The men who live upstairs
(Written in May 2013 for a Medill magazine writing class. Mr. Bob has since passed away, but his spirit lives on among those at the Irving Park YMCA who had the pleasure to know him. )
Many men across the country have used YMCAs as a transitional or short-term housing option. But some of those men, like 90-year-old Robert Friedrich, end up staying longer than expected.
The Irving Park YMCA is a massive, L-shaped, brick structure that stands nearly smack dab in the center of Old Irving Park on Chicago’s Northwest side. As you enter through the main door on Irving Park Road, it appears to be much like any other gym. You’re greeted by the friendly front desk staff on your right and the whirring cardio machines on your left; there are weight machines and a yoga room, the big gym and the small gym, administrative offices and a common area, and finally “The Maze,” a space used for baby and toddler care.
Take the stairs that lead down to the underground level and you’ve entered the realm of the locker rooms and racquetball courts, the program center and the teen center, the martial arts studio and the “Bears Den.” The Chicago Bears used the Irving Park Y, which opened in 1925, for weight training and conditioning from the early 1960s through 1971. Now, the “Bears Den” is full of Bears memorabilia as a homage to that time in the building’s history.
But not all stairs at the Irving Park Y lead down, and the ones that lead up are off limits. “Residents Only” signage block your ascent, leaving the second, the third, and the fourth floors alien and mysterious to Y members who walk past them every day—unless, of course, you happen to be one of the 193 men who live upstairs.
In which case, the uncharted upper floors of the Irving Park Y are your home.
My boyfriend works in the Irving Park Y’s program center. Every night, he comes home with stories about the boy who purposefully toppled the box of Legos but vehemently denied the indiscretion when confronted, or the little girl who cornered him and said, “Mr. Cole, I love you as much as I love bouncy houses.”
But one day, he came home and excitedly told me about an old man who lives upstairs.
“Sam,” he says, “guess what I found out today.”
“What?” I respond, only half-interested and expecting another “Mr.Cole” story.
“There’s an old man who’s been living at the Y for like 70 years!” he half-shouts.
“What?” He has my attention now. “Who is he? Why has he been living there for so long?” I feel myself entering spitfire-question mode.
“I have no idea,” he says. “But his name is Mr. Bob.”
Who lives at the Irving Park Y, and why? The short answer: many different men for many different reasons. The Young Men’s Christian Association, which first appeared in industrialized London in 1844 as a safe place where young men migrating from rural areas to find jobs in the city could meet to study the Bible, pray and address social needs within the community, began housing men in 1867 with the completion of Chicago’s Farwell Hall. The hall, which stood at 148 Madison St., was the first full-facility YMCA building in the world. At five stories high and dressed in marble, it was both a handsome and functional building, with a library and reading room, a main auditorium that could fit 3,500 people, a smaller lecture room, rented office spaces, and a long dormitory on the top floor that offered housing accommodations for 42 men.
The building was designed by Y member W.W. Boyington, designer of the Chicago Water Works and Crosby’s Opera House, and bore the name Farwell in honor of benefactor John V. Farwell of John V. Farwell & Co., a tremendously successful dry goods wholesale company of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Farwell was a dedicated friend and ministry partner of Dwight Lyman Moody, who founded the Moody Church in Chicago and served as the YMCA president from 1865 to 1870. But over time, Farwell became just as dedicated to the Y, recruiting Chicago’s underprivileged children to attend Moody’s Sunday school classes and donating large sums of money to the organization.
From 1922 to 1940, YMCAs across the country nearly doubled their accommodations, expanding from 55,000 to more than 100,000 resident rooms. Today, the organization offers supportive housing, senior housing, housing for homeless young adults, public housing for eligible low-income, elderly and disabled men, and hotel accommodations. The YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, specifically, provides more than 1,300 affordable rooms at five YMCA locations—Austin, Irving Park, Lake View, Lawson House and Leaning Tower. Residents are eligible for free YMCA membership, as well as free supportive services, including medical care, psychiatric treatment, case management, job training, food and clothing assistance and support groups. The Leaning Tower YMCA in Niles, however, is the only location that accepts short-term residents.
As of now, 193 of the 212 rooms at the Irving Park YMCA are occupied. The youngest resident is 19, the oldest is Mr. Bob at 90, and they’re all there for different reasons. Some men use the Y as a low-income housing option; some are homeless and the state pays their rent; some have physical or mental disabilities, including schizophrenia; some are having problems at home; some are going through a divorce; and some are employed with good-paying jobs, so they just use the Y as a home base where they shower and sleep. Because of differing circumstances, the amount of time each man stays at the Y varies as well. Some will stay for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, while others live there for just a few months.
