Universities are corporations and corporations only thrive if they are growing. One way a university grows is simply to expand the campus, so even in 1957 the blocks around Northwestern were being quietly bought up. The U of Illinois Circle Campus was also expanding on the south side where they were buying and razing old apartments and ethnic neighborhoods. It was a big scandal, but part of the post WWII Fifties growth movement, esp. among educational institutions fattened by the GI Bill. Stu Hagmann’s movie, “Kali Nihta, Socrates,” tried to capture Greektown before it was erased.
The houses NU bought and were simply holding became rehearsal spaces for the arts and other deserving but undemanding entities. There was no intention to rent to families who would demand to stay and have to be evicted. Some of the houses down toward the lake were quite fabulous, three or four stories with tower corners and backstairs for the servants. They were often used for teas, receptions, sorority events. I would sneak off to the empty rooms upstairs, even into the attics, looking for ghosts. Could feel them and smell them. Never saw them.
Alvina Krause’s house was in blocks of modest homes built around the time AK was born or maybe a little earlier. Her two-story house had a carriage house behind, with a little apartment upstairs. When it was exceptionally rainy, the place smelled like mousy hay. Otherwise it was a cozy and VERY decorated little place with front room, bedroom, bath and kitchen so tiny only one person could be in it at a time. Certain Greek (ethnic, not frats) students were in and out that there were always squeezed lemons in the fridge. They lived off campus and used the place as a kind of lounge. We didn’t really identify with the campus. (I lived in the quad dorms, of course. It was required for girls.) When I was there, the renters were Stu Hagmann and Tom Foral -- Maybe Laird Williamson. it was an extraordinarily chaste place. I don’t even remember anyone getting drunk. Maybe someone smoked cigarettes. Maybe when things got wicked I wasn’t invited.
AK lived downstairs in her house. I was only in the front room, which was a parlor with fireplace, quite “English” feeling. I was there to deliver the cast gift for “Caesar and Cleopatra,” which I had been deputized to buy. The charge was to find a bust of Cleo, which I did because it was easy. But what I did NOT understand was quality. I simply bought the biggest one I could find for the money we had. AK was very gracious and accepted it as though it were diamond-studded. I sat for a moment in her comfortable chairs and she may have offered tea.
The entrance went into a hall with an upstairs that was a kind of balcony. The rooms up there were rented to student actors. Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss lived there -- I don’t know who else. Maybe someone will add a comment. I was told once that AK sleep-walked and that the students living there came out of their rooms one night, hearing noises, and found her tight-rope-walking on the balcony railing in her nightgown. That may be apocryphal, but I wouldn’t count on it. No doubt some day someone will claim they saw her sleep-walking across Lake Michigan.
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