For almost seven months, as they zipped about the northwest side looking for a vacant lot on which to relocate the Huntley house, David Murray and Bill Lavicka were tag team crusaders for the preservation movement. The deal they offered the city looked like a good one. “We basically said, ‘Give us a vacant lot and we’ll pick the house up and move it there,’” says Lavicka.
“My dad told me, ‘You’re saving the world’s ugliest house,’” says Murray. “But it’s old–it’s been there since 1858. It’s the oldest house in West Town. And when you research its past and you see the names of the people who lived there in those old dusty ledgers, suddenly you start seeing your whole neighborhood differently. Suddenly you see a continuum in your neighborhood.”
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By his own admission, Lavicka’s an odd character for Chicago. An engineer by training, he’s made a good living renovating old buildings. Unlike most developers, however, he’s not shy about speaking his mind, even if it means lambasting city officials. He was particularly outspoken in the unsuccessful attempt to save Maxwell Street. Neither he nor Murray is a master of the tactics that win friends and influence people in City Hall.
They began meeting regularly with Alderman Jesse Granato–in whose First Ward the Huntley house was located. “I fell in love with that building,” says Granato. “I wanted to save it. I was ready to give it my all.”
Lavicka dogged the city throughout the spring, dropping in on the planning department offices once or twice a week. “I’m an engineer–I want to get things done,” says Lavicka. “But the city’s planners, they have a different frame of mind. They like to talk and have meetings. You can’t see Alicia Berg [the planning commissioner]. She’s got the palace guard. Maybe I offended them with my persistence. I don’t know. I wanted to save the house.”
Yet the city gave him back his check and rejected his offer. This news came to him in a July 3 letter from Berg. According to Berg, Lavicka had missed a city-mandated deadline. “They had to get their proposal to us [for Claremont] by June 19 so we could send legislation over to the City Council in order to have the land legally transferred to [Lavicka],” Scales explains. “We were on a tight schedule. We wanted to be fair to the owner [Ranquist], who was waiting for a demolition permit. [Lavicka and Murray] missed their deadline. There was nothing we could do.”
A couple of weeks later a wrecking crew tore the house down. “It took them just two days,” says Cristie Bosch, Murray’s wife. “They were remarkably efficient.”
