The Butlers and the Wintons Lived Here, Among Others

I dug up a little bit more house history today. Searching the Chicago Tribune archives specifically for our address, I found out that a Philip L. Butler lived here in the fifties. Whether he was the owner or a tenant, I don't know. But here's the info from the obituary section:

Butler--Marion Elizabeth Butler of the Ridgeview Hotel, E--, Ill., formerly of Morristown, N.J., July 15, 1955, mother of Philip L. Butler, 1XXX Monroe Street...

In the late forties /early fifties the Wintons lived here. A May 12, 1949 article on local golf caddies earning scholarships had this: "Glen Winton, 1XXX Monroe st., E--, Westmoreland, chemical engineering." Westmoreland is a country club founded in 1911 when a group of men from the local golf club grew dissatisfied with the space limitation for their own course. It's name literally comes from their move "West for More Land."

A May 4, 1950 article with the headline "Catholic High Schools Name Star Seniors" mentioned that a James Winton of 1XXX Monroe was named to the National Honor Society and also was a member of the golf team at St. George High School. St. George was an all-boys school located at 350 Sherman Avenue that opened in 1927 and closed in 1969.

So, that's about all I dug up searching for The Box House address in the Trib archives. Searching for the last name of the most recent previous owners in the archives provided a few leads regarding where the family used to live, etc., but nothing about their time in our house.

Doesn't sound like much, does it? But searching for information on our condo address, that's another story.

Prior to the construction of our six-flat building in 2002, a turn-of-the-century frame house existed. And in 1977, it was the site of a grisly murder:

"Criminal Court Judge William Cousins, Jr. sentenced a man to 60 to 70 years in prison Wednesday for what he called the 'hideous' burglary and muder of a 79-year-old woman.

'This crime is one of the most grisly than can be imagined,' Cousins said in sentencing Leon Blackwell, who was convicted last month of the murder of Agnes Bookham in her home at 4XXX N. Winthrop Av.

Court observers said it was the harshest sentence ever handed down by Cousins, a former liberal alderman from the 8th Ward who took the bench last December...

Blackwell, 34, of 4329 W. Washington St., stood motionless as the judge handed down the sentence...

According to testimony presented at the three-day jury trial, Blackwell and two accomplices entered Miss Bookham's home June 4, 1975, to steal money for narcotics. They bound the victim's hands and feet, sexually assaulted her, then wrapped masking tape around her head until, in the words of prosecutor Howard Schaffner, 'she looked like a mummy.' Doctors testified the woman died of suffocation..."

There is nothing left of Agnes Bookham's house or garage; everything was torn down to make way for the condo building. But it makes me sad nonetheless that such a horrible thing happened where we used to live.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1899, 1920, 1946

Even though I no longer live in Chicago, my library card is still good. This allows me online access to some of the databases at the Chicago Public Library, including the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Illinois. These maps were originally created to assess fire insurance liability in urbanized areas. The oldest maps date to just after the Civil War, and roughly 12,000 towns and cities across the U.S. were covered between 1867 to 1970. The Sanborn Maps are an excellent resource for researching urban geography, as the company's cartographers mapped out everything. Individual volumes might include an "index of streets and addresses, a ‘specials’ index with the names of churches, schools, businesses etc., and a master index indicating the entirety of the mapped area and the sheet numbers for each large-scale map (usually depicting four to six blocks) and general information such as population, economy and prevailing wind direction. The maps include outlines of each building and outbuilding, the location of windows and doors, street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, fire walls, natural features (rivers, canals, etc), railroad corridors, building use (sometimes even particular room uses), house and block number, as well as the composition of building materials including the framing, flooring, and roofing materials, the strength of the local fire department, indications of sprinkler systems, locations of fire hydrants, location of water and gas mains and even the names of most public buildings, churches and companies."

