SECTION 8 - NARRATIVE STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

Section 8 - Narrative Statement of Significance

The open-air market of Maxwell Street really began as an accumulation of Jewish pushcart peddlers who began selling on Jefferson Street after the Fire of 1871.... As peddlers became more numerous and the population of the area increased, traffic flowed over onto Maxwell St. until, in 1912, the City Council formally certified the Maxwell Street market as the official open-air market (Eastwood 1991:21). The Maxwell Street Historic District is locally significant for the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion A for commerce, ethnic heritage and performing arts. The district is significant as the historic location of an open-air market, the Maxwell Street Market, important in the history of Chicago as a port-of-entry neighborhood for many working-class newcomers to Chicago, including Jews, Mexicans, and African-Americans from the South, and as a formative area in the development of 20th-century blues music.

The period of significance for the district is circa 1870 to 1950, the fifty-year cutoff date for listing on the National Register. This period includes the neighborhood's intensive development as a working-class neighborhood in the years following the Chicago Fire of 1871. It recognizes the area's history as the first Chicago home for many of Chicago's immigrants, including East European Jews, who were instrumental in the creation of the district's most distinctive institution, the Maxwell Street Market.

Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe were concentrated in the area until the 1920s. First as pushcart peddlers and then as renters of small shops and storefronts, they created the market, in large part, and built it into a thriving center of commerce. In a compact area, a very heterogeneous clientele of immigrants bargained, bought goods, conversed, ate, and enjoyed the hurly-burly activity of the streets. Here they acquired a taste for American styles of dress and learned the ways of mass consumption and marketing.

As earlier immigrant groups moved out of the area, others took their places and participated in much the same processes and experiences. Into the post-World War II period, the district remained intact as a major commercial area, and into the early 1990s, an open-air flea market continued on Sundays, frequented by a heterogeneous clientele from both the city and the suburbs, numbering into the thousands.

The period of significance also takes into consideration the district's later history, during the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, when the area became an important residential, commercial, and social neighborhood for African-Americans moving from the rural South to Chicago. Beginning in the 1920s, Maxwell Street became common ground for a wide range of African-American musicians singing both secular and sacred music. In particular, African-American blues musicians, steeped in the musical traditions of the rural South, performed on the streets of the district, where they combined southern blues music with electrified guitars and other amplified musical instruments to create a modern, urban blues sound that revolutionized popular music of the post-World War II period.

For more than half century, Maxwell Street offered transplanted blacks from the rural South some of the comforts of their former lifestyles as a social center where they could gather during time off from jobs in the city's burgeoning steel mills, slaughterhouses, and factories. As an open-air market, Maxwell Street offered bargains from street vendors on all kinds of goods, but the most enduring attraction was music. The area's streets were the primary meeting place for singers newly arrived in the city and the center of the amateur blues activity of Chicago.

The remaining buildings of the Maxwell Street Historic District collectively provide the physical context for understanding the area's history. These buildings contained the stores and apartments of many of the immigrants and their families that entered Chicago society through Maxwell Street. On Halsted Street, there are still businesses whose facades illustrate the development of clothing stores from the early stands and shops of Maxwell. The streetscapes formed by these buildings served as backdrop for the rich commercial and social activities of early Jewish and other European immigrants and later African-Americans arriving from the American South. On the sidewalks of Maxwell and Halsted Streets, African-American musicians hooked up their electrified guitars and developed a new kind of music, which can still be heard there on summer weekends.

The historical significance of the area lies not in the occurrence of particular events of note within its confines, but in the vital activity that took place from day to day in the area. Tracing the demography, the types of commerce, the living conditions, and the cultural milieu of the district through a series of chronological periods conveys some sense of larger processes that were taking place in American society: urbanization, acculturation and socioeconomic mobility of large immigrant populations, and the development of a mass-production, consumer-oriented economy. In important ways, the Maxwell Street market district has been a microcosm of American urban society.

Commerce:

Chicago’s longest running open-air market;

Entrepreneurial development from pushcarts to department stores.

Maxwell Street and the Development of Urban Markets

Markets are the earliest channels for distribution of goods and services in urban economies. The urban historian Lewis Mumford (1961:17) found, in the earliest records of cities, that the market function was undertaken by the center of religious activity, the temple. The two classic forms of the market, the open place and the covered bazaar, appear in their urban form as early as 2000 BCE. Girouard (1985:19) asserts that in the early stage of a city's growth, the single, central open market-place accommodated commerce of all kinds.

The English market tradition has been dated to the Roman occupation in 43 BCE, and English markets have been famous for centuries. Petticoat Lane and Portobello Road in London are among the best known. Cambridge has a centuries-old market in the town square adjacent to the university, and Oxford and Salisbury have ancient market traditions that continue to this day. Within the English vocabulary, the Anglo-Saxon word for market was 'ceap,' producing such place names as Cheapside and Chipping Norton. In the mid-1800s, Henry Mayhew (1861:10) wrote of the many London street markets, "Nearly every poor man's market does its Sunday trade...but for this opportunity many a poor family would pass a dinnerless Sunday."

In America, markets date from the 1600s in New York and Boston. Faneuil Hall in Boston is the oldest market building in the country, built in 1741. Cities such as New York, Boston, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis all currently maintain public markets. The Sunday open-air flea market in the Maxwell Street neighborhood represented Chicago's only remaining historic link to this tradition until it was compelled to move in 1994.

