The homes we'll never own

Despite being on my summer break, I had a very busy week and have not had an opportunity to follow up on my birthday until just this minute. I was in a meeting most of the day Thursday. The most valuable thing about that was a free lunch. Thursday evening I was out celebrating the end of Leadership Greater McHenry County (LGMC) at our official graduation. On Friday the 13^th, Hilda and I gave Coop 1 a thorough cleaning in the morning, and I drove to Elgin to help Jane get her mom’s house just about ready to be listed with the realtor. At the end of the day, I went to a restaurant in Algonquin for an informal celebration of our LGMC graduation with my cohort. The first problem was that road construction has made it nearly impossible to get from Elgin to Algonquin. After two detours, I got to the restaurant and then spent 15 minutes looking for parking. I finally found a spot on the street and began the trek to the restaurant. Just as I was carefully stepping around some vomit on the sidewalk, a redwing blackbird swooped down on the back of my head and clawed my scalp. I am not making this up. I must have infringed on his territory. I was not injured but was certainly surprised.

Anyway, back to Wednesday. We got to Lake Geneva in plenty of time to pick up our tickets and get on the boat.

Fountain by the entry to the boat dock

 

Despite the cold, cloudy weather, we opted to sit upstairs in the open air. We were the only people up there for most of the cruise.

Boarding the boat

Group shot before we moved to the upper deck--Jane tried twice, but having everyone look at the camera all at once seemed beyond our ability

Terry looks out from the front of the upper deck

 

Our tour guide introduced himself as a college student between his junior and senior year at UW-Whitewater. He wanted us to believe—without any supporting evidence—that he was an interesting person. He encouraged us more than once to ask him anything about himself. He also intimated that he was available. The fact that nearly every woman on the cruise was old enough to be his grandmother made his flirtatious remarks more than a little creepy. His alleged attempts at humor centered on midnight trespassing forays on the grounds of the palatial estates we saw on the tour. So not funny. Twit. “The bar is open,” he said. “The more you drink the funnier my jokes are.” There’s not enough alcohol in the world.

We pulled away from the dock and started around the lake. Twit kept saying, “On your right, you can see…” Lake Geneva is a big lake. Moving in a counterclockwise direction, everything is going to be on the right. It seemed redundant to mention it.

In between the bad jokes, however, the twit gave us some genuine information about the homes we would never own. Property values ran at tens of thousands of dollars per linear foot of shoreline. Taxes are upwards of $100,000 per year. Think about that a minute. Yes, I’ll just sit right down and write a check for $100,000, put a stamp on the envelope, and send it to the assessor’s office. Most of these mansions are summer homes, by the way.

After we passed downtown Lake Geneva, we came to a bunch of homes on the sprawling Wrigley Estate complex. We heard the story of Wrigley’s fortune in chewing gum and how he built homes for various relatives and friends. I had thought that there was one Wrigley mansion and that it was on the other side of the lake.



One of the Wrigley homes (I think)

Lake Geneva was settled primarily by filthy rich business owners from Chicago. Most of the original mansions either burned down or were demolished to build more modern homes. Here are some examples of the homes we saw:

Seriously, just look a the size of these babies!

This house has a pond in front (that's water in the middle of the rock boarder) because the lake is just not enough.

Many homes had terraced gardens down to the water

 

We came to a strip of closely built and less ostentatious houses of the Elgin Club. This homes were built on land purchased by a group of businessmen from Elgin.

Houses of the Elgin Club

As we came into Williams Bay, we could see the Yerkes Observatory dome peeking out above the tree line. This observatory, operated by the University of Chicago, has the largest refractory telescope (40 inches) used for research. The telescope was demonstrated at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago before being moved to Lake Geneva to get away from the light pollution of the city. Many famous persons have visited the observatory, including Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, and Carl Sagan.

Yerkes Observatory

In the bay itself, several (presumably freezing) young persons were taking sailing lessons in three small boats accompanied by a larger mother ship.

