“Four hundred houses they’ve took down since the first of the year!” says Bill Lavicka, a structural engineer who’s rehabbed dozens of old buildings on the near west side. “The city of Chicago is creating more vacant lots than the Chicago Fire. You can’t keep tearing buildings down. There’s gonna be nothing left in this city–it’s turning into a prairie!”
In a lot next to the condos Lavicka has built a shrine to all the old buildings Chicago has lost in the last century. Five years ago he told HydroAire, the pump-repair company that owns the lot, that he’d clean it up if they let him turn it into a memorial. He started by moving out an old man who was living there in a motorboat. “There was five hookers there who hung around the boat. I chased the hookers out. Had the boat launched and burned, like a Viking funeral.”
In 1962 Lavicka entered the structural-engineering program at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He didn’t like the Mies van der Rohe campus. “Everything is completely sterile. The boxes–just steel and glass and brick, and that’s it. Ornament was anathema. You talk to these old Miesian guys, and you would mention ornament. And they would say, “Ornament? How dare you have ornament on your building?’ How dare you have any beauty in your life, is what they were saying. In the east and historically in Chicago there was always ornament. It’s what made the buildings alive, it sparked the personal interest. I lasted at IIT for five years, but every day of it I was saying, this is a death place, these are buildings that are saying, we don’t want anybody around. They may look nice on some little model, but they don’t engage you. You’ve got to add beauty, add carvings, add stonework, add relief. Add, add, add.”
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After Lavicka graduated from IIT he entered the navy as an officer and was assigned to the Third U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion. He was sent to Vietnam as a Seabee and served in Hue and Da Nang from October 1967 to August 1969. After returning to the States, he was on an officer’s inspection tour of the Long Beach naval shipyard and met a clerk and part-time student named Alys. After a short courtship they married.
A year after buying the house Lavicka started feeling hemmed in by the regulations at Sargent & Lundy. One morning he forgot to wear his name tag to work, and a supervisor got on his case. Finally Lavicka blew up. “I said, “I don’t need this shit. I quit.”‘ Another supervisor told him to go home early, cool down, and think about his decision.
Some of Lavicka’s buildings have been renovated and sold on spec. Others have been renovated and rented out. Lavicka decries the demolition of old houses, but in many ways the success of his business depends on old materials being available.
In 1977 Lavicka discovered and republished a turn-of-the century construction manual titled Masonry, Carpentry, Joinery. The book, essentially a beginner’s manual on building a house from scratch, captured his imagination; in it he saw the roots of his vocation. In a brief introduction to the book he wrote, “Good construction is not a phenomenon of today, but rather an evolutionary one that has come about with man himself.”