The public market tradition in Chicago dates back to the city's charter of 1837 that called for the city to create and operate markets for the welfare of its people. However, it was not until 1847 that Chicago built its first market at State Street and Randolph. Chicago's first public street market began in 1881 on Randolph Street between Des Plaines and Union Park. It was followed in 1912 with the city designation of a New York style pushcart market on Maxwell Street. The last publicly designated street market was in 1931 on State Street between 71st and 75th Streets.

By 1912 Jefferson Street had become so crowded with pushcarts that they were forced to move westward along Maxwell Street, which was then wider than Jefferson Street (Schulz 1954:10-12). Schulz states that in 1912 there were also no fixed stands, only pushcarts, and no peddler was in the same location for more than a day. Schulz notes, "With a large local market, small operating expenses, and the opportunity to move freely in search of trade, the pushcart trade prospered; and the area became so unique and significant that the Chicago City Council passed a resolution in 1912 officially recognizing the Maxwell Street Market." The resolution (Morales 1993:27) read as follows:

That the roadway of Maxwell Street from the west line of South Jefferson Street to the east line of South Halsted Street shall be and the same is hereby set apart for market purposes on each and every day of the week, between the hours of six o'clock in the forenoon and seven o'clock in the afternoon (City Council Report, July 22, 1912:1660). Morales (1993:28) notes that on November 18, 1912, in a subcommission investigation ordered by the City Council regarding the establishment of markets, three important findings were reported: 1) Maxwell Street Market can be maintained without interference with ordinary business and traffic; 2) experience with other cities at home and abroad has shown that street markets add greatly to the convenience and health of the people residing in large districts; and 3) the gathering of large numbers of dealers within a circumscribed area make inspection and enforcement of health ordinances more practical (City Council Reports, 19 12:2326).

The 1912 ordinance established the position of Market Master. According to Schultz (1954:12), "Peddlers would gather in the vacant lots at 13th and Union Streets to await the Market Master's whistle; whereupon riots broke out in the dash for choice locations." Officially, the Market Master (or Superintendent, as he was then called) was obligated to collect $.10 from each peddler, but one of the longstanding complaints was that he collected much more than that. Eventually the position of Market Master was eliminated because of graft and corruption.

Despite changes, the market continued to thrive. The sociologist Louis Wirth (1928:232) described the market in the 1920s:

Maxwell Street, the ghetto's great outdoor market, is full of color, action, shouts, odors, and dirt. It resembles a medieval European fair more than the market of a great city today. Its origins are to be sought in the traditions of the Jews, whose occupations in the Old World differed little from what they are here. To these traditions correspond also the traditions of other national groups who form their clientele. Sunday was "the busiest day of all. People come from all over the city to supply their wants on Maxwell Street."

Eventually the other markets disappeared or street vendors were excluded by the City. An example of this occurred in recent years when the City Council took action against vendors selling in the Randolph Street Market area (Eastwood 1988:87-90). There was the case of City of Chicago v. Witvoet (1975), a case concerning a family of Michigan farmers who had sold on the 1000 block of West Randolph for more than three generations. In order to prevail in this case, the City Council amended the Municipal Code to require that only the public ways of the Maxwell Street Market could be used for market purposes. This action against vending in the Randolph market area, ironically, gave additional legitimacy to the Maxwell Street Market; however, under pressure from the University of Illinois at Chicago, even this market was closed in 1994. A smaller Sunday market, called the Maxwell Street Market to capitalize on the famous name, was opened six blocks further east.

Entrepreneurial Development in the Maxwell Street Market

The real beginnings of the Maxwell Street market were the pushcart peddlers who began selling on Jefferson and later expanded onto Maxwell Street. An 1896 Chicago Tribune article (cited in Berkow 1977:10) stated:

LaSalle Street and Dearborn (Chicago's financial center) may busy themselves with a business which involves millions every week. But both of them combined will not expend more nerve tissue, action and volubility than does commercial Maxwell Street in this very center of hard times. It was the "ghetto" conditions: concentrations of immigrants, houses (typically two-story, often with rear tenements) crowded into relatively few blocks, and a system of back alleys that provided street peddlers with ideal markets for the sale of their goods (Eastwood 1991:18). The residents often clustered, block by block, according to the village from which they had emigrated, and the peddlers could tailor their wares to the specific needs and tastes of their customers. In addition to the cultural needs of the inhabitants, the lack of refrigeration in the households meant that peddlers supplied a real service as they brought residents the necessities of daily living.

According to the Chicago Tribune of July 19, 1891 (cited in Cutler 1984:84):

The favorite occupation, probably on account of the small capital required, is fruit and vegetable peddling. Here also is the home of the Jewish street merchant, the rag and junk peddler, and the 'glass puddin' man. From the East European Jewish immigrants came most of the peddlers of the neighborhood. This occupation and the context were familiar to them. Irving Howe (1976:10) describes the East European shtetls from which many of them had emigrated. In these little villages, the streets twisted and turned, and at the center was the market-place, "with its shops, booths, tables, stands, butcher blocks." Peasants came from miles around bringing vegetables, livestock, fish and hides, and in return, would buy city imports, such as dry goods, hats, spades, lamps, and oil. "The tumult of the market-place...[was] one of the wonders of the world."

