WE ARE NOT EXTREMISTS, Part I
In the teardown arena pitting developers vs. preservationists, it doesn’t get more charged than along the Winnetka/Kenilworth axis on Chicago’s monied North Shore. Factions: have yourselves a field day. A re-classification of human nature as architecture, and architecture as human nature.
Leo Birov is displeased. “Why do you want to go to meeting and be harassed by people who say you are not a good boy? I am not a bad boy.”
We’re speaking in the Winnetka offices of teardowns.com, a real estate company that espouses razing buildings so more economically-viable structures can be erected in their place. Birov, one of the major developers on the North Shore of Chicago, positively shakes as he describes the situation prospective builders encounter in nearby Kenilworth, stammering with frustration about the obstacles set before his company, Heritage Luxury Builders, a name his preservasionist adversaries view as painfully ironic.
Communities don’t get much richer than the adjacent villages of Winnetka and Kenilworth, about twenty miles north of the city. Here you’ll find aged manses that look like they’ve been lifted straight out of the same American dream that fired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of blue lawns and ample verandas, presentation parties, and a social caste system founded upon finances and property values, and the accordant degrees of envy and gossip that makes up much of a blue-blooded community’s subject matter.
If you have kids, there’s hardly a better place for them to go to school, with each village (a common Midwest designation) having one of the best in the country—namely, the Joseph Sears School in Kenilworth, just to the south, and New Trier High School in Winnetka, two blocks east—towards Lake Michigan—from teardowns.com. One could also easily stump for the area’s obvious beauty as just as strongly recommending itself to settling down here. Like when you first see the precipices above the deep ravines that act as a kind of buffer between nature and civilization on Sheridan Road as it traces its way around the lake. And then there are the details that make themselves more easily known when you’ve been in the area for a while—the manner in which the sunlight passes through the boughs of the strategically deployed hawthorn trees on Kenilworth Avenue, Kenilworth’s main drag, or the mullioned windows that invite one’s gaze ever-deeper into the large, many-gabled homes on Winnetka’s tidy streets, where cardinals are ubiquitous and vocal.
One such Winnetka home is at 412 Walnut Street. Built in 1910 by the firm of Dwight Perkins and John L. Hamilton, it is about to be knocked down and replaced by one of Birov’s signature designs, which the locals regard as unmistakably Birovian, insofar as grandeur constitutes a school of building. You might think of a Birov home as not dissimilar in style to an armory, but with more panache—that is, a massive edifice, commonly three-floored, utilizing elements from a range of European archetypes to fashion an unvanquishable talisman that you just happen to live, eat, sleep, and rear your children in.
“He’s probably the most prolific builder of new houses in town,” Brian Norkus, Winnetka’s Assistant Director of Community Development, informs me. “And by default, the most frequent item on the agenda with the Building Review Committee. In a town that has very mixed feelings about development, it’s kind of easy for him to embody all that is evil with developers and construction.”
Would that Birov were an unfeeling scoundrel and easily dismissed, so you could simply rub your hands together and declare, “yes, he’s the baddie, those people on the other side, they got it right.” His fiery temperament—“I ask you, did Lincoln live in that house? No, Lincoln did not live in that house, and still they tell me what I can do? Next they tell me what to cook for dinner”—clipped English, and blinkingly expressive eyes make me wonder why Gogol didn’t invent this manner of man, and for anyone looking for insight into the mind of the developer—and the mind of the preservationist as it stands in opposition to the developer—you need go no further than this sixty-one year old Russian immigrant and the feelings he engenders. Except, perhaps, to wander over to Kenilworth, and try to pick you way through a different kind of vipers’ nest.
What you quickly realize in these two communities is that houses are not merely homes any more than they’re merely configurations of eaves, angles, walls, bathrooms, and garages. They’re portals. And things that might as well be fleshy, cogitating entities, for their ability to impact—and reveal—the lives of those that bustle around them and inhabit them: both the people who want to knock them down, and those who devote a good chunk of their lives to trying to ensure that nothing of the kind will happen. You even find yourself wondering that maybe the houses themselves—like the one at 412 Walnut, and another at 157 Kenilworth Avenue, with its own saga and dramatis personae—have set people marching against each other as if by some brick and limestone decree, a diversion, perhaps, to help a house pass the time until fliers are handed out for the demolition sale.
