The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Tori Marlan’s 1999 feature “Brickyard Blues” is the Reader at its best: an obsessively detailed examination of a part of city life that you’d never bother to think about—the brick—and the people whose lives revolve around it. Marlan introduces us to the world of brick stackers—independent contractors who toil long hours for low pay, cleaning and stacking “Chicago common” bricks at demolition sites. They fill pallets called “skids” with 530 bricks and get paid $10 per skid; the bricks are then resold all over the country for aficionados of the unique, rustic look of the Chicago common.
The Chicago plants operated scove kilns—open-roof structures in which bricks were hand stacked and fired for up to 60 hours at temperatures between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees. When subjected to such intense heat, the blue clay turned shades of salmon or buff rather than the reds, creams, and browns seen in other regions. Each brick turned out mottled and textured. The limestone particles popped the ware. Variegations depended in part on each brick’s proximity to the source of the heat. Bricks in the hottest zones tended to burn black and were badly deformed. Some bore shadows of the bricks stacked on top. Underfired bricks tended to be lighter.
Before irregularities became coveted architectural effects, common bricks were a cheap and abundant resource—a prosaic building material for places generally obscured from street traffic: side and back walls, for example, chimney flues, and structural support behind facades.
Aware that he was treading foreign waters—and thankful for the excuse to stop stacking—Mumford hired one of the men to coordinate brick handlers on his behalf. With urban renewal projects all over town and a glut of bricks from the riots, there was plenty of work. Mumford paid the stackers and haulers at a rate of $8 per thousand bricks, then turned around and sold them for $30 per thousand, a little less than the price of new commons. He bought out his partner within a couple weeks and became the sole owner of Colonial Brick Company.
Meanwhile, the bosses see themselves to be titans of industry. Mumford’s successor at Colonial Brick Company seems like a cross between Tony Soprano and a used car salesman:
Chicago commons absorb water. As it rains, the bricks get heavier. The mortar gets harder to knock off. “Your hands get cold,” a stacker named Woody says. It’s easy to see why his would. All five of his fingertips poke through the glove on his right hand. In the coming weeks, he will begin wrapping his fingers in duct tape to keep them warm. The last time he worked in the rain, he says, he caught a cold he couldn’t shake for two months. He didn’t see a doctor. Stackers rarely do.
Gurican fancies himself a whole new breed of brick boss: ambitious and professional, clinching deals on paper rather than with a handshake and a drink. He’s college educated and Internet savvy. When he put up a Web page, he says, call volume shot up. “There was a lot of animosity from our competitors when I got into the business,” he says. “They all started together pretty much. A lot of these guys didn’t go to college. They worked their way to where they are now. And maybe I learned some things that they didn’t, I don’t know”—he majored in international business at Illinois State University—”but I do things a lot differently. I don’t have a problem with stepping on someone’s toes.”
By stepping on someone’s toes he means wooing the competitors’ employees and soliciting bricks from wreckers, who tend to deal exclusively with one brick company. In the past, he says, the brick bosses “stayed away from each other’s wreckers.”
Colonial’s biggest competitor runs his business from right across the street. “I flip him off every time I go by,” Gurican says.