It was natural for this on-the-street selling and buying also to take the form of crates, stands, and pushcarts in front of the shops of the area. The July 19, 1891, Chicago Tribune notes, "The principal streets in this quarter are lined with stores of every description. Trades with which Jews are not usually associated such as saloon-keeping, shaving and hair cutting, and blacksmithing have their representatives and Hebrew signs." A view (see reproduction) from Jefferson Street across Maxwell Street in 1904-06 shows a "street nearly impassable because of rotting rubbish" as a line of fruit vendors sell at their stands on Jefferson (Mayer and Wade 1969:261).

Mayer Laser who was born in Chicago in 1893 and lived a block from Maxwell Street tells his recollections of this period (Berkow 1977:57-64):

In about 1912, people began renting space on Maxwell Street from the lord of the building. And soon you could not go through the street, it was so crowded. Horses and wagons couldn't get through. Cars couldn't get through. It was a unique place. You couldn't walk down the street because you were pulled in. And they had shills at different stands. On Sunday, for blocks and blocks, it was thick with people, shoulder to shoulder...Maxwell Street itself was a poor man's paradise...The State Street of the ghetto, it was known as. Most of the material was shoddy. In the first place, they wouldn't have call for anything else. Who would pay thirty dollars in those days or thirty-five dollars for a suit when you can get 'em for ten or twelve? Between 1912 and 1920 the Maxwell Street Market Area changed in response to the expansion of the clothing trade in Chicago due to the influx of immigrant labor (Schulz 1954:12). According to the Chicago Times, October 9, 1938 (cited in Schulz), it was at this time that the Maxwell Street Market Area became primarily involved in the clothing trade, attracting customers from outside the market area, and operating with methods unique to the market area.

Most businesses in the Maxwell Street Historic District followed a similar pattern of development. Initially, they sold goods from tables or carts on the street. When enough money was made, the business moved into a storefront on Maxwell Street. Success on Maxwell Street often was followed by a move to Halsted Street. After prospering on Halsted Street, most businesses relocated in a different section of the city.

Wirth (1928:232) referred to the connection between the market and the commercial establishments of Halsted Street: "The proprietors of the substantial establishments on Halsted are the graduates of Maxwell, for the most part. The modern business man on Halsted Street represents the ideal of the sons of the pushcart owners on Maxwell Street." Cutler (personal communication, June 22, 1992) asserts that there was a hierarchy in terms of shopping. "Roosevelt Road had the wholesalers, Halsted was basically one price with two big department stores, L. Klein and the 12th Street Store, and Maxwell Street was the pushcart, open stand bargaining bazaar but it also had a few small, but very busy department stores such as Gabel's, Robinson's, and Mackevich's. There were also small factory sweatshops throughout the area." Well-known businesses such as Keeshin, Vienna Sausage, Fluky's, Meystel's, Karoll's, Chernin's, and Mages all had their beginnings in the Maxwell Street neighborhood.

Vienna Beef (originally Vienna Sausage): Samuel Ladany and Emil Reichl were immigrants from Austria-Hungary who bought a storefront at 1213 S. Halsted Street following their success selling sausage at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. With their talents from the "Old Country", they made sausage in the rear of the shop and sold it in the retail store in front. By 1907, Vienna Sausage had moved next door to 1215-1217 S. Halsted, and they remained in the neighborhood until 1972 when the company moved their plant to their current location on Damen Ave. in Chicago. Today it is a nationwide distributor of sausage and other beef products. (The History of Vienna, Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Company).

Mages Sporting Goods: Morrie Mages learned his trade by selling jackets from a pushcart in front of his Russian immigrant father's store, Henry's Sports Store, on Maxwell Street in the 1920s. In the 1930s, Morrie opened a store at 835 W. Maxwell, where he became successful enough to move his store outside the neighborhood. When his business failed there, he returned to 729 W. Maxwell St. where he remade the fortune that enabled him to open Mages Sporting Goods, an eight-level store on LaSalle Street. (Personal communication with Mae Mages and Tillie Shore).

Jim's Original Red Hots: The building at 1320 S. Halsted houses a hot dog stand that was originally operated by Leavitt's Delicatessen with a full-scale deli attached to it in the 1920s and 1930s. Jimmy Stefanovic, a Russian who emigrated to America from Yugoslavia, purchased the building in 1939 and continued the hot dog stand business. Today, the family of Jimmy Stefanovic continues to operate the stand year round, 24 hours a day, in keeping with its well-known reputation for the "Maxwell Street polish". (Personal communication with Jim Christopoulos and Bruce Kraig).

Ethnic Heritage: The Maxwell Street Neighborhood as the Port of Entry for Chicago’s Immigrants

1850-1870: Early Immigrants

Describing the Near West Side, including Maxwell Street, Pacyga (1986:199) writes:

From the 1850s on, the Near West Side was a port of entry for immigrants: first German, Bohemian, French, and Irish and later Eastern European Jews, Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, and southern blacks. But far from being a 'melting pot,' the neighborhood was always divided along ethnic, economic, and racial lines. With the arrival of the railroads and the development of the trolley car, the Halsted/Maxwell Street area was opened for settlement and commerce (Adelman 1993 Colloquium). The population began to grow rapidly in the 1850s, and thousands of small frame cottages, occupied by Germans, Irish and Scandinavians, were built extending to Halsted Street on the west and Roosevelt Road on the south (Erbe 1984:75). By the end of the Civil War decade, 40,000 wooden frame cottages housed two-thirds of the city's population (Hill 1976:37).

