MEET THE QS--2006 to present

We bought the property on south Lincoln in August, 2006, and moved in September 5.

It was a long, hot summer of fruitless house-hunting--our condo sold in three weeks, but every house we attempted to buy slipped through our hands, for one reason or another. Our favorite, 411 Ashland, was a foreclosure and had to be paid for straight-out; the home on Kendall had a moldy basement; Liberty had multiple code violations, including a basement kitchen; Binder had so much mold, the real estate agent couldn't enter it; State's owner wouldn't lower the price, even though it had been on the market for years. Talma had a low price and a beautiful downstairs, but the master bedroom was in such poor condition that even our Christian real estate agent uttered an obscenity when she saw it.
Finally, three weeks before the condo would close and we would become homeless, the kids and I left for a week-long vacation at Mom's. Jim stayed in Aurora to work and to look for a home,without me.
We communicated every day during that week. I pleaded with him to buy Talma (who cared if the roof was caving in in the master bedroom?) I told him we should move to Yorkville, Sandwich, any place in boobooland as long as we could get a four-bedroom home cheap, cheap, cheap. ANYTHING but becoming homeless!
Finally, our agent spoke those now-famous words to Jim: "You know, Lincoln is still out there." The house we had actually looked at four times, but could never pull the trigger on.
The rest is history.
There were reasons, of course, why we always held off on Lincoln. My biggest worry, the blackened toilet bowls, was actually the easiest to fix; a bottle of Lime-Away the day after we moved in made them lily-white, not to mention more efficient than our condo's toilets had been. Still, an army of repairmen was hired, ready and waiting to start plumbing surgery September 7. The bathroom's drum trap had to be changed to a modern P-trap; a massive clog was removed from the kitchen sink; the shower was uncapped and made serviceable again. The kitchen stove, probably dating from the Greenwood era, was quickly replaced, as was the washing machine. The disconnected washtub had to be installed so the washing machine could drain. And, of course, we had to buy a dishwasher and put in central air. This is the 2K's!
Electricity was another issue. Before we moved in, the upstairs was loaded with live electrical wires hanging from the walls, an issue so dangerous that the agent would not permit our children to go upstairs. We convinced the previous owner, Yorktown Enterprises, to remedy this before closing (against their will), but even after the wires were disabled, we were left with no electric lights on the stairs or in the bedrooms for six months. According to our electrician, the previous owner had removed old knob-and-tube wiring, but had failed to replace it with new wiring. Through God's grace, we were chosen to receive services from Rebuilding Together, a charitable organization which does repair work gratis for selected homes each year. The church group which worked on our home included a contracted electrician, who climbed into our attic and restored most of our wiring. The lights went on!
Since that time, we have also ripped out the downstairs carpeting to reveal the original hardwood. Vera Hunger said she could still see the lines on the floor where the Christians had had a dining room carpet. Someday, we would like to refinish the hardwood--at least, I would. According to Jim, that would be a project and a half.
Jim and I slept in the now-enlarged back bedroom for three years that we lived here, but we have recently converted it into a "rec room" for the kids. The old storage area is a home office, called "the bat cave." We now use the bedroom on the right. Joe, age 11, and David, 9, share the master bedroom where Eugene Applequist was born. Lydia, age 5, sleeps in the bedroom where the "secret staircase" used to come out.

Yes, the neighborhood has gone downhill and the Aurora police know our block well, but we are happy in our historic home. May the tradition live on!

PHOTOS OF THE HOUSE

JAMES HARLEY, AURORA'S FORGOTTEN HERO: 1901--1910

JAMES HARLEY: AURORA'S FORGOTTEN HERO

Prindle sold his home to James Harley in November, 1901, for $1550 Harley’s biography, though apparently lost to professional Aurora historians, reads like the classic American success story--the super-achiever who built our nation into what we’d like to believe it is today.

Harley was the oldest of eleven children, born during the 1860’s on a farm near Elwood, Illinois. He attended a country school and began a college education, yet quit when his father died and he was needed to run the family farm. He married Emma Linebarger and bought a fruit ranch near Grand Junction, Colorado, yet soon discovered it would be more profitable to sell fruit than to grow it. He moved back to the area in 1896 with his wife and daughter, Mildred, born in 1889, to open a produce company with two other men, Taylor and Morey, on Broadway. Before long, he bought out the shares of the other two owners and become sole proprietor.