When residents apply for housing, they must: provide proof of income, clear a background check to ensure they are eviction- and felony-free, present a picture I.D. and social security card, pay a $25 non-refundable application fee, and schedule an interview with the social worker who is on-site three days a week. Once they pass, they are given five room options to choose from: regular (10 x 14), large (10 x 25), washbasin (room with a sink), double, and full facility (room with a private bathroom). According to Michelle Collins, resident director at the Irving Park location, demand is highest for the full facility rooms. But these are rarely available, as the men who occupy full facility—priced at $498 a month—are in it for the long haul.
I volunteer to face paint at the Irving Park Y’s Healthy Kids Day in hopes of running into Mr. Bob, who, I’ve found out, has lived at the Irving Park Y since 1949. (My boyfriend guessed he’d been there for 70 years, but 64 is close enough.) Earlier in the week, Lara Pacelt, senior program director at the Irving Park location, had told me that it might be difficult to rope in Mr. Bob for an interview; he hasn’t been feeling well and to top it off, he’s kind of a grouch who hates attention from outsiders, she said. So she suggested I help out at Healthy Kids Day to see if I could casually run into him and introduce myself that way.
The day comes and I sit patiently at a table outside of Pacelt’s office, waiting for her to direct me to my face painting station. During my wait, I hear a woman at the table next to me say, “Ope, there goes Mr. Bob.”
I whip around, only to catch a glimpse of the elderly man as he walks into a room and shuts the door behind him. From the momentary spotting, I take a few notes. He’s short, maybe 5’2”, 5’3” tops; slightly hunched; white hair with a black ball cap; wearing a red long-sleeved button up shirt, black pants, and black shoes. I also note how slowly he walks. Correction—shuffles.
The next sighting is only a momentary glimpse as well. I’m manning the face-painting table around noon when I notice something red out of the corner of my eye. I turn to my left and there here he is again, this time shuffling away from me and the other vendors who are lined up in two rows across the Y’s large gym. Again, I only see his back. I quickly confirm my initial observations, and just as I move to stand up and run over to him, a little girl taps me on the shoulder, asking for a unicorn on her face. I realize I’m the only one at the table so I smile and say, “Sure. Which cheek?”
I turn around to check out Mr. Bob one last time; he has turned slightly to his left to watch the kids hula hooping in the center of the gym. Glimpsing his profile, I note his small eyes and largish nose. I also see him smile.
Itely Rideout, Collins’s assistant, guides me through the floors of the residency one Thursday. The second, third and fourth floors of the Irving Park building are wholly dedicated to resident living, with the second floor reserved for the elderly.
Accommodations are by no means extravagant. The main corridors are long, jam packed with light wood doors outlined by dark gray doorframes; the floors are carpeted, walls white and gray two-tone. Everything looks and smells pretty clean and fresh given the looks of the aged carpet and the tired doorways. A cleaning crew vacuums the halls and cleans the shared bathrooms every day, and once a week, they tidy residents’ rooms and take away their trash.
Two shorter—but still long—corridors branch off of each main one, and every hallway has the same setup; light doors, dark gray doorframes, gray carpet, white and gray walls. The layout feels more like a dorm building than an apartment building, mostly because of the bathrooms.
The shared bathrooms have three toilet stalls to the left, five sinks to the right and an open shower area with five showerheads in the back right corner of the room. I ask Rideout if she knows how the men handle the shared shower situation. She says she thinks the men have worked it out among themselves to ensure each gets his privacy.
Next, Rideout lets me take a look around a recently vacant full facility room on the fourth floor. What is most shocking is the size of the bathroom—it’s huge, equipped with a rather large bathtub and a shower head, a toilet, a medicine cabinet, a sink, and towel racks. The main room has a good-size closet, a dresser, a lamp, and a twin bed with a mattress. The rug is beyond old and looks pretty dirty. There’s a light circle in the middle of the floor where the carpet has worn to the point where it could tear any day now. But Rideout tells me they’ll inspect the room the following day and have it fully cleaned so it’s ready for the next approved resident.
This particular room also has two curtained windows with radiators under each. Collins had told me that each room has at least one window. “You may not be able to see anything but the other side of the building in some rooms,” she says. “But they do have a window.”