The earliest traceable ethnic group in the proposed district area was German. The first parish church on the West Side was St. Francis of Assisi (Hill 1976:20; Pacyga 1986:207, 226). Built originally in 1853 at 11th and Clinton, the church of this German parish was rebuilt in 1866 at Roosevelt and Newberry. (Today it attracts a congregation of predominantly Mexican American worshippers.) By 1850 Germans (5,094) were 17% of the population; there were some Catholics, but more were Protestant. Just west of the proposed district on 12th Street (immediately west of Blue Island), the German Lutherans established Immanuel Church in 1854 (Pacyga 1986:205). Other early German churches include the Maxwell German Methodist Episcopal Church, which worshipped in a schoolhouse at Halsted and 12th St. in 1864 and established themselves as the Maxwell Methodist Episcopal Church at the corner of Newberry and Maxwell in 1866 (Andreas 1884(I):330, 332). Gethsemane Baptist Church, located on the corner of Union and 14th Street, which now serves a Baptist congregation, was originally constructed as a German church and later changed to a Jewish synagogue.

Parish records aid in understanding the district's changing populations because, as Pierce (1937:36 1) points out, "Separate parishes met the needs of ethnic groups whose mother tongues were not the same, and whose mastery of English was not great enough to permit religious instruction in that language." Such an indication is given by another historic church adjacent to the proposed district. Pierce notes (1937:180) that with few exceptions the Irish subscribed to the Roman Catholic faith, so when the Church of the Holy Family was built on Roosevelt at Blue Island, it "drew to its arms workingmen who lived in the small wooden houses near the railroad buildings and lumber yards." In 1857, Father Arnold Damen founded Holy Family Parish, and when the church was completed in 1860, it rose to a height of 246 feet, making it the fourth largest church in North America (Hill 1976:20; Cutler 1982:50). The Census of 1843 listed the Irish by wards and showed that the greatest concentration (26%) of the Irish lived in the 2nd ward, slightly to the north and east of the proposed district. That population then expanded to the south and west (Pierce 1937:180).

By 1860 Bohemian settlers had also moved into the vicinity of the proposed district as they settled in the area bounded by Canal, Halsted, Harrison and 11th Street (Cutler 1982:78). This community, whose boundaries were somewhat larger than the proposed district, was called "Praha." Immigrants from the area of Bohemia were classified as Bohemians in most censuses, although Slovaks, Moravians and other people from that area were also included (Hill 1976:35-36). Because of the scarcity of priests and the poverty of the group, they did not have their own priest, so some of the Bohemians attended St. Francis on Roosevelt Road.

Cutler (1982:118) notes that the first significant black settlement developed along the south branch of the Chicago River and was composed of both free black and former fugitive slaves. However, Mayer and Wade (1993: 64) assert that as early as the 1860s a small black population existed in the Maxwell Street area.

1870-1890: After the Great Fire

The Great Fire of Chicago of 1871 began in a barn at 137 DeKoven Street, just outside the proposed historic district. Although the fire destroyed three and a half miles of stores, houses and churches, it burned north and east and so caused only minor damage to the Halsted/Maxwell neighborhood (Erbe 1984:75; Hill 1976:42). Instead, the fire actually resulted in an upsurge in population and an increase in building and business activity in the West Side area because one third of Chicago's population, or 104,500 people, were left homeless. Construction in the entire area south of Madison Street and east of Western Avenue resulted from these refugees of the fire seeking places to live. As Adelman noted (1993 Colloquium), many of the Loop businesses temporarily located along Halsted Street while the State Street stores were being rebuilt. He states, "This caused a period of great prosperity for the area, but this ended as soon as the new downtown buildings were rebuilt. Jobs were lost but nothing was done for the area or its people."

Since the area was populated by immigrants, it is not surprising that there is evidence of working class organization and union activity. Adelman related (1993 Colloquium) that during the early post-fire period, the Turner Hall, on the southeast corner of Halsted and 12th Street, was a center for union activities and it became the founding site of the Workingmen's Party of Illinois. Apparently, the workers' living conditions were miserable in cities throughout the country, and in the summer of 1877 rioting broke out from coast to coast. In Chicago, demonstrations took place in the Halsted area among the unemployed. On the morning of July 26th, the police attacked German furniture workers who were holding a meeting in the Turner Hall, killing one and injuring many others. That afternoon federal troops brought in by General Sheridan killed 31 and injured 100.

In 1880 Eastern European Jews comprised only a small fraction of Chicago's 10,000 Jews, but after the Russian pogroms of 1881 and the repressive "May Laws" of 1881, Eastern European Jews emigrated to Chicago in great numbers (Cutler 1982:68). So many of them settled in the Maxwell/Halsted area that it took on the character of a Russian or Polish ghetto. Cutler notes that the Jews moved south along Canal and Jefferson Streets and westward to Halsted, and then farther west as the congestion increased. Horwich (1939:125) described Liberty Street, one of the many unpaved streets, where he lived in 1880, as narrow, muddy and dirty. He added, "The wooden sidewalks were uneven, and at some places they were elevated, with steps on each side leading to the houses."

