Maxwell Street - History

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.