Photographs by Janet Sanders
They’ll tell you stories about showering under basement faucets in January. Or August afternoons spent marching to the Dumpster with wheelbarrow loads of rotted wood, crumbling floor tiles, old insulating straw or, like my neighbor Michael, a collection of artificial legs and a dozen rusted-shut Mason jars sloshing with mysterious substances, both light and dark. Rehabbing means sleeping behind curtains of visquene, making toast while leaning over piles of dislocated crown molding, sometimes even spatting with your spouse to the point of divorce or walking away from a building you’ve spent months cleaning, gutting and framing out. This is why rehabbers throw parties to celebrate the first flush of a working toilet, toasting with canned beer as the water swirls around the bowl.
A few years ago I decided, unequivocally, the only place in the world I wanted to live was Old North St. Louis. Up there, rehabbing is the smart thing to do. It’s not just more affordable. You’re the author of the space, from the wiring to the wallpaper. Getting to the point where you’re drinking iced tea and flipping through wallpaper books, however, requires a certain kind of constitution, and I was one of those overdramatic little girls who refused to wear sneakers with skirts and would lie on the couch waiting to die if I accidentally ate potato salad that had been left out for more than an hour. When our buddy Barbara (who’s spent the last three years rehabbing a 6,000-square-foot four-family flat) took us on a screwdriver-gun tour of possible rehabs around the neighborhood, my husband, Thom, seemed closer to fainting than I did, though. I like the idea of learning to tuckpoint; Phil, another Old North friend, does that (the last time we visited his house-in-progress, he affixed a note on the front door that read, “I’m up on the scaffolding … ”). But I could just see us walking 10 feet astride the house to avoid being concussed by falling bricks before either one of us picked up a grout trowel.
So we looked for a finished house. Last fall we found one with a wood-burning stove and a lovely double lot, but it needed masonry work we couldn’t afford. In February we almost closed on a finished, moderately priced rehab repossessed by a bank; mysteriously, the lockbox code would change every time we dispatched the sewer cam guy to inspect the pipes. The Friday before we finalized the contract, our realtor called. “Well,” she told me, “they’re old clay pipes, pretty good shape, but … the guy running the cam said he’d never seen anything like it. It empties out into, er, sort of a gravel pit. Maybe it’s a cistern?” I panicked and phoned Sean Thomas at the Old North Restoration Group, who was coaching us through moving to the neighborhood. He sighed. No; sadly, that would have to be a collapsed sewer line. With no time to find out if the $10,000 sewer repairs would be covered by the city’s lateral-line insurance program, we wussed out and cancelled the contract. I felt stupid; there were people we knew in the neighborhood who sledgehammered walls, pulled up floors, rebuilt staircases and re-laid brick sidewalks—for them, fixing 6 feet of pipe might as well be reading the paper. But I pictured Thom and I, party of two, bankrupted and standing over the toilet—well, one of the three toilets—just to watch it not flush, and then crying. “Besides,” Thom said, “I feel ridiculous buying a house with more bathrooms than we have digestive systems.”
For two weeks after we gave up on the house, I frowned and lay around on the couch a lot. I guess like any kind of love, my smittenness with the neighborhood can be irrational, though I can make a long, logical list of its charms: Crown Candy Kitchen, the soda fountain that’s anchored the corner of 14th and St. Louis for
95 years; Marx Hardware, which has sold nuts, bolts and mineral spirits since 1875; The Urban Studio, a neighborhood coffee shop, where they’ve taught DIY plaster repair and capoeira; the Riverfront Trail; the 100-year-old lilac bushes; the mouse-hole arches, old wrought-iron fences and mansard roofs; and, of course, the Restoration Group, who saved the Mullanphy Emigrant Home and helped redevelop the 14th Street Mall, now Crown Square. I’d add the Saturday farmer’s market and New Roots Urban Farm (which grows vegetables in St. Louis Place and sells them at the market) as well as the market master, Lucas Hudson, who also edits the Vital Voice and who appeared in the Post’s food section this summer dressed as a giant carrot.
After watching me mope, Thom admitted he wasn’t ready to buy any house in Old North, much less a rehab, but agreed we could move out of our South City house, with its fenced yard and full basement, into an Old North apartment, where we could check out the neighborhood. “But I’m not promising anything,” he warned me.
We first met Janet, our landlady—which seems like the wrong word, because it conjures the image of a mean old butt-scratcher in pin curls and a quilted housecoat—on a freezing, rainy March night. Next to the house was a large empty lot (a swath of what’s sometimes called “urban prairie”) that had turned to a sea of red mud in the rain. We squelched across it, past a trench where they were still laying gas lines, to where Janet had parked her car. She’d spent the last several months rehabbing two LRA buildings—a two-family flat and an “alley house,” a phenomenon dating back to the late 19th century, when the blocks were so packed that people literally built tiny houses in the alleys (hers is one room deep and three stories high). LRA stands for “Land Reutilization Authority,” the city department that’s in charge of developing abandoned property. They will sell you a house for $1,000, usually one that needs a gut rehab. Then you have 18 months to secure your loan, hire your crew and finish your project.