Harley completely remodeled it in June 1905. The contractor, J. F. Bennett, built and remodeled other area homes during the same time period, including the Stolp home on Fourth Street and the Bornheim home at the corner of Lincoln and Bluff. Although we have found no documents, we believe Harley added the upstairs bathroom, back bedroom, storage area, and second staircase. The 1897 Sanborn fire map shows the back section having only one story and the 1907 Sanborn increases it to 1 ½, which supports our theory, as does the significant increase in property value when he sold it nine years later.

Harley moved to Fox Street in November 1910, but his story doesn’t end there. He went on to become a two-term Aurora mayor during the World War 1 years, install an extensive sewer system in the Oak Park area, become postmaster during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and attained leadership in more civic organizations than one can count. His death in 1948 merited a front-page headline with inch-high letters in the Aurora Beacon News.

Why isn’t there a street named after him?

JAMES FRANKLIN, NOBLE INTENTIONS: 1993--2005

JAMES FRANKLIN: NOBLE INTENTIONS

James Franklin, a young reporter for the Joliet Beacon-News, bought 615 South Lincoln Avenue from the estate of Dorothy Greenwood in April, 1993.

According to Franklin's mother, Rita Franklin, James had every intention of fixing up the house, but never did. He applied for a permit to rehabilitate the home soon after purchasing the home in 1993, but city records show that he never picked up the permit. He is listed in city directories as living here between 1994 and 2005, but we also know that a parade of renters went through--Anibal Banos, Moyses Flores, Sylvia Lomas, and Peggy Niles, to name a few. Rita, who lived with him for only a short time, believes that these were friends; she described her son as a generous man, who liked to provide his down-and-out buddies with a place to live until they got on their feet. We know of them only because we receive their mail. Only Sylvia is ever mentioned in a city directory.

According to Rita, the wall separating the back bedroom from the storage area was torn down when they moved in, which leads us to believe that Louis Greenwood did tear it down. She said the house needed a lot of work, which her son wanted to do but never could--perhaps because of a busy, and erratic, newspaper schedule. It appears that Franklin removed the old knob-and-tube wiring, but never replaced it with a modern wiring system, which is why we had no upstairs lighting for the first six months that we lived here. Rita remembers the house as being very cold, and said that James would close off the unheated back bedroom all winter because even a space heater couldn't keep it warm. She was impressed with the apparent history of the home, and said that the city had even talked about designating it as an historic home. She had heard that this area had once been inhabited by a lot of rich people at the turn of the century, but that gangsters had also lived in the area. During the 1990's, the east side had deteriorated to the point that she was afraid to drive here at night.

Franklin sold the home to Yorktown Enterprises, an investment firm who "promised to take care of it," in 2005 for $119,000. We bought it in September, 2006.

LINCOLN BLOSSOMS WITH THE GREENWOODS:1964--1991

LINCOLN BLOSSOMS WITH THE GREENWOODS

Louis and Dorothy Greenwood moved from their home on LaSalle, next to the old corset factory and across the street from Doney, into 615 South Lincoln around 1964. They bought the home from Doney for only $13,000. They were members of Our Lady of Good Counsel church, and had five lively Boomer children--twins Mary and Margaret, Betty, Robert, and Pam. The children loved running races down the long upstairs hallway with their dog, Bruno, who was allowed to run around the house as much as he pleased. They had furniture in the basement, and the children watched T.V. down there during the hot summers before central air conditioning was common. Louis Greenwood worked at FermiLab, and Dorothy, the first working mother to inhabit the home, worked at Carson's.