Across the Street from The Box House, 1899

I was able to check our neighborhood in three different volumes. The 1899 map showed that some of the streets in my neighborhood existed back then, but ours did not. There are a few farmhouse-style buildings marked out, including the Twin Yellow Houses we considered making an offer on, which were once owned by the town's first black doctor (according to the current owner). There were a few parcels of land marked out into lots for future development, but most of it looks like farmland or open land with a few greenhouses, including the Weiland-Risch Floral Company just to the south (of our present location) and the Nicholas Welter Florist and Pete Schumer Florist just to the west. If The Box House existed then, we'd be able to look out from our living room windows at the greenhouses across the street.

Our exact neck of the woods is not mapped, although everything around it is, which leads me to think it was completely undeveloped land.

Portion of Evanston, 1920

The 1920 map of the neighborhood, a portion of which is shown above, shows that most of the land has now been divided into individual parcels, although nothing has been developed on them yet. The land is marked as Kinsella's Addition and Welter's Ridge Addition; I'll have to see if those are the names of the actual developments or just a way to designated who sold the land for development. Based on this, it seems our parcel may have been owned by the same family who owned the Welter greenhouses. At any rate, with the exception of one lone house on the far end of the block, there were no other houses on my street prior to 1920. The street is marked, and the alleys are now marked, but there are no houses yet. The Nicholas Welter Greenhouse still existed, along with a Mat Welter Greenhouse just beside it. The Pete Schumer Florist Greenhouse has become the Schumer Florist Company Greenhouse, and there are a fair number of other greenhouses in the immediate vicinity that didn't appear on the 1899 map. In addition to all these glass buildings, The Box House (if it had existed in 1920) would have looked out onto a few wagon sheds.

Portion of Evanston, 1946

The Sanborn Map from 1946 is vastly different. Nearly every lot on my street is developed, and The Box House and its garage are clearly marked as part of the Welter's Ridge Addition. The land to the west is still mostly undeveloped, as far as housing. So up until World War II, at least, the residents of The Box House would have been looking out their living room window at the one greenhouse left, which looks like it was called Jack Clusen Greenhouse. Here's a closeup of our house on the Sanborn Map:

The Box House, 1946

It doesn't tell us much that we don't already know. The "D" stands for "dwelling" and "2B" means two-story brick (or two-story plus basement). The "A" on the garage indicates it is a private garage. The slashed lines on the house show that there were window openings on the first and second floors. I think it's saying that the house is 45 feet tall? I'll have to measure it sometime, that doesn't sound right. The porches are frame, and by 1946 were enclosed. I can't discern what the other symbols mean, and I don't know what the slashed lines on the garage indicate. I thought the black dots might be doors, but they're not positioned correctly.

Nowadays, the greenhouses are gone and it's solid dwelling units--single family homes, town homes, apartment buildings--for blocks all around us. But it is interesting to see how the immediate area changed in a little over a hundred years.

Box House History

Inspired by Andy at Building a Better Bungalow, I got a free 14-day trial membership to Ancestry.com to see what I could dig up from the 1930 Census regarding The Box House, which was built in 1925, 1926, or 1928, depending on which records you believe.

It was a little more complicated than just plugging in the address. For whatever reason, that wasn't working. I would get an "address unknown" sort of message. I found another source online that indicated what enumeration district our street fell under, and then pulled up that document on Ancestry.com, checking it page by page until I found the address for The Box House.

Well, I found out that both units of our two-flat were occupied by renters during the census. The downstairs unit, the one we're currently occupying, had a George and Ethel May Tetlow who lived here with their children, George Jr. and Betty Lou, and George's mother, Nellie. Nellie was born in England, and Ethel May's family came from Canada. George was, unsurprisingly, the breadwinner of the family, working as a salesman for an oil distributor. Checking back to the 1920 and 1910 censuses, I found out he had worked as an auto mechanic and a chauffeur. It seemed he always lived within a few blocks of The Box House.

The upstairs unit, which we are currently renting out, also had tenants back in 1930. George Melberger, originally from New Jersey, worked as a department manager for an insurance company. He lived at The Box House with his wife Claudia and his daughter, also named Claudia, age 15.