1890-1910: East European Jews

Although people of many nationalities lived in the area, the culture and commerce of the Eastern European Jews was primarily reflected in the next period of the history of the Maxwell-Halsted area; it was their activity which gave rise to the peak period of the market. In 1891 a Chicago Tribune article described the West Side, which included the district, at that time:

On the West Side, in a district bounded by Sixteenth Street on South, Polk Street on the North and the Chicago River and Halsted Street on the East and West one can walk the streets for blocks and see nothing but Semitic features and hear nothing but the Hebrew patois of Russia. By the turn of the century the area surrounding Maxwell and Halsted was 90% Jewish, and by that time Chicago's Jewish population had reached almost 80,000 people (Cutler 1984:79). In a study of housing conditions of 1900 in Italian and Jewish districts, it was reported that 54.6% of the front houses and 79.9% of the rear houses were of frame construction (Schiavo 1928:34, cited in Glanz 1971:62). The lots were typically narrow 25 foot lots, and some of the residents lived in buildings crowded onto the rear section. There they were confronted with "...no light in front and the ever-present aromas of a squalid alley" (Mazur 1984:55). Cutler (1984:79) states that housing conditions in the area were very poor, based on surveys that were done at the time.

An English journalist (Mayer and Wade 1969:261) described a neighborhood scene graphically after travelling to Chicago in 1896:

Street stretches beyond street of little houses, mostly wooden, begrimed with soot, rotting, falling to pieces. The pathways are of rickety and worm-eaten planks.... The streets are quagmires of black mud, and no attempt is made to repair them. They are miserably lighted, and nobody thinks of illuminating them. These bleak descriptions of housing do not present a complete picture of the area, by any means. Cutler (1982:72) notes that in spite of slum conditions, "crime was almost nonexistent and the death and disease rate was one of the lowest of the various immigrant groups." As he describes it (1984:79), "The community in many ways resembled a teeming Eastern European ghetto": It housed kosher meat markets and chicken stores, matzo bakeries, tailor and seamstress shops, bathhouses and peddlers' stables. Its rich and varied religious and cultural life included synagogues, Hebrew schools, literary organizations, Yiddish newspapers, and Yiddish theaters. There were more than forty Orthodox synagogues in the focal Halsted/Maxwell area. They were usually small; few of them had more than a hundred members, and members of each congregation consisted largely of immigrants from the same community in Europe (Wirth in Cutler 1984:79). Cutler also notes that it was in a Yiddish theater on Roosevelt near Halsted that Muni Weisenfreund (1895-1967) performed various roles as a boy. Later he became the stage and screen star Paul Muni and won an academy award.

A surprising number of prominent individuals had familial ties to the Maxwell Street ghetto; for some of them, peddling on the streets of the neighborhood was their first job (Berkow 1977:10-11). A partial list of these includes: Barney Balaban (President, Paramount Pictures); Walter Paley (CBS founder); Benny Goodman (jazz musician); Muddy Waters (blues musician); Arthur Goldberg (Supreme Court Justice); Admiral Hyman Rickover (father of the atomic submarine); John Keeshin (trucking magnate); Colonel Jacob Arvey (influential politician); Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (federal judge); Saul Alinsky (community organizer); Muni Weisenfreund (actor Paul Muni); and Barney Ross, King Levinsky, and Jackie Fields (boxing champions). Most of these individuals were children of Jewish immigrants. The fields in which they achieved success are indicative of some of the limited mobility routes that existed for this community: entrepreneurship, especially in new industries, politics, entertainment, and sports that appealed to the working class, particularly boxing.

1920-1950: Maxwell Street & Changes in Ethnic Composition

By the end of WWI, the East European Jewish community began to break up as its members left for Lawndale and other parts of the city. Their place on the Near West Side was taken by African-Americans and Mexicans (Erbe 1984:75; Cutler 1982:73). The main concentration of the black population was immediately south of the proposed historic market area. The first boom of black migration into Chicago occurred during and after World War I. The war closed foreign immigration and the city's labor supply ran low, so industrial jobs opened up for southern blacks, who were looking for a way out of the oppression-laden South. From 1916 to 1919, about 500,000 blacks traveled north, and in the 20s one million more followed.

Of all northern destinations, Chicago became the most popular for African-Americans leaving the South. The Chicago Defender, the city's black-owned newspaper, was the most widely read paper in the black South, and it afforded prospective migrants a vision of an exciting city with a vibrant and assertive black community. Stories from family members and friends also added to a growing anticipation among many southerners about hitting the big city.

There can be little doubt that the black migrants were influenced heavily by urban centers like Chicago, but they worked very hard at preserving a lifestyle similar to that of the South. Places like Maxwell Street provided the equivalent of the front porch at dusk, or the turn-row at noon, for the urban black population to continue the highly social life they were accustomed to. The Chicago Defender keenly observed the stubborn nature of black southern culture when an editorialist remarked, "It is no difficult task to get people out of the South, but you have a job on your hands when you attempt to get the South out of them".

