The Queen of Sherwin Avenue

One of my least favorite pieces of writing advice is “Make the setting into a character.” I admire the vivid rendering of time and place as much as the next bookworm, but the conflation of a story’s location with the people who populate it has always struck me as lazy and inaccurate. Character is character and setting is setting. A protagonist has a personality and a will that give the story momentum. Setting, the authentic depiction of an era and a locale, is crucial, too, but should serve the function of stage, not actor.

Or so I thought before I met — yes, met — the 96-year-old, eight-story Italianate edifice holding court as regally as a royal in exile at 1205 West Sherwin Avenue. The lakefront building, imposing and unmistakably the stately eccentric of her windswept block in Rogers Park, made me reconsider my bias.

Sherwin on the Lake, as the building is known, struck me as a poetic appellation, a little bit Stratford-upon-Avon in its iconic descriptiveness: proper name plus geographic feature. On the luminous night more than a decade ago that I first made her acquaintance on a stroll through the neighborhood, her air of world-weary glamour wafted across the sidewalk like an elegant older lady’s assertive perfume. As when one meets a beautiful person, the Sherwin charmed with her harmonious whole, the kind of allure that makes one long to linger.

For years, in my perambulations across the city’s northern reaches, I’d been pulled repeatedly into the Sherwin’s orbit. Towering over the sparkling water, leaning almost, evoking the prow of a grand cruise ship, she surveys Lake Michigan — sunrise to moonrise, snow to rain — never wavering as she watches each grain of sand on her private beach, each swimmer in the waves, each boat that floats by. Exuding a hard-earned charisma that can only be called human, the Sherwin is the kind