Louis Greenwood was a man with varied interests. He loved to work outdoors, and he took pride in his ability to landscape and garden the backyard. His daughter, Mary Luba, says that they always had "the most beautiful backyard," and son Robert told me that he filled it with irises, snapdragons, and rosebushes. Flowers adorned the north side of the yard, the edge of the sidewalk and the space under the kitchen window. He planted yew trees in the back and two large evergreen trees in the front which, unfortunately, have been chopped down; but, amazingly enough, the perennials he planted along the north side still come up every spring. The fence did not yet exist. Louis also enjoyed playing his organ, which was positioned between the two windows in the dining room, and making wine and grape jelly in the basement closet where previous generations had stored coal. We have found many artifacts from the Greenwood years: antique matchbooks, Louis's canning jars, a Melmac saucer, a ping pong table, an old football and gardening supplies.

Louis made several modifications to the house. He planted grass in the driveway, which ran along the north side of the yard, so he could have more space for his gardening pursuits. He also enclosed the sunporch and installed a new kitchen door, which had been taken from an old farmhouse. Mary claims that he removed the wall separating the upstairs back bedroom from the adjacent storage area, so Robert would have a bigger bedroom, but Robert says he never did this. The home, during this era, had siding that looked like tiny pebbles, a design not commonly seen anymore. Like the Boltie's, the Greenwoods were able to park cars in the garage, and Robert and his dad often worked on cars together in it during the 1970's.

During the 1980's, Greenwood children gradually married and moved out. Louis's health deteriorated and, as he grew increasingly ill, he moved his bed downstairs, as Carl Boltie had done. He suffered a stroke one evening during a trip to the store, and came home unable to speak. He died that August night in the den. Dorothy stayed there alone until her death in September, 1991. Robert, the executor of the estate, rented out the home until James Franklin, a young worker for the Joliet Beacon-News, bought it for $58,000 in April, 1993.

PHOTOS OF THE KIDS

THE "DONE-AGE"; OR, LINCOLN GETS A FACELIFT: 1962--1964

In 1962, Boltie sold the house to Emery Doney, who lived only one block away on LaSalle Street. Doney was a tradesman, and we have a neighbor who still remembers him and the frequency with which he changed jobs. Doney worked as a painter for the CB&Q Railroad and as a maintenance man for the East Aurora schools, among other jobs.

Doney never intended to live at the house on South Lincoln. He found the home to be in poor repair, and he intended to fix it up and sell it. And fix it up, he did! Doney’s work represents the link between the old and the modern, the home that previous generations knew and the one we live in today. Without the help of contractors--and, incidentally, without securing a permit--Doney chopped out a portion of the kitchen and created a new basement stairwell. He moved the kitchen sink, previously in the pantry, to its present position under the window, and converted the pantry into a downstairs bathroom, installing a shower where the sink had been. He closed off the second staircase, which had led from the kitchen to the hall outside the upstairs back bedroom. In its place, he created two den closets where the downstairs entrance had been, and turned the upstairs entrance into bedroom and linen closets. Doney also created a hall closet outside the master bedroom.

After contacting another resident, we learned that the mismatched hardwood in the closet of our son, David, was actually the entrance to the closed-off staircase. Other clues were high baseboards, worn with scuff-marks, in closets where they didn’t belong, and “fake walls” put together with nails and thin wood in the backs of closets. If you look at the ceiling when descending the basement stairs, you will see an unnatural slant which is where the second staircase went up. My husband climbed a very tall ladder to see if any stairs were still intact, but he found that Doney had covered them with a sheet of Masonite. If they are still within the walls of the residence on South Lincoln, they will never be seen again. However, if you look carefully at the wall beside the basement stairs, you will see drywall seams which outline the door that used to lead from the den to the kitchen. Our son, Joe, has learned to look throughout the house for unnatural drywall seams, all evidence of Doney’s reconstructive surgery.

Doney is still alive today, at age 91, and we met him at his nursing home. He remembers little of the work he did, though he does remember that the house “hadn’t been taken care of” when he bought it. He also remembers the names of the five small children in the family sold it to, the Greenwood’s. He was firm in his recollection that he had closed off the second staircase before they moved in, which led me to wonder what was wrong with it. According to Will Schwickert, the staircase was very steep and curvy, which makes me think he closed it off to prevent accidental injury of the Greenwood children.

Doney rented the home to a man named Rauscher while he was doing the repair work. Rauscher ran a small machine shop in the garage during this time, which may explain why it has so many electric outlets. The Greenwood family moved in around 1964.