As a result of the black migration to the area, black "blues culture" sprang up in the neighborhood and established it as a place where blues could be heard, especially at the Sunday marketplace. Berkow (1977:387-394) writes, "The blacks have been playing music to entertain—and some to 'sanctify' souls—from the time they arrived in Chicago."

During this period, Mexicans also began to move into the area, with St. Francis of Assisi Church becoming an institutional mainstay of the community. In 1927 George Cardinal Mundelein designated St. Francis of Assisi as a Spanish-speaking parish (Pacyga 1986:215). Italians, who had originally settled in the area decades before, continued to live to the immediate north of the Maxwell Street area and farther north was a Greek settlement which also dated back to the early part of the 20^th century.

These ethnic enclaves had their distinctive religious, educational, and cultural institutions. Jane Addams’ Hull House, one of the earliest and most famous of the American settlement houses, worked very closely with the Greek immigrants who settled nearby, and these efforts were among the most successful in winning community support and involvement in Hull House’s program of acculturation. Hull House also reached out—less successfully—to the Italians, although their immigrant clubs did use the Hull House facilities.

Culture: The African-American Migration and the Development of the Blues

The influential Chicago bluesman Robert Nighthawk once said,

Most all music more or less starts right off from Maxwell Street, and so you wind up going there. You meets lots of musicians, gets lot of jobs from Maxwell Street. Mostly every musician in Chicago played on Maxwell Street at one time. (Nighthawk 1964) Bo Diddley, an early star of rock-and-roll, has said, Cats like me, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Minnie, Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter Jacobs, all of us came to Maxwell Street. This is the backbone and the roots of what everyone is listening to today. It started right here. (Diddley 1997) Gerard Herzhaft calls Maxwell Street, ...the famous flea market of Chicago where all the great bluesmen who had come from the Delta made their debuts. (Herzhaft 1992) While many see Maxwell Street simply as the open-air market for which it is primarily renowned, musicians, historians, and cultural anthropologists see it as the place where the music of the Mississippi Delta found an electric voice in the guise of the many African-Americans who migrated into that area in the 1940s and '50s. This voice became the electrified south side Chicago blues sound, epitomized by artists such as Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom played on Maxwell Street. The cadences and tonalities of this music later evolved into rock and roll. In short, the musical development that was centered around the Maxwell Street area forms the cornerstone of one of the most important musical and cultural developments in American society in our generation (Stovall 1996).

As the Maxwell Street neighborhood and marketgoers increasingly became African-American, starting in the 1920s, blues music became an important component of the overall culture of the area. African-American musicians would come there knowing that they could join with other musicians in singing on the street, and make sizable amounts of money. They sang the music they brought with them from the South, the melancholy-tinged laments known as "blues." Although the definitive history of Chicago blues music is still being written, popular accounts and oral histories taken from the recollections of blues musicians recognize the Maxwell Street area as a key area in the development of Chicago blues.

As one who has researched blues for over thirty years, I can testify to the fact that little of the physical evidence for this music's history remains beyond historical recordings. It was a music born in rural poverty and usually performed in flimsy structures and ephemeral venues, often even outdoors, yet it has profoundly influenced popular music throughout the world during the twentieth century. The Maxwell Street neighborhood is central to the development of the blues in Chicago, which ranks alongside my home city of Memphis as one of the great creative places of this music (Evans 1997). In the Maxwell Street neighborhood, many important blues musicians got their start playing on the street. The area saw the development of a new, amplified blues music: musicians would persuade store and building owners to run extension cords out onto the street, where amplifiers allowed the players to meld the intimate laments of southern blues with the louder, more raucous sound of electric guitars. This amplified blues sound became an important component in the development of rock-and-roll music, one of the major popular musical developments of the second half of the twentieth century. The sound was possible because of the sedentary nature of the new urban setting. The rural blues sound was a result of the itinerant bluesman moving from place to place, so a single guitar was the only practical accompaniment. As the music moved into the clubs of Chicago's South Side, then it was possible to have the piano-guitar combination, and later a multitude of combinations.

If a musician was unknown to the established artists and record companies, then he turned to the life of a street singer. This was a familiar position for most southern bluesmen who ‘hoboed’ all around the South trying to make a buck. When his travels carried him to Chicago, the unknown bluesman had to find an audience, and the largest audience he could reach was found at the Maxwell Street market (Way 1997).

By the years after World War I, Maxwell Street had become known as a place for street musicians. Many would work their way up to play in established blues clubs, and eventually reach the top of the ladder to become recording musicians. Maxwell Street was where they got their start, and where many continued to come even after they achieved success. They came back to scout out new talent for bands, pick up tunes, engage in friendly jam sessions, and get the latest news from Mississippi.