As we leave the room behind and move toward the stairs to exit the Y’s upper levels, Rideout and I run into a resident, a middle-aged man with round glasses and thinning grayish-black hair. He and I make eye contact.
”Hey—!” he starts, but trails off when he notices Rideout behind me.
He smiles and laughs uneasily. “Oh, she’s with you,” he says. “I was gonna say, women aren’t allowed up here.”
Rideout smiles, nods, and we move past him, continuing our path down the hall. I ask Rideout about the policy regarding women visitors. Can they come upstairs? Can they stay over? She explains that visitors, regardless of sex, are not allowed on the resident floors, nor are they allowed to spend the night; if a guest would like to visit a resident, they’re restricted to the first floor. But there are occasions when it’s acceptable to have a female visitor upstairs. Rideout tells me that the mother of one of the younger residents will come over once every few weeks to clean his room. So for the most part, family visits are okay, as long as they’re short.
Rideout then turns to me, smiling. “I’m actually surprised he said anything about you,” she says. “Usually men are excited to see women up here.”
I finally meet Mr. Bob at 11 a.m. on a Friday. Pacelt has arranged for us to sit and chat in her office on the Y’s main floor. She says it’s best she’s there to coax him along, especially at the beginning; as she mentioned previously, he’s wary of strangers and can be a grump.
When I walk in, I finally see Mr. Bob’s face full on. He has small smiling eyes, wispy gray and white eyebrows, a large nose, long ears and a deeply wrinkled face. He’s donning the same red shirt and black pants he was wearing when I spotted him at Healthy Kids Day, and I realize that his shirt says “YMCA” above the left breast pocket. It’s his work shirt, dirty with paint and oil stains and some other markings I can’t recognize. His hands, like his face, have deep wrinkles, and I note the size of them—they are surprisingly large given his smaller stature and they are visibly strong, with wide palms and thick, but slightly bent, fingers.
The strength of his hands makes sense when I hear of how Mr. Bob can fix anything—and does fix everything—in the building. He’s built numerous walls, shelves and murals; he talks to every contractor who comes to repair a part of the old brick structure; he knows how to fix the heater when it gets all “janky”; and he’s the guy they call on to fix pieces of furniture from the residency when they break. They’ve even given him his own workshop on the second floor, down the hall from his room. And Pacelt tells me that he keeps the Y’s blueprints under his bed, and engrained in his head. In short, the Irving Park Y belongs to Mr. Bob, and the Y staff readily admits it.
Mr. Bob, whose full name is Robert Friedrich, is extremely protective of his birthday. When I ask for it, he answers, “I’m 90 years old,” avoiding the question entirely.
Pacelt tries next. “When’s your birthday?” she asks.
“No,” Mr. Bob says firmly.
“When is it? August what?” she prods.
He looks at her and playfully blows a raspberry in her direction. He isn’t going to tell us—he isn’t going to tell anybody ever. He does, however, tell me he was born in Plainview, Minnesota.
Mr. Bob is a World War II veteran. He was drafted by the Army in 1943 and worked in special operations in electronics. He tells me briefly about his time stationed in Russia.
“There was a couple of air raids, and I got hit,” he says, then pauses as if remembering. Finally he snaps back and glances toward me. “Anyway, I got wounded,” he says.
After three years, Mr. Bob finally came home and ended up in Chicago. Before moving in to a room at the Irving Park Y, he lived with a work friend, who later became like a brother, from Zenith. (Mr. Bob got a job at the radio and television corporation immediately after returning from war.) But when his friend got engaged, he had to move out.
“I had heard there was YMCAs that had rooms, so I came down here, made an application. Took me six weeks before I was accepted, and I’ve been here since then,” he says.
When Mr. Bob moved in, all of the Y residents were businessmen, the cardio room was a cafeteria, the program center didn’t exist, and The Maze was a lounge with a fireplace where the residents made a fire every evening in the fall and winter months. His first Y room was on the fourth floor, but now, he lives on the second floor with the other elderly residents.
His love affair with the massive brick building began almost as soon as he moved in. Once he was settled, Mr. Bob got acquainted with the building manager at the time, a man from Germany who Mr. Bob describes as “a hell of a building engineer.” But as good as he was, the German man needed some help with the electrical, so he asked Mr. Bob, who he knew worked at Zenith, if he’d consider volunteering. Mr. Bob accepted the volunteer offer in May 1949, and he liked the work so much, as well as seeing the kids every day, that he decided to stay.
