Have you ever made a momentous decision without realizing it was a big deal?

There was a day back in 2006 when I was wandering down a street and noticed a little For Rent sign tacked to the side of a building. The location was perfect. The building was one of those largely forgettable 1920s courtyard affairs that offered very little in the way of character but had the decency to provide good proportions.

So I called the number. This was back when you still called somebody.

A wonderful lady named Carmen appeared a few minutes later and showed me around. The moment I walked in, I thought, “Huh. I can do something with this.” In short order, I had signed a lease and moved my rather meager collection of belongings into four small rooms at 921 West Cornelia.

I thought I had found an apartment.

Over the years, I began accumulating other apartments in the building. Each gradually filled with objects and collections assembled over time, until the whole operation began to resemble one of those storerooms in an adventure film where someone has inconveniently misplaced a priceless artifact.

Some of the collections were material. Others were personalities.

There was Nympho Nancy on the second floor, whose smoke permeated the rear of the building and whose cackle enlivened the hallway. Upstairs was Jason, who supplied the big dick energy, and Jacob across the hall, whom I affectionately called the third-floor troll. There was Alex the Adonis, neurotic Yusef, a mother-daughter pair of cleaning ladies who both died without me knowing about it, and the first generation of design firm employees, who were also part of the proceedings.

Over the years, I spent time in each different apartment, but I generally inhabited the first floor, along with a rotating cast of first-generation Airbnb guests. I had converted two walk-in closets into truly beguiling places to stay, and there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of interesting people willing to pay to sleep in someone’s closet.

Then there was the cellar level, optimistically described as a garden apartment. Into it went my collection of antique pipe organ parts, a harpsichord, and eventually the dining room I had wanted since childhood: a table that seated twenty-four people in matching vintage Dunbar chairs.

As a child, I had imagined this dining room in a manor house or a mansion. I had not pictured a basement flat in the middle of Chicago. But apparently, when you manifest something, you need to be considerably more specific about the floor.

Still, there it was. My dining room for two dozen friends.

Four or five times a year, I staged grand entertainments, with hundreds of people invited. That strange little basement dining room became a launching pad for friends who would go on to own the Mockingbird Diner in Nashville. It played a small part in the beginnings of their particular way of entertaining, of putting together an evening that people would remember.

The New York Times came calling and published a long article. My mother was delighted, not least because, as she pointed out, nothing needed to be redacted before she could put a copy in her purse.

Other magazines came, five or six over the years, each chronicling a different part of life at 921. Some of the magazines were interested in the parties; others were interested in the aesthetics.

For some weird reason, Dwell magazine wanted to take pictures of me making cocktails under a moose head, which seemed very off-brand for their establishment.

A couple of music videos were shot. Crate and Barrel rented the house for a month and turned it into a stage set of different perfectly appropriate rooms. I felt like I needed to burn some sage to get rid of that when they departed.

But it was strange to get junk mail in my mailbox that featured my own rooms. I still, to this day, get FLOR catalogs that feature bits and parts of my house, with astonishingly unattractive rugs under all of my furniture.

Periodically, a truck full of wine would arrive. Or a truck full of toilet paper. A rental piano might be delivered to the courtyard to welcome people to a Halloween party. These are all perfectly reasonable things to have delivered to a residential building, provided nobody asks too many questions.

We certainly created a spectacle. But somewhere among the deliveries, the dinners, the guests and the collections, we also created a place where people belonged.

In the early ’90s, I had read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, with its magical landlady and its building full of people who became part of one another’s lives. I loved the idea that an address could mean that much. That the people living behind a collection of doors could become a world of their own.

It never occurred to me that an unprepossessing courtyard building on a side street in Wrigleyville might become my own little kingdom, with more than a passing resemblance to 28 Barbary Lane.

I had just called about a For Rent sign.

Looking back, 921, I’m not sure when you stopped being a place where I lived and became such an enormous part of who I was. There wasn’t an announcement. We were busy making dinner, moving furniture, opening wine and finding somewhere to put another rather questionable acquisition.

I didn’t know, while it was happening, how much I would miss it.

P.S. I still rue the day, just a few months before COVID-19 surfaced, that I packed the final moving truck and left my rooms at 921. I thought I needed a fresh start, a change of pace. I thought some smaller, beautifully renovated rooms might bring me a little peace.

And they did. It was a lovely place to weather the global storm.

But I’ve never stopped missing what I had before.