As the demographics of the area surrounding Maxwell Street changed to African-American, "the bazaar atmosphere at the market on weekends took on a new life with makeshift stands catering to the new black population and the sounds of blues musicians, songsters, medicine show entertainers, and southern gospel hymns entertaining patrons. Known as 'Jewtown' to the musicians, Maxwell Street became the center for all unknown musicians looking for a recording break." (Way 1997)

Famous Blues Performers on Maxwell Street

One of the earliest blues singers known to perform along Maxwell Street was Papa Charlie Jackson, who became popular in the 1920s as the first self-accompanied solo male blues singer to be a recording star. Born in 1890 in New Orleans, Jackson was one of the first male country blues artists to achieve significant commercial success. In 1924, he cut "Papa's Lawdy Blues" and "Airy Man Blues" for the Paramount label, ending the domination of recorded blues by female artists, which had begun in 1920 with Mamie Smith. In 1925, Jackson recorded his "Maxwell Street Blues," the first known mention of the street on a blues recording. Unlike other bluesmen, who accompanied themselves on guitar or piano, Jackson played a unique six-stringed banjo-guitar. His bawdy and humorous tunes were early versions of what became known as hokum blues.

It is difficult to know exactly how many established bluesmen started their careers on Maxwell Street. There are many comments from street musicians referring to artists like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters playing on the street, but few citations from the musicians themselves. Those who made a national impact on the music scene sometimes considered their former roles as street musicians an embarrassment. Others, like Muddy Waters, claimed that they played the street not for tips (a practice known as "busking"), but to promote their record releases.

While Muddy enjoyed the Maxwell Street scene, playing there for change wasn’t his style. "A lot of people was down there trying to make a quarter," he said, "but I didn’t like to have to play outside in all the weathers, and I didn’t like to pass the hat around and all that bull---." Although he busked there with (Jimmy) Rogers, Muddy would only admit to having played there a couple of times with (Little) Walter, to help promote his debut disc. "I was down in front of the record shop," Muddy recalled. "Went down there and tried to push his record. We sold a good bit that Saturday afternoon." (Tooze 1997) Johnny Williams remarked, "You found all kinds of musicians on Maxwell Street. Some could and some couldn't. But they was out there. Muddy Waters was out there. After he cut that first record and got up in the world he didn't associate down there no more." Delmark Records' Bob Koester sheds light on the predicament Little Walter found himself in when he returned to the street: "There was some splendid talent on Maxwell Street. You know the picture of Little Walter holding a guitar? (1963) That was Little Walter on Maxwell Street playing guitar, because if he played harp everyone would know who he was and his price would go down in the clubs." (Way 1997) The Record Companies, the Musicians’ Union, and Maxwell Street

Before World War II, record companies relied on the established sounds of Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson and a handful of others, who also dominated the local club scene in nearby Bronzeville and other African-American neighborhoods. In 1942, concerned about the competition jukeboxes were giving his members, J.C. Petrillo, President of the American Federation of Musicians, Chicago chapter, ordered a complete ban on commercial recording. The studios stayed closed for two years.

The union also had an impact on Maxwell Street. Hammie Nixon recalled, "most of our fooling around was on the street—till we hit that union. We hit that union in the early part, too. Well, they stopped that street business. Their records stopped it, too. They didn't want you on the street." (Living Blues, Jan./Feb. 1975)

Of the union, Johnny Williams remembered, "if you could play, you was gonna play with somebody on Maxwell Street. They wasn't snooty. When you joined the union, you wasn't allowed to do that. That's what broke us up." (Sutherland, Blues Unlimited, Feb./Mar. 1973)

While the union did not halt street playing for the uninitiated, they did prohibit members from playing on Maxwell Street, and nonmembers must have felt pressure to conform. Many simply ignored the union's stance on street playing. The lifting of the recording ban in 1944 ushered in a new era of recording activity and the breaking-up of the monopoly enjoyed by major record companies. "There was a vast pool of undiscovered talent and the smaller companies dipped into it, partly because they were forced to since the majors had a monopoly on the established artists. This undiscovered talent was largely to be found roaming the Maxwell Street market." (Way 1997)

One of the smaller record labels that discovered its talent on Maxwell Street was Ora-Nelle, which had the advantage of a Maxwell Street address. Ora-Nelle was the label of the Maxwell Radio Record Company, founded by Bernard Isaac Abrams and operated out of his radio store on Maxwell Street. Born on Maxwell Street, Abrams in 1945 converted his family's residence at 831-833 Maxwell Street into Maxwell Radio, TV, and Record Mart. There he sold and repaired radios and other appliances, sold records, and had a small booth where musicians could record demo disks. Muddy Waters, Johnny Young, Jimmy Rogers, and Little Walter all recorded there.

Despite the many demo records made in his shop, Abrams’ Ora-Nelle label only managed two releases, but both are significant. "I Just Keep Loving Her" was the first release by Little Walter Jacobs, one of the biggest stars of Chicago Blues and the definitive blues harmonica player. He was accompanied on that record by guitarist Othum Brown. The other Ora-Nelle release was by the mandolin-guitar duo of Johnny Young and Johnny Williams.