When he retired from Zenith in 1986, Mr. Bob became the building engineer, and later, the resident director—but it was all volunteer work. “The Y has never paid me,” he says, even though he’s faithfully paid his rent since 1949 and religiously cared for the Irving Park building for just as long.
And he still does. In fact my boyfriend recently spotted Mr. Bob tearing down a wall at the back of the building with a hammer, a circular saw, a drill and a speed square (which, confusingly, is an isosceles right triangle). The wall had to come down so he could build a large closet, which now houses the refrigerator that stores kids’ lunches while they’re off at summer camp.
“When I saw him tearing into that wall, I thought, ‘Oh Mr. Bob. At it again,’” my boyfriend tells me. “I asked him if he needed any help and he said, ‘No—I got it, thanks.’”
David Kozil has lived at the Y since May 1, 2012. He lived with his elderly mother before he moved in, taking care of her until she passed away last year. Once she passed, Kozil, who is unemployed, needed to find a cheap place to live, and fast.
“I was kind of in a tough situation, so I just kind of wound up over here,” he says and shrugs. “Being out of work and all that combined, didn’t have much a choice.”
Kozil lives on the third floor in a regular room, which, at $398 a month, came fully furnished with a bed, a dresser, a mini-desk, a lamp and a closet. Though Kozil says the room is “much smaller than a regular studio,” he doesn’t complain; it serves its purpose.
The fifty-eight-year-old Chicago native is a soft-spoken man who answers my questions slowly and deliberately, not because he’s suspicious of me but because he wants to make sure his responses are thoughtful and accurate. All kinds of men live at the Y, he tells me. There are people with physical and mental disabilities, there are people on social security, there are homeless men, working men, and young men in college.
But living with 192 men can be tricky, and tense situations are inevitable when people of different circumstances live in close quarters. The housing rules in particular are the cause of some of this tension among residents. “Some of the people tend to say things like, ‘There’s too many rules that the tenants have to follow,’ or they don’t like some of the rules,” Kozil explains.
For example, alcohol and drugs are not allowed in the building, and smoking in the building is prohibited.
But there are rules anywhere you go, Kozil concedes.
What about the bathrooms? I ask.
Kozil admits that the bathroom situation can get a bit awkward, especially when it comes to the extremely private residents. But you work around it and get a feel for which residents need more space, and before you know it, you’re pretty comfortable with the accommodations, he says.
Despite the complications that come with living in a building like the Y, Kozil is satisfied with his life there. “It’s not really a bad place,” he tells me. “I mean, there are much worse places than this.”
And luckily, Kozil has managed to find a few friends in the building despite his
quiet nature. “We sit in the resident lounge and watch television and converse with each other,” he says with a soft smile.
But this isn’t the first time Kozil’s lived at the Irving Park Y; he stayed in a larger room from 2006 to 2008. After his wife passed away in 1998, he struggled to keep his head above water. Then after his son graduated from high school in 2006, Kozil finally moved out of the townhouse he was staying in (he couldn’t afford it anymore) and moved into the Irving Park Y; it was the cheapest place he could find.
That two-year experience living at the Y is why returning a year ago wasn’t a hard decision to make. The accommodations didn’t bother him and the Y is a “friendly organization” Kozil tells me. “They try to make you feel like family.”
Mr. Bob has always wanted to build a building.
“My goal in life was to become a civil engineer because I like to see things being built; I like being involved in it,” he tells me.
So after graduating in the upper third of his 600-student high school class, Mr. Bob enrolled at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
But one thing stood in the way of Mr. Bob fulfilling his dream—math.
“I was having a hell of a time with the algebra,” he explains.
One day, a professor finally sat him down and told him he would never be an engineer. There would be no building a building after all. Instead, Mr. Bob tells me, he started studying radio manufacturing, a secondary interest. But I can tell radio was just a consolation prize.
“I was stupid. Couldn’t get a grasp on it,” he says, returning to the math and the failed dream. “I would just love to have been an engineer.”
Pacelt tries to cutoff his downward spiral. “But you’re an engineer anyway, you build stuff all the time.”
“I could just see myself when I was in high school, seeing myself building a building…” he continues, remembering.
“Yeah, but you built this building,” Pacelt insists, gesturing toward the Y walls that surround us.
Mr. Bob looks at her and gives a slight shrug. At that point I know he’ll never voice any semblance of an agreement. I can’t tell if it’s modesty or something else, but he’ll never acknowledge what he’s accomplished here.
