MAXWELL STREET: Why the Ellis Island of the Midwest Ought to be Saved.

-by Ira Berkow, Columnist, New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036 <fax#1-212-481-6430>

Below are excerpts from Ira Berkow's Nathan Lerner Address at the University of Iowa, February 1995.


In a literal sense, Maxwell Street became the Ellis Island of the Midwest. Other market streets in other ghetto areas in other midwestern cities existed and thrived in the early years of the century but Maxwell Street was the biggest, the liveliest, the loudest, the most eagerly sought by immigrants.

Maxwell Street doesn't have to expire this way. It shouldn't.

While much of Maxwell Street was inhabited by Jews, others lived on the Street, or in close proximity, and a rainbow of nationalities worked there. Most began with little more than hope and a shoe string. In the market place, the trick was to sell that shoe string and then with those pennies buy two more shoe strings, and sell them. Sometimes actual fortunes were begun just that way.

While life there could be unbearably hard and bleak for many, others rose spectacularly, living the American Dream: William Paley, who founded CBS, was born in the rear of his father's cigar store near Maxwell Street, and Admiral Hyman Rickover's father was a tailor on Maxwell Street; the late Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, whose father was a potato peddler with horse and wagon, was born there. Goldberg told me that his father owned one horse, a blind horse,, the only horse he could afford, but had learned the routes so well that he even topped a stop signs by himself.

And boxing champions Barney Ross and Jackie Fields began their careers literally fighting for survival there. The widely known heavyweight contender and character Kingfish Levinsky, born Harris Krakow, who once fought and lost to both Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis, among others, was from there, a member of the remarkable Krakow fish-selling family of Maxwell Street.

The variegated history of Maxwell Street includes its embrace of blacks all through the 20th Century, many escaping the suppression of the South on the train they called "The Smokestack Express."

When the rest of Maxwell Street is devastated, the University, it has stated, will erect tennis courts and baseball fields and parking lots --as if they couldn't put them someplace else.

Well, but the argument goes, the University must grow, it must expand, and Maxwell Street is vulnerable. It's old, it's shoddy, it's neglected. Who needs the squalid thing anymore? Besides, there may be people, politicians and businessmen, who will profit nicely by its destruction. This is not an unheard-of scenario in Chicago.

But is this the last gasp of Maxwell Street, or, like those long-ago Saturday-afternoon movie serials, is there yet another episode?

Now, though, the place truly may be at the end of its long, long, rope. Should we cut that rope and let the Street and its history just sink into oblivion?

For too long America allowed Ellis Island to also fade and crumble, until it was decided that this was a treasure. Then came a move to refurbish it, which resulted in renovating not only parts of the building, but the memory of what it represented to millions of people. It is exactly what Maxwell Street meant to many of those same wide-eyed foreigners - many of them, perhaps most of them, our ancestors.

A university, if any institution, should be especially sensitive to this piece of history and Americana. A university, above most other institutions, should want to conserve its legacy, instead of bulldozing it.

Maxwell Street could be a thriving landmark, complete with kiosks and stands and stores (with the dubious charms of their "pullers," that sometimes overly aggressive sales force, on the sidewalk). "In the old days, " Mike Royko once wrote, "they didn't stand outside and coax you into the store. They hauled you in if you weren't big enough to resists. The only reasons they stopped was because an ordinance was passed prohibiting the kidnapping of customers."

And Maxwell Street should retain the nearly carnival atmosphere that made visiting it such a memorable experience for so many (with maybe a little restraint put on the pullers). Look at some of Nathan Lerner's photographs - of the man in clown face, of the strange masks, of the crowds around the boy with a handkerchief conceivable performing a kind of magic trick.

I saw first-hand the man selling watches who showed you the one on his wrist, and if you weren't interested, he showed the one higher on his arm, and the one above that and above that. Then he went on to the next arm. I saw a man who had a horse who could count with the tap of a hoof.

I learned how to haw my wares from the four card-table stand piled with boxes of nylons. Since many of the people on the street were sometimes skeptical - and sometimes rightly so - of the goods, we had to try to get their confidence. My best come on was: "There's only one hole in these stockings, and that's where you put your foot in." I later owned a belt stand, and then retired from the street at 18, when I went away to college.

Poor people don't head directly for Lake Shore Drive.

But it would be an historical tragedy for America and for Chicago and for the memory of our families if Maxwell Street were annihilated.

You do not destroy such an old, tumultuous, wondrous, vital, important monument. You save it, you preserve it - you cherish it.


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