Each morning on my commute, I walk past a stately, three-story green house on my way to catch the Metra. A historical marker identifies it as the Carl Sandburg House, where the poet first lived when he moved to Chicago. Here, the sign points out, he wrote his most iconic poems about the city, including “Chicago,” which famously declares this metropolis the “Hog Butcher for the World.” Past the historical marker is another sign: Blue Sky Realty. The house sold on July 28 for $2.25 million.[1]
Although the city of Chicago has landmarked the building and named it the Carl Sandburg House, it never belonged to Sandburg. Along with his wife and young daughter, Sandburg rented an apartment on the second floor of the building for about two years. He was a tenant, not an owner, of the house at 4646 North Hermitage Ave. This type of rental housing, the multi-flat building, is rapidly disappearing in Chicago. The Carl Sandburg House has been gut-rehabbed and turned into a single-family home, part of a growing trend in Chicago’s housing market. In a city whose rental market is rapidly changing, Sandburg’s poetics of tenancy illuminates what is at risk both culturally and materially in the shifting landscape of Chicago’s historical housing stock. By documenting workers at home in “furnished rooms”[2] and shared backyards, Sandburg depicts Chicago through working-class domestic space.
Sandburg’s representations of tenant life have important implications for his investment in working-class politics and poetics. Critics frequently read his poetry in terms of its representation of industrial workers, in part because of Sandburg’s involvement with socialist politics in the Midwest and nationally. A staunch supporter of Eugene Debs, Sandburg moved to the Chicago apartment in 1912 to write for the socialist newspaper Chicago Evening World, the only paper still publishing amid a citywide strike by newspaper pressmen.[3] Given his radical politics, it follows that the poems he wrote in his apartment every evening reflect a concern with labor.[4] Chicago Poems (1916), a collection he wrote during his time on Hermitage Avenue, features his most prominent work on labor and the industrial city.
Yet this focus on labor elides another fundamental condition of working-class life: tenancy. Throughout Chicago Poems, the plight of tenants in their rented apartments appears again and again as an axis of inequality in the urban-industrial city. In “Graceland,” for example, Sandburg criticizes the excesses of the elite by juxtaposing their lavish graves with images of struggling young workers. The poem refers to Graceland Cemetery, where many of Chicago’s nineteenth-century industrialists and millionaires are buried, and where one dead robber baron pays “the usury of twenty-five thousand dollars” each year “for upkeep and flowers.” Even in “his long last home,” the millionaire continues to demonstrate the excesses of capital. A second stanza, blocked off with parentheses, points out that nearby, in “a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages.”[5] These rented rooms in apartment buildings and tenements pale in comparison to the lavish subterranean homes of dead millionaires.
Other poems in the collection illustrate the reality that extravagant homes depend on the violent protection of property to keep a class of tenants and workers out. In “A Fence,” Sandburg directly implicates the ways the elite protect their private property. After detailing a new stone house by Lake Michigan, the poem describes its fence as “a masterpiece” that can “stab the life out of any man” and “will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children.”[6] The protection of the detached single-family home here depends on excluding—on threat of death—everyone else. Ravenswood, the neighborhood in which Sandburg rented his apartment, is now home to many of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful people. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house, for instance, is just four blocks down from the Sandburg house on Hermitage Avenue. But in 2023, the lavish houses in Ravenswood need no deadly fence to keep out the rabble; Amazon Ring cameras, like the one now mounted on the Sandburg House, can do that job.
While he condemns the ruling class’s violent enforcement of their ownership of property, Sandburg also envisions a shared working-class world through tenancy. “Back Yard” addresses the moon from the green space of the backyard at Sandburg’s apartment. The poem imagines the yard not as an enclosed, privately owned space but as one shared by anyone who can see the “moon of summer.” The poem invokes the figures of an “Italian boy…sending songs to you to-night from an accordion,” “a Polish boy…out with his best girl,” and the “old man next door…dreaming over a sheen.”[7] Here, the yard is not protected by a fence but rather open to the working-class immigrants of Chicago and Sandburg’s fellow tenants and neighbors alike. This vision of urban space as a commons originates on the back porch of his rented apartment. By contrast to the fenced-in home along the lake, this collective vision of exterior space, in which Chicago’s working-class immigrants share a love for the built and natural environments, is a lyrical assertion of what David Harvey calls the right to the city, a collective working-class right “to change ourselves by changing the city.”[8]
Yet the role of tenancy in Chicago Poems goes beyond theme; the condition of rental housing undergirds the formal structures of Sandburg’s poetic practice. “Two Neighbors,” an overlooked poem in Sandburg’s body of work, clarifies the structure of Sandburg’s divergent poetic forms when its titular neighbors are understood as fellow tenants. This poem juxtaposes the “[f]aces of two eternities.” One of these faces is that of the classical Persian poet Omar Khayyam, associated here with “the red stuff wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow and remember only the voices and songs, the stories, newspapers and fights of today.” The other is the fifteenth-century Venetian nobleman Luigi Cornaro (rendered by Sandburg as Louis Cornaro), whose visage is tied to “slow, short meals across slow, short years.” Sandburg draws here on Cornaro’s Discorsi, in which he advocates temperance and measure as the key to a long life, while he uses Khayyam to refer to a life lived vibrantly and wildly, moment by moment. The poem goes on to introduce “a neighbor who swears by Omar” and another “who swears by Cornaro.” “Both,” Sandburg writes, “are happy.”[9] In these two neighbors, Sandburg unifies divergent modes of living and thinking through tenancy: on the one hand, passion and urgency, on the other, sobriety and quietude.
