Back when Lennox was in grade school, the northwest neighborhood was populated with longshoremen, electricians and steel workers: hard-working, hard-drinking folks. It had been that way for as long as there had been that kind of work. Bill Pike started investing in small apartment complexes back in the late sixties. Places with good bones as he liked to put it, but in bad neighborhoods. The banks wouldn’t go for it, Delia recalled, so Bill recruited his cousin, Father Mac. They pooled the money their grandmother had left them. Bill used his own crew to replace the dry rot and plaster. Ten years later, Father Mac needed the money for a deal in the suburbs and Bill bought him out. About the same time, artisans began moving into the neighborhood. They opened little shops that sold felt hats and beaded dresses. Twenty-third Avenue turned into Trendy-third as a mob of shoppers trolled the shops looking to buy Italian pottery and eyeglass frames. Doctors and lawyers swooped in and bought the run-down Victorian homes and turned them into gingerbread palaces.
