Clarke-Ford House

This guide to the Clarke-Ford House in Chicago follows a Greek Revival mansion built in 1836 for hardware merchant Henry Clarke, through cholera, a family named Chrimes who owned it for seven decades, and a preacher named Bishop Louis Henry Ford who bought the crumbling building in 1941. It centers on a frozen night in 1977, when the house hung suspended above the Green Line tracks after its hydraulic jacks locked solid mid-move. Listen for how long it stayed there, swaying whenever a train rumbled beneath it.