Column: Is it possible to recapture the manic magic of Maxwell Street? The market returns to its original home this summer
The first time I went “shopping” on Maxwell Street was in the mid-1960s when I ventured there with some little friends in an attempt to retrieve the bike that had been stolen from one of us a few days before in Lincoln Park.
We never found that bike but over the next decades, often early in the mornings in the hope that a Polish sausage would help cure a hangover, we found all sorts of diversions, wonders, music and bargains. Maxwell Street — we never called it the Maxwell Street Market, as it would come to be known by more formal folks in recent years — was a wild carnival of a place, a stretch that resembled, in its colorful chaos and hint of danger, that playground called Riverview, which vanished from the North Side in 1967.
Recent news sparked all sorts of memories of those of a certain age. Perhaps you heard about it, and learned that some variation of the Maxwell Street Market is returning to its original home this summer.
It will do so Sunday, settling in on Maxwell Street between Halsted Street and Union Avenue, as well as on Union from Rochford Street to Liberty Street. It’s been gone for a long time, moving first in 1994 to a portion of Canal Street and in 2008 to the 800 block of S. Desplaines Street.
This new move will offer a marketplace on the last Sundays of every month from this Sunday into October (the August market will take place on Sept. 1). It will be open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Entertainment and food are promised.
The reason for this move is that the Desplaines site is the city’s landing zone for migrants arriving here by bus and many more buses are expected. There is some irony in that, since the area that once spread out from the corner of Maxwell and Halsted Streets, was once and for more than a century a “landing zone” for immigrants.
From the 1880s into the 1990s it was a human quilt of various immigrant groups, mostly Jewish, then Black, then Latin in substantial waves. It was where people lived and worked, many of them at the marketplace that dominated the area, south along Halsted Street from Roosevelt Road to 16th Street. It attracted others from across the city, to buy and sell things. People played and listened to the blues. They ate food and in other ways tasted new cultures. Vibrant and wild, it was an essential piece of the city. It was, for so many, where their American dreams took root.
But as the University of Illinois-Chicago began to expand in the early 1990s, the market eventually vanished, despite the energetic efforts of the members of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition and others. In short, “urban renewal” order, the market was obliterated and the area rebuilt, transformed into what was called University Village.
The great photographer Charles Osgood and I were there then. It was like visiting an old friend who was dying. As I wrote, “the curbs were broken, the sidewalks too, smashed and thrown askew as if by a small earthquake. It’s a shattered and tattered place, a messy stretch of iron grates, plywood and broken glass windows.”
There was an empty lot on the north side of the street, covered with wood chips, and next to it a makeshift shrine. A sculpture spelled M-A-X in 10-foot-tall letters made of railroad ties, and near it is the “Maxwell Street Wall of Fame,” a mural filled with names of former area residents such as bluesman Bo Diddley, jazzman Benny Goodman, boxer Barney Ross, author Willard Motley and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.
There were new plaques placed on the street, offering bits of history. But there are other ways to explore and learn. Ira Berkow, a native Chicagoan and former New York Times sportswriter, provided it in his wonderful history titled “Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar.” Years later, when the shadow of doom was obvious, he called Maxwell Street “the Ellis Island of the Midwest” and passionately pleaded against its “annihilation.”
You can get some deep thoughts from “Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place,” as author Tim Cresswell tells us that “If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘Cities give us collision,’ then Maxwell Street was the epitome of what it is to be a city.” His book contains a lot of fine writing, such as this section focused on Simone de Beauvoir, the French writer and feminist who was the gal-pal for a time of novelist Nelson Algren. He took her to see Maxwell Street and she found it, as Cresswell notes, “an extraordinary mix of all civilizations and races that have existed through time and space… Yet under the blue sky, the grayness of Chicago persists. At the end of the avenue that crosses the glowing bazaar, the pavement and light are the color of water and dust.”
There is also the 2006 documentary film “Cheat You Fair: The Story of Maxwell Street,” by filmmaker Phil Ranstrom and narrated by Joe Mantegna. I once wrote that “This is one of the most remarkable pieces of work I’ve ever seen. Anyone with any affection for Chicago or the blues must see it.”
You can’t, however, recapture the past. The city changes. We move on. One newspaper, the Sun-Times, earlier this week cheered the relocation, writing, “The city deserves a pat on the back — and maybe a complimentary pork chop sandwich — for its decision to bring street vendors back.”
There’s nothing wrong with such boosterism. The city’s having a tough time.
In his book, Creswell captures the essence of change, writing with hope, “The people who live in University Village live lives as authentic as anyone else’s — going to work, raising families, or not. Places change, and this place too will one day be a place of the past that some will look back on with longing and nostalgia.”