The real estate listing for 412 Walnut baldly states that the house shows elements of David Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright—Wright, of course, being everyone’s answer as to who’s the most famous of American architects, while Burnham is as responsible as anyone for the scope and visual appeal of Chicago, a turn of the twentieth century urban planner/architect extraordinaire.
Quite a claim—but legitimate Wright/Burnham elements are indeed strongly in evidence in Perkins and Hamilton’s design. The windows look as though they may have been executed by Wright’s glazier, and are deployed in almost motivic fashion, their geometric patterns refracting light and shifting its beams to other points of attention: the vaunted Burnham-esque peaks, for example, which give the house a “stretched” effect as if it has sprung from the earth, made its bid for the canopy, and decided to stop at the height of a respectably-grown tree. 412 Walnut is the American house as geode—an amalgamation of primary, rectilinear shapes, with hard, sharp angles, blended into a single structure, the removal of any portion of which you’d imagine would rend apart the whole, like splintering a vein of quartz. Or, emerald, in this case, as the house is painted a handsome green, a man-made conifer to go with the surrounding pines.
“Winnetka really doesn’t want new construction,” Birov contends. “And obviously 412 Walnut was built for Hamilton, partner of Perkins, some architect…And each time I take a house down, some people in the village think I commit some kind of crime.”
Birov’s contention is that a healthy dose of teardowns is good for the economy, that property rights are sacred, and that if you buy a parcel of land and the house atop it, you should be free to do as you please. As for Hamilton and Perkins, it’s Birov’s apparent disregard of historical background that makes his maneuvers all the more difficult. One man’s nonchalance—or loyalty to his cause—draws another’s ire.
Dwight Perkins remains one of the most lauded of all Prairie School architects—a design discipline noted for its broad-hipped, squatty buildings, with a multitude of vertical lines, embellishments, and deft tracery. It’s frequently tabbed as America’s first indigenous architecture, and if you want to see the premier examples of the style, a place like Winnetka is a veritable mecca.
Birov does not execute Prairie School architecture—a logical enough conceit, given that the developer responds to the demands of his clients, rather than scholars and historians and the lay people who volunteer their time to sit on the committees and subcommittees to determine how a village ought to look. But the homes he knocks down are only part of Birov’s public relations problem; there’s also the issue of the homes he puts up, and how they relate to what many people in Winnetka view as an architectural community in which accordance is treated as a virtue.
“He has a style that he uses,” says Michael D’Onofrio, Winnetka’s Director of Community Development. “Because his houses are unique and it’s so easy to pick them out, people like to point him out in terms of ‘this is what we need to guard against.’ I’ll just take a devil’s advocate position and say that whatever he builds, he sells, so people must like it. He must be hitting the market.”
I take a tour of some of Birov’s Winnetka houses. He says he’s done thirty-four homes in this community of 12,500 or so residents, with three standing in succession on Lindenwood Drive. They are monumental: a Tudor, Colonial (a home to give Hawthorne’s Salem Seven Gable house an inferiority complex), and French design that I stare at for some time, half expecting a moat to appear before my eyes. There’s room for these homes here. “Where” a Birov design can go certainly seems a question of juxtaposition: three in a row, on a nondescript street, fine. Elsewhere, the issue becomes dicier. It’s hard to envision one of the Lindenwood superstructures going up in the space that will be vacated by the Perkins/Hamilton house at 412 Walnut, a leafier, more densely settled street. “He has relatively recently moved into the smaller, more narrow lots in town…and whether he’s done so successfully is up to each person’s judgment, I guess,” Norkus allows. “He’s changed it up a little bit…baby steps. It’s a little more contextual.”
As to whether public pressure and Building Review Committee suggestions have exacted a toll and led Birov to a re-think: “I don’t want to give him too much credit for having fit into the neighborhood particularly well,” Norkus says, wistfully adding, “I’d also like to pat myself on the back that the zoning ordinances are solely responsible for his doing a better job fitting in.”
Part II next week.
