The tragic fire at Roy’s Furniture, which has been much in the news, took me back to the late 1970s.
I bought two six-flats in the 1800 block of Halsted from Roy Warner, with plans to convert them to 3-flat condo buildings. I rehabbed and converted one but sold the other, due to the depressed market at the time.
Roy was a genuine Chicago character and a showman, who claimed to be a former Chicago firefighter. He expressed great pride in having individual gas, water and electric shutoffs in a heavily-reinforced room in the basement of each building, enabling him to shut off utilities to any tenant who was late on rent payments. I don’t know whether he ever took advantage of that facility, but it would have been blatantly illegal to have done so.
After the closing one of the tenants introduced himself to me and suggested that I hire him to manage the buildings. When I inquired after his qualifications, his response was “3 years at Stateville for arson.” I evicted that tenant for nonpayment of rent. When I visited the apartment after the eviction, I found that a number of windows had been shot out – from the inside – and there were bullet holes in the ceiling and casings on the floor. Parting shots, so to speak.
At the time, fire was a common tool used by some unscrupulous real estate investors in the area to terrorize reluctant owners into selling and moving on. There would be a small fire, followed by a visit from real estate agents.
One real estate investor in the area had very bad luck. A half-dozen ramshackle frame 3-flats that he acquired burned to the ground. He then built new construction 3-unit front-to-back townhomes on the sites.
On several occasions an individual who reeked of gasoline walked into my ground-level office on Webster. He introduced himself and asked, in a thick Irish brogue, “would you be having any need of me services? I’m in the demolition business, if you get me drift.”
These are memories only, rich with irony, not to be read in any way as suggestions that the flames of yesteryear have any connection to those of recent days.