside, pasted photographs of the mansions. According to Krone, Daley looked at the shoebox and said, “You’re talking about saving these houses–who’s going to live in them?”
“I am,” said Krone.
“I think the city was completely amazed that all these young people wanted to live down here,” said Lavicka. At the time, whites were moving out of the city in droves and few were moving in.
As a result, the prices of the three-story mansions were very low. None of the first half-dozen buyers on the block paid even $30,000, and most paid considerably less.
The young people worked together; forming an association that fought for house loans in an area that banks were reluctant to invest in. Also, they didn’t bid against each other, which helped keep the prices down. They were beneficiaries of the connections of Near West Side politico Oscar D’Angelo and the knowledge and support of Leonard Curry, who was dean of art and architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “He was our father,” said Lavicka.
The youthful Jackson pioneers may have needed a father figure, but they suffered from no shortage of leaders. “If you went up and down the block,” said Ron Cichon, now a software executive, “you’d find that 95 percent of us were firstborns, only children or redheads.”
Despite their egos, they stuck together; and perhaps because of their egos, they transformed the block. Lavicka alone filled a 3-inch-thick binder full of correspondence with various city departments and other officials regarding the narrowing of the street from three lanes to two, the installation of trees and vintage street lights, and the designation of the block as a Chicago landmark district.
Value beyond money
Estimates vary on what the houses on Jackson Boulevard are worth, and the owners don’t like to say. It’s generally thought that you can’t get into most of the places for much less than a million, and some may be worth significantly more.
“But the point isn’t profit,” said Leslie Recht, who lives around the corner on Adams, in a house included in a 1990s expansion of the Jackson historical district. “The point is that we’ve gotten to live in these houses for all these years.”
The living hasn’t been easy. The Jackson pioneers have always been fighting something. In the beginning, it was the objections of their families and friends, some of whom refused to visit them in the neighborhood, many of whom thought they were crazy to bring up kids in the city. Along the way, there were pitched battles against unsuitable development plans in the area. And always, the neighbors fought for the sanctity of their block, long after it was designated a landmark.
Everyone around the table at Penelope’s agreed that the whole process was hard on relationships and on people. A couple of the original pioneers are dead, and there have been divorces, some of which the neighbors believe were caused by the intensity of the commitment to the block.
But the rewards are just as many.
The Jackson residents “stoop-sit” so often that if you happen to know someone on the block, you shouldn’t drive down the street unless you have time to chat.
Lavicka and neighbor Bill Rumbler make red wine in Lavicka’s cellar and drink it in his back yard.
Another neighborhood ritual is “worm night,” when Judy Peyton and a couple of others gather in the spring to watch the worms emerge from hibernation and mate on the sidewalk and in the street. “I don’t care what day `worm night’ falls on,” said Peyton. “That’s the first day of spring.”
The initial neighborly spirit of “everybody trying to help everybody,” as Lavicka put it, is still alive–especially in the summer, when the residents see each other working in their yards and occasionally gather for communal clean-up days.
In the winter, these firstborns, only children and redheads see less of one another. This is a good thing, said Lavicka. After spending so much time building the block in the 1970s, “I think we got tired of each other.”
Cafe Penelope is still the main hangout, but the group doesn’t come in together as often. “They needed each other more” 15 years ago, said owner Penelope Holden. “Now they’re older and their kids have gone and they’re more independent.”
Nevertheless, although there is some turnover on the block–Rumbler is one of the relative newcomers–the new blood hasn’t exactly watered down the thick old blood. Holden observed that the original group has always acted as “an exclusive club, not out looking for new friends.”
The old-timers have a sense of ownership of the block that the newcomers just can’t match. During a neighborhood-history conversation at the wine-making session, Rumbler said the mansions had been used as flophouses. “Boardinghouses, Bill, not flophouses,” corrected Lavicka. “There’s a difference.”
But there were no newcomers at the brunch at Penelope’s, and the members of the old gang seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Lavicka’s daughter Amber was there, back in town after graduating from Harvard last spring. She said one of her best memories was stoop-sitting in front of her house and neighbor Carolyn Stewart’s.
At this, Stewart beamed. “I’m glad you remember that. I loved those times.”
They all did.