These two figures and their warring senses of temporality map onto a tension central to Sandburg’s early poetics. On the one hand, his lines take on a Whitmanesque bluster in poems like “Chicago,” which brashly names the city “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.”[10] On the other hand, he writes with an Imagist austerity in poems like “Fog,” which describes the weather phenomenon as feline: “It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches / and then moves on.” The brashness and urgency of his long, exclamatory lines resonate with the neighbor who appreciates Omar Khayyam, while the simplicity and sobriety of his quieter poems sound like the neighbor who prefers Cornaro. This poem is metapoetic, offering the distance between the two neighbors as a microcosm of the tensions that structure Chicago Poems. “Two Neighbors” illuminates Sandburg’s poetics when we recognize that he wrote the poem while living in a rented apartment. These two figures may well be fellow tenants alongside Sandburg—one might imagine these neighbors living under the same roof just as the two poles of Sandburg’s poetics exist together in the same poetic project. The formal contradictions of Sandburg’s poetry are reconciled in the condition of being a tenant and sharing a roof with others.
The house at 4646 N. Hermitage is called the Carl Sandburg House, but who else might it be named for? Perhaps these two neighbors, who provide a framework for understanding the tensions in Sandburg’s poetry. Perhaps for the countless other tenants over the past century of multifamily occupancy at the house.
Yet the house was just sold, for the very first time, as a single-family home. Its previous owners, who purchased it in 2013, renovated it into a six-bedroom, four-and-and-a-half-bathroom house. While they have put care into restoring the building’s exterior to look like it did in Sandburg’s time, its interior has been completely transformed.[11] The practice of remodeling multiflat buildings into detached, single-family houses has become ubiquitous in Chicago. Many developers and contractors specialize in what is called a two-flat deconversion, which takes one of Chicago’s iconic vernacular architectural types and restructures it.[12]
The two-flat (along with its cousins the three-flat, four-flat, and six-flat) is a housing type that was widely built from 1900 to 1920. It is a two-story building, typically with a brick or greystone façade, that features a prominent front porch on the first story and a bay window in the front. Its two floors are separate units intended to be inhabited by separate households. These buildings have facilitated various domestic arrangements since their early twentieth-century emergence, but in the early twentieth century, they predominantly housed immigrants from Poland, Bohemia, Italy, and elsewhere. Owners of two-flats could live in one unit and rent the other for supplemental income, or house relatives in the other flat. Architectural historian Joseph Bigott argues that “the two-flat blurred distinctions between working-class and middle-class houses.”[13] In a city whose unevenly developed built environment lays bare its stark racial and economic segregation, the two-flat is a rare constant throughout Chicago. Near-identical rows of two-flats can be spotted from North Lawndale to Lincoln Park and everywhere in between.
An adaptable housing form for working-class and middle-income tenants and owners, the two-flat exemplifies what architect Daniel Parolek calls “the missing middle”—multi-unit housing situated between the detached single-family home and the large apartment or condo building.[14] Parolek and like-minded urbanists lament the fact that very little middle housing has been built over the last several decades, and the conditions of urban life have consequently deteriorated. A decent, walkable, urban way of life, they contend, depends on maintaining and restoring the missing middle.
In Chicago, the middle isn’t so much missing as vanishing. DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies reports that the share of the rental housing market made up by two-to-four-unit buildings has decreased steadily over the past decade; what was once the “backbone of Chicago’s unsubsidized affordable housing supply” now makes up less than a third of the rental market. The deconversion of two-flats to single-family homes accounts for much of this loss, especially on the North and Northwest sides of the city, which are seeing the largest declines in overall rental affordability.[15] Developers and contractors deconvert this extant housing stock for prospective homebuyers who seek both a relatively affordable single-family home and the rich architectural heritage of Chicago’s housing stock. It is also profitable; the sellers of the Sandburg house have more than tripled its value since they bought it in 2013 for $685,000.