Randy Hegler, Jr. has lived in a regular room on the third floor for just over a year and a half. “Describe your room for me,” I prompt him.
“Man, I didn’t decorate anything in there,” he says. “I left it exactly the way it was when I moved in ‘cause this is only temporary.”
His logic is this: If the room doesn’t “feel like home”, he won’t get comfortable and stay for years like some of the residents he’s met. He’s getting out of there—and soon.
Like Kozil, Hegler moved into the Y when he needed to find a cheap place to live in a short amount of time. He moved to Chicago from Fayeville, North Carolina, to study business and marketing at Westwood College, and the Y was an easy solution for thirty-year-old Hegler; it’s affordable and only 20 minutes from school.
What kind of people live here? I ask.
“You have a lot of people here for a lot of different reasons,” he says. “You got the people that have to be here, people that had no where else to go so they came here, people that use it out of convenience, people that use it for the escape.”
“You got the different floors, you have the different cliques,” he says. “You have the old who hang out with the old that judge everybody, then you have the people that think they run the place, then you have, like, us.”
And by “us” he means the young people in the building. The generational gap at the Y is an obvious source of contention. You have residents from ages 19 to early 30s living with older residents 50 and up, and, needless to say, the polar groups don’t always see eye to eye.
A few of the older residents are actually close to death, Hegler tells me.
“Some of them really shouldn’t be in an environment like this for the simple fact that they can barely take care of themselves,” Hegler says. “Like when you see them going up and down the stairs, it be taking them ages.”
And men do die in the building, more often than you’d expect. Since Hegler’s been here, multiple men (he can’t remember the exact number) have passed away in their rooms. “That’s another reason why I gotta get out of here,” he tells me. “Can’t be linked with death.”
But men dying at the Y isn’t the only reason why Hegler needs to pack up and move out; to him, the place is starting to feel like a prison. Last year, they banned smoking in the building; then, they added cameras and a card swiping system.
The cameras were installed in the entire building (except in the bathrooms and resident rooms) because someone was stealing from the members; they are purely a safety precaution, as is the card swiping system that residents need to use to enter the building at night. But Hegler doesn’t see it this way; he sees it as a way for them to monitor his comings and goings—and he doesn’t like it.
“Ya, now it’s prison, and I don’t do prison,” he says. “I’m good on that.”
So why has Hegler been here for so long? He said it really was all about finding an environment where he could focus on doing well in school. Then along the way, he met some like-minded people in the building and started caring for some of them, started acting as their “guiding force.” But while these relationships kept Hegler tied to the Y, most of the men Hegler has befriended there are planning to move out. So, his time at the Y is coming to an end as well.
“My lease ends in October, so…” he trails off.
Mr. Bob wakes up at 4 a.m. every day, a habit, he says, from managing the testing department at Zenith. Between 5:30 a.m. and 6 a.m., he heads next door to The Golden Nugget, where he orders oatmeal, a small glass of orange juice, toast and green tea.
“I used to drink coffee,” he tells me “It’s good for you, it’s not bad—but green tea is better.”
After breakfast, he walks back (very slowly) to the Y to see if there are any work orders. If there are, he’ll spend the rest of the morning and afternoon repairing this and fixing that, doing some plumbing, checking out the electrical, repairing furniture, whatever needs to be done.
When the mail’s delivered, Mr. Bob will retrieve it, sort it, and place all letters in their proper mailboxes. And once things slow down or he’s finished his work, he’ll sit and talk with Y staff members, sharing love stories and war stories. Pacelt and Collins are two of his favorite listeners.
“He talks to me often because I listen to him,” Pacelt says. Mr. Bob tells her mostly about the war—including some of the graphic details from his months in Russia as a prisoner of war.
“They starved him,” she tells me, grimacing.
But that isn’t the worst of it.
He told me how the Russians used to send women and children out into the fields with these longs sticks, Pacelt begins slowly. They would poke at the ground with them, trying to blow up landmines.
“And then the women and the children would get blown up,” Pacelt says. Right in front of Mr. Bob and the other troops.
Even though the story made Pacelt and another Y employee cry, she says she’s more than happy to listen to the 90-year-old man who shuffles, slightly hunched, into her office multiple times a day. Some of the younger employees ask why she spends so much time with him, and her explanation isn’t complicated.
“The reason I listen to him is because I never listened to my grandpa,” she says. “Someone should listen to him [Bob]—and I have the time to do it.”