The Maxwell Street School of Blues

During the forties, Maxwell Street regulars included bluesmen like Daddy Stovepipe, Floyd and Moody Jones, Snooky Pryor, Johnny Young, Uncle Johnny Williams, Othum Brown, and Little Walter Jacobs. The music performed by these artists has come to be known as the "Maxwell Street School" of blues. Unlike the older, established recording artists, these musicians did not live a stable, sedentary lifestyle. They were ramblers, and that spirit showed in the music they played.¼

The music of the Maxwell Street market retained the emotion of a Deep South juke joint rather than an urban street corner. The musicians were well traveled and not yet influenced by studio producers, and with the rural South experience vividly flowing through their consciousness, they created a uniquely southern atmosphere juxtaposed against an indubitably northern backdrop. Most retained the life of the itinerant bluesman, only staying in Chicago for short periods of time and frequently returning to their regular rounds in the juke joints of the South. This contact with the traditional blues stage was critical to the development of the Maxwell Street sound. Fresh folk blues artists consistently moved in and out of Chicago bringing the creativity and tradition of rural areas with them. The market was a cornucopia of sound with different groups on every corner and musicians experimenting with various combinations each week. (Way 1997) Of the musicians closely associated with Maxwell Street, one of the most influential was Robert Nighthawk, whose album Live on Maxwell Street was released on Rounder Records in 1965. Nighthawk was born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas, in November 1909. As a child, he learned guitar from Houston Stackhouse and, in the early thirties, started to play professionally around the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. During that period, he was in and out of Chicago, recording his first sides for the Bluebird label in 1937. Nighthawk had a sporadic recording career and was not heard from again until Muddy Waters brought him into Chess studios to record "Sweet Black Angel" in 1949. Throughout this period Nighthawk continued to play on Maxwell Street. By the time he recorded the Maxwell Street album, his sound was unmistakably urban. He plays amplified slide guitar accompanied by Maxwell Street regulars Johnny Young, Carey Bell and Robert Whitehead.

On the recording, Nighthawk talks about the importance of Maxwell Street to his music and that of countless other musicians:

Well, when I really think about it, I think the blues will never die. It's always been the blues. You can always come up with something else, but when you wind up you'll wind up with the blues every time. It's just like something or other you can't get rid of. Lately I went back to Maxwell Street—I been playing there off and on about 24 years now. Most all music more or less starts right off from Maxwell Street, and so you wind up going there. You meets lots of musicians, gets lot of jobs from Maxwell Street. Mostly every musician in Chicago played on Maxwell Street at one time. (Nighthawk, "Live On Maxwell St.") In the years after 1944, many of the same forces that transformed Chicago’s blues were at work in other areas of the country. African-Americans seeking work migrated to other northern industrial cities and to California, the advantages of electric instruments were obvious to everyone, and records and radio were exposing even the most isolated rural musicians to modern blues styles. The difference in Chicago was its much larger scale, the existence of an established African-American recording industry, and the opportunities presented by the Maxwell Street Market. Already for decades, Maxwell Street had provided an unmatched opportunity for social and artistic interaction between new and established musicians. After the war¼ blues remained prosperous in Chicago clubs, but it was not the civilized and mellow Bluebird blues but rather an intensified blues that maintained the harshness and the drama of the Delta blues. (Herzhaft 1992)

The modern Delta style took root in Chicago because of the vast influx of Mississippi migrants during the 40’s—out of the total net migration to Chicago for these years it’s probable that one half came from Mississippi alone. (Rowe 1973)

One clear example of the importance of this cross-pollination between Chicago and the Delta can be seen in the example of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, a Mississippi sharecropper who migrated to Chicago in 1940 and was discovered on a Chicago street corner by producer Lester Melrose. One of the songs Crudup wrote and recorded for Melrose in Chicago was "That’s All Right." Years later, that record was heard by a young, white truck driver in Mississippi, who recorded his own version of the song in a Memphis recording studio. Crudup’s song, on the Sun label, was the first hit record by Elvis Presley.

Ultimately, the updated Delta blues style that originated on Maxwell Street and was recorded on Chess, Vee Jay and many other labels, found an eager audience in an unlikely place: England. There it was discovered and absorbed by teenagers with names like Lennon, McCartney, Jagger, Richards, Jones, Page, Clapton and dozens of others, who transformed it into a new and even more successful brand of rock-and-roll, and through which elements of its innovations can be heard in virtually all modern popular music today.

Conclusion

The Maxwell Street Market was a major marketplace and commercial district in Chicago. For the diverse ethnic groups that worked, lived, shopped and socialized in the market and the surrounding neighborhood, it was a great bazaar with roots in the Old World. For these groups, it was also an introduction to the unfamiliar abundance of goods, and new styles of consumption, dress, and entrepreneurial activity that characterized American urban society. These features make it distinctive in the history of Chicago.

Many buildings in the Maxwell Street district have been demolished, mostly by the University of Illinois at Chicago, and many of those remaining need rehabilitation. Nonetheless, these buildings provide many examples of the kinds of commerce and residential use that characterized the area in its peak periods. The remaining streetscapes still convey a sense of the lively ambiance of the market and the excitement conveyed by the new urban blues music created there.

In January 2000, the Blues Foundation, a national organization dedicated to the promotion and preservation of blues music, awarded the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition the Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Historical Preservation, in recognition of that group’s efforts to preserve the heritage (through oral history, video recordings, and preservation of buildings) of the Maxwell Street neighborhood. Blues fans all over the world regard Maxwell Street as a key landmark in the history of the music they love.

Examination of the remaining buildings in the area by experts familiar with preservation techniques (architects and structural engineers) indicates that most are still salvageable. Some have been reasonably well maintained for years, and viable businesses are still conducted in them. With a real effort to preserve and restore this unique part of Chicago, the Maxwell Street Historic District could become a major historical site in the Midwest, attracting tourists from around the world.

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