Sailing lessons

There are still several camps along the shores of the lake. Most were established in the 1880’s to bring poor children from Chicago to have a wilderness experience.



Holiday Home Camp, established in 1887

Twit explained that all the docks around the lake have to be taken in for the winter. Having grown up on a lake, this was not news to me. I recall it vividly as a pain in the neck. On Lake Geneva, of course, the home owners have people for that. It is, in fact, a $6 million industry. Six million!

One of the boat in the pier service industry

Toward the end of the tour, we came on the mansion that I always thought belonged to Wrigley. It was really built by Otto Young, an entrepreneur who bought up the “worthless” land along State Street after the Chicago fire in 1871. Contrary to popular belief at the time, Chicago was rebuilt, and Young made a fortune. He spent a million dollars building the structure at the turn of the 20^th century. If I remember correctly, Young died just a few years later. His heirs kept it for a time. It was donated to the Episcopal Church for a short-lived school in 1939 and sold for back taxes in the 1980’s for $74,000. After several unsuccessful business ventures, it is now divided into 6 luxury condos worth well over a million each.

Youngsland, the mansion of Otto Young

As we pulled back into port, Hilda asked, “Do you think this is one of those tours where you are supposed to tip?”

“I’m not tipping him,” I said. He had just told us that the view from the pool of a house on the top of a hill was nice at 1:00 in the morning, but you have to watch out for their dogs. Trespassing was still not funny.

But others did tip. I exited among of group of grandmas and gathered from the conversation that Betty had given the guy a ten to split with the captain (another undergrad who had done part of the narration), and everyone in the group was supposed to give Betty one dollar to pay her back.

The tour was over at 3:00. Our dinner reservations were at 5:00. We drove 3 miles north of Lake Geneva to Northwind Perennial Farm. While the driveway from the road was easy to find, the parking lot was less so. Signs directed us down a gravel road for some distance to the entrance.

Northwind is a laid-back place. Gardens with interspersed sale tables spread among old barns and repurposed outhouses. Exactly where one paid for the plants was not obvious on the first pass. We looked through some value added items (objet d’artsy-fartsy, antiques, etc.) in a barn that smelled strongly of cat urine. One of the offending cats sprawled on a table outside. I puzzled over a “diamond” hoe hand-forged in Holland and attached to a very long and heavy pole. It was an elongated diamond shape about 2” wide where it attached to the pole, tapered to 3” long points on either side, and sharpened front and back, apparently so one could push it or pull it. Even if I had not deemed it too heavy for practical use, the $90 price tag would have put me off.

Entrance to Northwind Perennial garden--that's a red bird house at the top

Overall, though, it was a beautiful place. They had mayapples growing in a wooded area, but  none for sale. Jane bought some dill because she doesn’t have it coming up all over like I do. The purchase transactions were conducted in a small building to the side of the main path. It was the only new structure I saw. I was tempted by their vast selection of native plants but held off. I need to have a plan before I start buying.

Allium in bloom

Bleeding heart in front of an old outhouse

One of many gardens

Geraniums by an old barn



Former outhouse now displaying a cactus, a Mexican, a burro (only the back end is visible in the photo) and the Last Supper

In addition to cats and dogs, chickens roamed freely. I found the little black rooster fascinating. Such a scrawny little thing.



Free range chickens with tiny rooster on the left

We didn’t quite fill up all our time at the gardens. The Tuscan Bar and Grill was happy to seat us at 4:30, however. We were the only guests in the place at the time. We had a nice meal. Most of us chose soup over salad because we were still feeling chilled from the boat ride. We warmed up as we dined and sipped wine. I was sure to save room for dessert. My triple chocolate cake was delivered with a candle on top.

We were home early. Between the cold, the fresh air, and the wine, I was ready for bed at 7:30. I made myself stay up until 8:30 so I wouldn’t be wide awake at 3:00. It was a very fun birthday.