Save Maxwell Street

This page is meant by the Midnight Ramblers group, to make our small contribution to the cause of this street, the symbol of an entire culture, of a way of life and of the music we all love: the Blues. The aim is to keep hope alive, that all the area around Maxwell St. shouldn’t be completely discarded, with the consequent demolition of its historic buildings and destruction of the commercial activities typical of the area, to make way for the planned expansion of the South Campus of the University of Illinois. Also our aim is to keep attention focused on the Maxwell Street problem, to avoid what so often happens in these so-called modern times, a tendency to an ‘out of sight out of mind’ mentality.

 How many great masters of the Blues have met up on Maxwell Street, to be together and to share their music, almost always the only outlet and escape route from a life otherwise of desperation and abject poverty.

A PLACE OF MEMORIES

Maxwell Street is the centre of a one-square-mile ghetto, on the west side of Chicago. The area around it and leading to the area bounded by Halsted, Jefferson, Liberty, Sangamon, Peoria, Newberry and Morgan was the place where, to flee from the persecution to which they were subjected in eastern Europe, hundreds of Jews settled from 1880 up to 1924. But the myth of the Promised Land, however much the situation was better than that left behind, was still a pipedream.

Overcrowding, deficient sanitation, poverty, companies exploiting the workers and petty crime all flourished, inducing the authorities, who had recognised the area as the place of a Sunday morning outdoor market, by a 1912 Chicago City Council ordinance, to call for its demolition in 1926.But, as often happens in similar circumstances, local vested interest, bureaucracy and the apathy of the authorities themselves, led to the proposal being forgotten, although years later, in 1938, the Jewish leaders themselves asked for its demolition. The outbreak of the Second World War, led to new chaotic, disorderly urban growth in Chicago soon raising the coloured population, driven to the North by the need for manual labour in the armaments factories, from 250,000 to 500,000 people. This new poor, above all individuals without contacts, ended up on the South-Side and the West-Side, thereby supplanting, above all in the Maxwell Street area, those Jews who in the meantime had "made good", transforming the market into a highly colourful multi-ethnic place. But the turnover was not on equal terms and the situation deteriorated, since it wasn’t a beauty spot in the first place, but rather a concentration of negative situations. If to that is added the building of the Southern Expressway in 1957, which expropriated a part, and also in 1967, the Chicago Daily News bore the news that another part of the area (that delimited by Roosevelt, Maxwell, Newberry and Morgan ) had been given to the Chicago University of Illinois to enlarge the campus and create new faculties and that on 4 April, 1968 it became, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a besieged ghetto in flames, the face of the area understandably changed. In fact, the perennial state of precariousness, as a reclamation area, ended up affecting everyone, residents or otherwise. If no-one had ever bothered about the slum housing, even less attention was given to the occupants. So if the owners didn’t care about their tenants’ rights, they too didn’t bother to demand them. A situation of decay emerged from this vicious circle of cause and effect, with filth, neglect, brutality and squalor, being added to all the difficulties that the inhabitants, already trapped in hopeless poverty and lack of education, experienced.

The Maxwell Street outdoor market was closet in 1994 and what remained moved some blocks to the East, in the Canal Street area. Despite this, Steve Balkin, professor at the Roosevelt University, has set up the MAXWELL STREET HISTORIC PRESERVATION COALITION, opposed in every way to the systematic and total destruction of this are of historic importance.

Anyone wanting to lend a hand, is invited to write to the Coalition’s address:

Room 760, 430 Michigan Ave. Chicago, IL 60605 USA; or to fax on 001 312-341-3680 , E- Mail mar@interaccess.com.

To get real time news surf the site http://www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html.

Beside him in the struggle is Jimmie Lee Robinson who, to further sensitise public opinion, went on a hunger strike lasting from 18 August to 8 November last year.

(Text adapted, by kind concession, from " Maxwell Street – A Place of Memories - Il Blues n° 74, edited by Marino Grandi )