Both units were paying a rent of $75 a month, which is $968.26 in today's currency. It was the cheapest rent reported on the block. The other rental properties on our street were renting at $88-$110 a month. Most of the houses were owner-occupied, most of the people in them American-born, and most had foreign-born parents. The block seemed primarily English descent, with a smattering of folks of Belgium and German heritage. Each household had at least one radio, and everyone could read and write.

I couldn't glean who owned The Box House from the census info, but it seems obvious it was built as an investment property, as both units were rented out shortly after it was built. I recall one of my neighbors saying The Box House and the next two properties were all built at the same time, so it's possible that one of the owners of those houses owned this one, too. But that's pure speculation. I'll have to dig deeper and haul myself down to the library and/or historical society for the next phase of research.

I Hope Lightning Doesn't Strike the Same Place Twice

Okay, I do know lightning can, and often does, strike the same spot more than once. Years ago, when I lived in Iowa City, I worked with a girl whose house was struck by lightning every few years. And not just the house, it always seemed to target one bedroom in particular--even coming into the room through a window once. It was crazy, because it certainly wasn't the tallest house on the block. We used to tease her that it was the wrath of God or something. Needless to say, I never visited her on a rainy night.

Anyway, we just found out that The Box House had suffered a lightning strike sometime in the past.

Last week, UPS delivered a package to the house that wasn't for any of us, and we didn't recognize the name as belonging to anyone who lived in the house before us. We tucked it to the side, planning to follow up on it (or keep it, I'm not sure), but ended up getting sidetracked by a billion other things.

Turns out the package was for the son-in-law of the previous owner. We should have recognized his name from the closing papers, as there were four siblings who had inherited the house and they each received a check at close. Their agent represented them, so they weren't there in person and we'd never seen any of them face to face before.

So the son-in-law shows up at the door, and we talked for a few minutes. He told us how happy they were that this building that had been in the family for forty years now belonged to another family. So I asked him if he had any photos of what The Box House might have looked like before. (I didn't expect much of a difference--I was mostly curious about landscaping, etc.) The son-in-law didn't think he had any photos to share, but he did indicate that our parapet was now nearly two feet shorter than it was originally.

What? Really? That thing is already pretty high, and kinda looks like some fake facade as it is. I posted about it a while back. We were all a bit flabbergasted to hear it was actually higher at one point.

So why the change?

Well, the southeast corner, right above the kitchen (currently obscured by the lurching cedar), was hit by lightning sometime in the last forty years--son-in-law couldn't remember exactly when, but it was a long time ago. The lightning did quite a bit of damage, and knocked out a bunch of brick. (Although it's tall, The Box House is not the tallest house on the block, and there are elms on our street that are even taller.)

When they rebuilt the parapet, they lowered it all the way around. We're not entirely sure why, and the son-in-law wasn't really clear. It's possible that rather than buy new brick, they had dismantled the parapet, salvaged the brick they could, and rebuilt the section. (This might explain why I'm finding brick all over the yard; wherever I dig to reclaim garden space, I'm finding bricks and brick fragments that might have been used as edging at one time.)

But this does explain some oddities:

1. It does look like there should be more space between the top two decorative squares of limestone and the limestone caps at the top--like a couple of rows of brick are missing, maybe.
2. This limestone square on the front is not proportionally centered (making it the only unboxlike thing on The Box House). A few more layers of brick between this and the capstones would correct this perspective.
3. Okay, this bullet has nothing to do with the facade; I'm just so psyched this overgrown bush found a new home.

So wow. We learned a new bit of house history. But go back to the first picture a second:

All but one of those bushes along the front have moved to different homes (I'm taking out the last one myself), but we'd still like to remove the two-story tall cedar. It's planted about 18 inches from the foundation, and is leaning at a 22-degree (or so) angle. Aesthetically, it does not please any of us. Morally, we feel terrible about taking out such a large tree. So what do y'all think. Should it stay or should it go?