As temperatures dipped to 20 below zero on the night of January 29, Martha Hardy and Nakia Young were horrified that the radiators in their South Shore apartments stood cold. The neighbors live in a 21-unit brick building on the southwest corner of 70th Street and Oglesby Avenue. To their surprise, when they contacted other residents, some said they had heat. It didn’t make sense. The whole building only had one source for heat, an enormous Kewanee boiler in the basement. Young, 39, was particularly worried as she bundled her two small children and plugged in space heaters; she, the kids, and her mom all slept in the same bed that night. Hardy, 65, fired up a portable heater and the stove with the door open to warm up, though that heat didn’t make it far through the length of the shotgun-style apartment.
In his 2004 book Chicago Apartments historian Neil Harris writes that South Shore “fully blossomed in the 1920s, when real estate companies undertook the massive development of newly purchased land tracts.” Oglesby Manor, the four-story building where Young and Hardy reside, was erected in 1925. It was part of the tony South Shore Country Club district, north of the commercial thoroughfare on 71st Street. Ads for the building, which ran in the Tribune, included an image of the structure over the words “our sixth successful 100% co-operative apartment building.” The developers, brothers John and Richard Johnston, were among a wave of real estate men promoting co-operative apartments as the hot new form of property ownership.
By spring 1929, according to a survey conducted by the Chicago Real Estate Board, more than 20,000 Chicagoans lived in co-ops. The board even published the names of some of the most prominent co-op dwellers, ranging from noted capitalists to vaunted medical professionals to journalists, adding that it had “never heard” of a co-op defaulting on a loan. Later that year, however, after the stock market crash, many co-ops found themselves overleveraged and were converted to rental apartments. This was especially true of the more extravagant buildings. But the Oglesby Manor co-op was able to survive the Great Depression. In 1935 its articles of incorporation were amended to lower the price of stock in the building from $100 to $25 per share, presumably to adjust to the economic realities of the neighborhood.
After WWII, as the federal government increasingly subsidized ownership of single-family homes, co-ops remained the province of the wealthy. Getting a mortgage for a co-op has always been tricky, as many banks are uncomfortable making loans secured by corporate shares rather than an actual piece of property. And so in most places outside New York City, which has long had robust financing options for co-ops, they persisted as a rather insular world, dependent on the ebb and flow of well-to-do residents. Rich people liked things that way, anyway. Because co-ops didn’t depend on federally insured mortgages, they were exempt from even the most basic fair housing regulations, allowing co-op boards to be as biased in their criteria for admitting new residents as they wanted.
- Source: Cook County Assessor’s Office
Greathouse got involved with Oglesby Manor’s board in the 1990s. “Most of the whites were gone because some of them had died and some of them moved away,” he said. “[The building] was growing older and the upkeep wasn’t too good.” The remaining shareholders were aging and less able to pay for increasingly expensive maintenance. The co-op had entered dire straits. “As a matter of fact [we] had lost the building, someone bought the building for delinquent taxes,” Greathouse said. “I wanted to rectify that, I wanted to make sure that didn’t occur again and make sure the business was taken care of. We took it to court and we won and paid the taxes and got the building back.” Still, maintenance continued to grow more expensive, and “it’s not easy to take out a loan [for repairs] as a co-op.” In the absence of other financing options assessments had to be raised, but not all shareholders could keep up, which led to more deferred maintenance, which further magnified existing problems. All of this wore on people, exacerbating tensions between neighbors.
As the years went on, the problems in the building mushroomed and the co-op grew more fragile in body and spirit. The enclosed back porches turned rickety and unsafe, the garages behind the building slumped and the heating inside them stopped functioning, the basement ceiling collapsed, the windows and roof were no longer waterproof, and mortar crumbled from between the building’s aging Chicago bricks. Niedas patched the roof over his apartment and fixed portions of the dilapidated back porch at his own expense. Hardy kept repairing and painting her ceilings due to persistent leaks from the upstairs neighbors. One of the biggest problems was the aging boiler, which broke frequently and was the source of the building’s high gas bills. “All our money went to the heat and we have no money to fix other things,” Niedas said. (Indeed, according to documents obtained by the Reader, this has continued to be the case through the years. In the 2017-2018 fiscal year, for example, 27 percent of Oglesby Manor’s income was devoted to heat, more than any other single expense.) Several shareholders, including Hardy, McGowan, and Niedas, were also unhappy with the quality and cost of service from the building’s management company, McKey & Poague, which had been in business since the 1890s.
When visiting the co-op one doesn’t exactly run into friendly neighbors. The hallways are quiet and the back decks empty and deserted. The lawn is clean but there are no signs that anyone is putting in extra effort to beautify the building grounds. All current and former shareholders who did speak with the Reader agreed on one thing: there are cliques in the building. That’s hardly surprising, since a co-op is just another human social endeavor like high school and church, prisons and PTAs, sandboxes and C-suites. There are leaders and followers, well-liked but incompetent people, and those with valuable skills who never seem to make any friends. Throw in the fact that people’s homes and nest eggs are on the line and what begins as a disagreement can spiral into a lawsuit. Conflicts at Oglesby Manor are exacerbated by differences in age, race, culture, language, and communication styles, and divisions grow deeper as those who see eye to eye find reprieve from the tension in lengthy phone conversations and short whisper sessions as they pass each other outside. Shareholders disagree on how to make decisions and how to spend their money, what counts for rudeness and responsibility, but the divide that matters most for the beleaguered building’s fate as a co-op is that some use their unit as their primary home while for others an apartment at Oglesby Manor is a source of income.