We followed Janet up the back stairs, where she unlocked an elaborate, neo-Victorian metal gate straight out of a steampunk novel (she’d made it herself) and led us into the apartment. It was still in process—there were buckets and fixtures and doors and stacks of wood, but she moved it all around and sketched out how things would come together before we moved in come May. “And just tell me what you want,” she said. “How many shelves in the closet, if you want a dishwasher … ”
We told her we would think about it and call her back. We debated: It’s only 675 square feet; what do we do with our stuff? We can’t make her buy us a dishwasher! But what if we are so spoiled, we succumb to sloth? And then get trench mouth? If we grow tomatoes, we’d have to build a raised bed, and nothing would grow in that red mud. OK, OK. It’s a plan. When I told Janet we’d take the apartment, she shouted, “Brilliant!” and sent us a receipt worthy of William Morris: signed in fountain pen, on parchment paper, with a handmade postcard pasted with a triptych of photos of the house in progress—a window well and ladder, a shot of the back wall before the stairs were built, a scrap of the original fern-and-ivy wallpaper.
Almost everyone in the neighborhood knew we were arriving weeks before we pulled up with a cargo van full of severely edited belongings (we made, no hyperbole, 18 trips to Goodwill’s donation dock). They sent us welcoming emails, stopped by to say hello. Barbara strode down 19th with a giant broom over her shoulder and threw it into Thom’s hands (“For good luck!”), Janet helped us move our washer and dryer up three flights of stairs and Tom and Gloria Bratkowski invited us to a neighborhood open house—clever us, we moved in during the weekend of the house tour, and Janet’s rehabs were on the route—and we were grateful to have a place to drink lemonade, flop in chairs, meet our neighbors and listen to Tom’s player piano let loose with “Toot Toot Tootsie.”
But this was full circle. It was on the house tour a few years ago that I decided this was where I wanted to be. Thom and I spent a warm May afternoon meandering down North Market and Hebert, Monroe and 14th, then stopped at Crown and ate big, drippy chocolate ice cream cones in the sunshine. There was something about the quality of the light (it’s this peculiar golden color), the yellow finches parked on the branches of the dogwoods (I never see those birds anywhere else in the city) and the aura of fierce deliberateness that emanated from every repainted door and rebuilt wall. I was flooded with an almost physical sense of nostalgia and a rush of associations—New Orleans, Emily Dickinson, 1930s musicals, curio shops, road trips, birding manuals, lime rickeys—that left me filled with an unquenchable homesickness that I’ve never really been able to explain. The people we met were all ages, all colors. They were scientists, artists, machinists, mothers; transplants from England and fourth-generation North Siders. It was the only place I’d ever felt at home, even though I had never lived there.
Weirdly, the first morning I woke up in the apartment, I freaked out. The space made me happy: The shelves were made by hand, supported by curly, Alphonse Mucha–like brackets; the floors were stained a deep burgundy in the front rooms, blond in the bedroom. But we’d been so busy driving back and forth from Goodwill that we hadn’t bought curtains, and we were on the second floor. The bedroom was floating in space, too bright, flooded with that golden light that filled the corners of my eyes with sparkles. “Things are going to be OK, right?” I asked Thom, like it was his idea to move up here. I paced around, weaving through the stacks of cardboard boxes, trying to allay this algae bloom of anxiety spreading through my chest. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, and he honestly meant it. It was just the disruption of moving, and the fact we didn’t have a land line yet—the building hadn’t had service in years, and the technician had to come over and hook up the wires. As for DSL, the phone company seemed even more pessimistic about that. (After being told seven or eight times that they didn’t offer DSL in my area, I finally talked to a customer service rep in Earth City who admitted that they could offer it and just needed to send an engineer to take a clip off the line—which, eventually, they did.)
That Monday morning, I threw myself into putting stuff away, and my anxiety receded every time I flattened a cardboard box. Norman, Janet’s contractor, was working in the downstairs apartment, hammering and whistling and listening to R&B on the radio. I watched as one of the anarchist kids living in the house behind Janet’s emerged from the trees; he had a pocket full of seeds and was finishing planting a succotash garden in the huge raised bed they’d built in the common field next to the house. Then a huge, bouncing orange thing that looked like a Transformer—it turned out to be one of the city’s lawn mowers—came tearing through the empty lots from a few blocks away and began making spins through our yard, but the anarchists had cleverly bordered their garden with old railroad ties, so the mower couldn’t get anywhere near it. The AT&T guy showed up shortly thereafter; after I signed some papers, he started climbing trees and giant ladders and slinging phone wire around. Then a wasp crawled through the transom, and a big black spider peeked around the side of the stove. I’m not sure why, but it was at that point I knew everything was going to be OK. And I felt even better the first time the phone rang.