The capital gains to be had through the two-flat deconversion have been extensively documented in the HGTV house-flipping show Windy City Rehab. One of many shows about flipping historical houses, Windy City Rehab demonstrates just how many millions of dollars are to be made by transforming Chicago’s two-flats and other historic multiunit buildings into single-family homes. In one episode, the show’s cohosts deconvert an early twentieth-century two-flat in the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which they praise for its historical detail and craftsmanship. And while they preserve its exterior, the remodeled interior is ultracontemporary, with an open plan and a muted gray and beige color palette.[16] (This very same deconverted two-flat in Lincoln Square got Windy City Rehab in trouble; its buyers sued the show’s cohosts for problems with the house, including rotting wood and damaged drywall.[17])
Those who remodel two-flats and other multi-flat buildings, such as the Carl Sandburg House, value the exterior architecture of Chicago’s historical houses with no concern for the social relations embedded in their floorplans. The practice of deconverting two-flats not only removes rental units from the market, but by increasing the value of homes, it contributes to the ever-inflating cost of buying or renting a home anywhere in the city.
In addition to the material loss of working-class housing, the deconversion of two-flats also results in a tangible loss of culture. Two-flats and other Chicago-specific forms of rental housing have played a significant role in the work of Chicago’s most prominent poets. Sandburg is only one of two great twentieth-century poets of Chicago’s built environment. The other, Gwendolyn Brooks, was a keen observer of the racial and economic inequalities enshrined in the city’s architecture. Brooks structured her poetry around rented domestic space, from the cramped kitchenette apartments of mid-century Bronzeville to the Mecca Flats, a West Side apartment building since demolished to make way for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Brooks’s poetic forms tend to embody the architectures of apartment buildings in more direct ways than Sandburg’s. The lines of her narrative poem “In the Mecca,” for example, meander down the building’s twisting hallways and into its many rooms. This homology between literary and architectural form demonstrates her engagement with the apartment buildings in dense, segregated neighborhoods after the Great Migration.[18] Despite their many differences, Sandburg and Brooks’s poems document a lineage of Chicago poetry that understands domestic space as a key element of working-class life and culture.
These two poets have become emblems of the city’s cultural heritage, and mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot have proudly quoted their lines in inaugural addresses. But these were poets who wrote at home in their small apartments about the rented spaces of the city. The culture of Chicago has been shaped by tenancy and by the city’s rich architectural history of working-class housing. The future of a poetics of tenancy is in danger as Chicago, like all cities, becomes increasingly hostile to a working class striving for the right to live in the city. The deconversion and sale of the Sandburg house illustrates a threat both to the city’s cultural heritage and to working-class life in Chicago.
Sandburg’s poetics of tenancy gives form to a vision of urban life that captures the contradictions of living in the city. By housing multiple poetic modes under the same roof, he gives voice to the breadth of working-class experience in a city like Chicago. But as two-flats and related forms of housing disappear, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the intimate acquaintance with fellow tenants that Sandburg has with his “two neighbors.” When multifamily housing is rapidly converted to expensive single-family homes, the city offers fewer opportunities for tenants—including poets—to survive in Chicago. Poetic forms arising from tenant life, like those developed by Sandburg, Brooks, and other Chicago writers appear less and less possible.
Although the interior in which Sandburg wrote the bulk of Chicago Poems would be unrecognizable to him, a Little Free Library outside the Carl Sandburg House nods to the home’s literary significance. On a recent visit, though, I found it contained no poetry, instead offering such titles as Making Divorce Easier on Your Child, Cajun Night Before Christmas, and TI-89 Graphing Calculator for Dummies.
Notes:
[1] “4646 N Hermitage Ave,” Redfin https://www.redfin.com/IL/Chicago/4646-N-Hermitage-Ave-60640/home/13392228. Accessed July 3, 2023.
[2] Carl Sandburg, “Graceland,” in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 2003)
[3] Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 229.
[4] Biographer Penelope Niven writes that the period during which the Sandburgs lived in this apartment was marked by hardship—Carl found it difficult to keep a job in Chicago, and his wife, Lillian, delivered a stillborn child in their apartment. Throughout this period, Carl continued to write poetry for several hours every night at home. See Niven, 231-233.
[5] Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1992), 23.
[6] Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 32.
[7] Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 123.
[8] David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (Sept/Oct 2008).
[9] Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 50.
[10] Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 3.
[11] Dennis Rodkin, “House where Sandburg dubbed ‘City of the Big Shoulders’ is for sale,” Crain’s Chicago Business, May 17, 2023.
[12] While the Sandburg House is not a two-flat, its division into apartments used the same kind of floorplan to divide the building.
[13] Joseph Bigott, From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869-1929 (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 206.
[14] Daniel Parolek, Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2020), 8.
[15] 2023 State of Rental Housing in the City of Chicago. Institute of Housing Studies at DePaul University, June 23, 2023.
[16] Windy City Rehab, season 1, episode 5, “Giddings Street Rebuild,” aired January 29, 2019, on HGTV.
[17] Jay Koziarz, “Couple sues HGTV ‘Windy City Rehab’ hosts over leaky Lincoln Square home,” Curbed.
[18] Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca: poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1968)