In 1990 Judy Marks had the windows on her four-story near-north-side town house outfitted with a set of heavy-duty aluminum security shutters. She intended only to secure her home from break-ins, but she wound up in a costly legal battle with some of her neighbors in the Sutton Place Townhome Association, a walled-in group of 50 town houses on Clark north of Goethe. Marks says she should be allowed to keep her shutters because they’re unobtrusive and don’t hurt anyone. Her opponents contend the shutters are so ugly they deface the building, undercut its value, and violate the Sutton Place rule against installing items on the outside of the town homes.
Sutton Place was built by Arthur Rubloff in the late 1970s. Just across the street is the Carl Sandburg Village; to the east are the swank old mansions of the Gold Coast. Marks, a former stockbroker, bought her unit in 1979 for $190,000. Similar complexes now fetch as much as $480,000. Sutton Place is home to prominent lawyers, politicians, and business executives. “This really is a fabulous place to live,” says Jan Brown, a friend of Marks’s who also lives in the complex. “Despite the terrible things that a few people have done to Judy, most of the people are very nice.”
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In April 1990 Marks installed the shutters. “To me they look like mini blinds–you can buy them anywhere. I never thought it would be a big deal. They’re a deterrent. If a guy tries to break in, he’ll take one look at them and say ‘Forget it,’ and he’ll walk away. Another couple in the complex, the Slutskys, had installed a similar set on their unit before I installed mine. No one had complained about those shutters.”
Marks says the board members were belligerent. “They didn’t just ask us to take them down, they ordered us to do it. They were vehement. One board member waved his fist and said, ‘These are coming down–we’ll take them down.’”
That suit, incidentally, is one of four filed by residents of Sutton Place against either the association or one another. “In some respects when you talk about an upscale community like this, if the people can afford to litigate they will do so,” says Antonio. “You can’t push around wealthy people–they resist.”
Left unresolved is the issue of legal fees. The association wants Marks to pay its legal fees. Marks refuses. A judge may eventually have to settle that matter as well.