Across the street from us, there’s a little bungalow that’s smaller than our apartment—645 square feet. We went inside it when Barbara took us on the screwdriver tour. There’s a hole in the floor in the front room, and we could see the gas meter had fallen down inside the hole, a thing that for some reason became a sticking point for Thom. Every time I’ve brought up the possibility of buying it, he shudders. “It’s just like that sewer cam video, when the camera goes into the hole,” he says. “There’s just something about it that makes me feel all cold inside.” A friend who helped us move spotted it right away: “What about that bungalow? You could put a hay-bale addition onto it—I’d do it!” “There’s a problem with the floor,” I said weakly. “But that’s fixable,” she objected. One night, when I was sitting outside talking to Janet and Barbara, drinking wine and getting my feet nipped—the mosquitoes here are big and shameless; the cicadas sound like a snapping Tesla coil—I idly mentioned that in a perfect world, even with my dysfunctional relationship to grout trowels, I sort of wanted to rehab the bungalow. “You should do it!” Barbara said, and then launched into a string of very convincing reasons why (one of her more amazing talents). “I almost bought that bungalow, actually,” Janet said, “but I couldn’t because it had only been on the market for three months, and there’s some kind of anti-flipping ordinance, which is good—anyway, it’s a brilliant house.” “It’s so little,” Barbara said, topping off her list of good reasons. “And it has a new roof. You’d probably be able to finish it in eight months.” And then I thought to myself: Well, bloody hell. I guess I have a pretty good idea of what would have to go out to the Dumpster, and it doesn’t make me shiver.
If you have a penny in your pocket, throw it in a fountain and wish me luck; I’ve seethed at the window as people come by to walk around the house, and I’m hoping we can get our paperwork filled out and some kind of loan in place before it slips away and becomes someone else’s Little Easy. We can’t rent forever; and at this point, no matter how profoundly that gas meter gives Thom the willies, his enthusiasm has finished its sine wave rise-and-fall and finally come to rest in a place that makes him reticent to leave—and open to tackling that house.
Initially, it wasn’t Crown Candy or the house tour that first brought me to North City. No—in the summer of 2001, after living in St. Louis for all of two months, I boarded the Soulard bus on the wrong side of the street. We rumbled through downtown, and suddenly I was riding through neighborhoods I’d never seen before. And I mean that in a larger sense. In Salt Lake, where I’m from, the streets are laid out in a Cartesian grid. The churches look like suburban office towers, and every night but Sunday, little guys in carts putt around and scrape gum off the sidewalks. I’d never seen storefront churches, barbecue joints with whole-animal cookers, 19th-century brick buildings painted with Orange Whistle advertisements half-obscured by graffiti. For whatever reason, despite my terror of warm potato salad, I’d never felt comfortable in Salt Lake, with its neurotic aversions to germs and surprises.
The only thing I recognized in the landscape at all was a plant my mom always called a “Tree of Heaven.” Despite its sweet name, she ripped up the seedlings on sight, swearing their only mission was to perforate sewer lines and uproot foundations. Biologists, always more objective than my mother, refer to the tree as Ailanthus altissima and describe it as a short-lived, fast-growing deciduous tree native to Asia, where it’s called chouchun; the Chinese use it to cure baldness and insanity. In St. Louis it’s called a “ghetto palm.” You see them growing in soil contaminated with oil and lead chips, out the windows of abandoned buildings or through the cracks of forgotten tennis courts. They remind me that the soil here is much more fertile than it looks: Our stairs are now surrounded by wild pansies and sunflowers, which sprouted up and bloomed in that hard, red dirt—from seeds that spilled out of our birdfeeder.
Down the street from that little house I love so much, there’s one with a mansard roof and flowers painted over the boards nailed to the windows. On the patinaed brick there’s a tiny, graceful bit of graffiti (written in delicate cursive, for crying out loud): the word AGAPE. I imagine it came out of the Holy Ghost’s can of silver spray paint, because it seems too perfect, the handwriting and the sentiment, at least if you think about agape in both senses, at the same time: Ah-gape, like standing on the corner with your mouth hanging open, fireworks reflected in the pupils of your eyes, being smacked hard by the unexpected and the uncontrollable, but keeping your mind, like your mouth, wide open; and Uh-GAHP-ay, the Greek word for a love that emanates from the soul, the kind that allows you to adore the silty dirt under your feet, and the spiders crawling over it, and the grass growing out of it, and the mosquitoes flying over it, and the houses placed up on it, and the people inside them. Because in the end, that’s the only way to find the gumption to smile when the cold water pours over your head, or to fearlessly carry the most odious stuff to the Dumpsters, sometimes with your bare hands..
