History
Maxwell Street first appears on a Chicago map in 1847. It was named for Dr. Philip Maxwell. It was originally a wooden plank road that ran from the south branch of the Chicago River west to Blue Island Avenue. The earliest housing there was built by and for Irish immigrants who were brought to Chicago to construct the first railroads there. It continued to be a "gateway" neighborhood for immigrants, including Greeks, Bohemians, Russians, Germans, Italians, African Americans and Mexicans.
Hull House, the largest and most famous of the 19th-century settlement houses, established by Jane Addams, began here to help immigrants transition to their lives in Chicago. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 started only a few blocks away but burned north and east, sparing Maxwell Street and the rest of the Near West Side.
A few blocks north of the Maxwell Street neighborhood are the city's historic Greek and Italian communities. Taylor Street is Chicago's Little Italy and one can still find Italian cuisine, including pastries and lemon ice. Pilsen, the neighborhood to the south, was originally Bohemian and today is Mexican.
The neighborhood's historic church is St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis has evolved through the years with the surrounding community. It originally was German Catholic, then Italian, and now is Mexican, with almost all its masses in Spanish.
Beginning in the 1880s, "Russian" (i.e., Eastern European) Jews became the dominant ethnic group in the Maxwell Street neighborhood, which remained predominantly Jewish until the 1920s. This was the heyday of the open-air pushcart market for which the neighborhood is most famous.
After 1920, most of the residents were African Americans from the Mississippi Delta, who came in the Great Migration (African American), but most of the businesses continued to be Jewish-owned. In the 1980s and 1990s, both the neighborhood and market became predominantly Mexican-American. Most of the older Jewish merchant families had gathered wealth and moved to the suburbs.
During the period when the neighborhood was predominantly African American, and especially in the decades following World War II, it became famous for its street musicians, mostly performing Blues, but also Gospel and other styles.
In Maxwell Street, by Ira Berkow, the author heads each chapter, from 1905 onward, with a newspaper quotation showing a prevailing belief at the time that the city was about to abolish the Maxwell market. The street itself began to shrink in 1926 when the Chicago River was straightened and new railroad tracks on its west bank pushed the eastern end of Maxwell Street further west. The 1957 construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway cut Maxwell Street in two and pushed the market west of Union Street. In 1967 UIC started to expand south of Roosevelt Road, into the Maxwell Street neighborhood. A few years later, a subsidized housing development called the Barbara Jean Wright Courts Apartments chopped off Maxwell's western end at Morgan Street (1000 west).
In October 2008, Maxwell Street Market moved to the intersection of Roosevelt Rd. and S. Des Plaines Avenue.
Read more about this topic: Maxwell Street
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We dont know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We dont understand our name at all, we dont know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)