Sidney Sorkin, Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996
Dear Chancellor Broski:
Five-twenty West Barber Street, now covered by the Dan Ryan Expressway, was the first home of my mother and her parents in America. It is in this area of Maxwell Street, a sort of Chicago landing place, a midwest Ellis island that so many of the immigrants, who came in the fifty years from 1880 on began their American journey.
Recently Seymour Persky attempted to house the Chicago Jewish Historical Society in the Maxwell Street police station - which would have been the right group in the right place. This would have brought history to a full circle within the Circle Campus.
Maxwell Street represents, as does Hull House, the history of a time and place for the Irish, Italians and Jews who lived there. It is a focal point for the history of the cities ethnic shoppers who came to shop, as they did in the old country in the stores and open market of the district - the Maxwell Street district.
In my dozen of years of research on Chicago's Jewish Landsman-shaften the origins of the majority of these organizations, be they religious or secular, were from the Maxwell Street area.
History has a way of disappearing under the wrecking ball or improvements, such as the Garrick Theater being replaced by a multi-story parking lot! But, Maxwell Street is more than a building, it is a symbol for many of us a very special time and place. It was the area out of which the customer peddlers plied their trade. It was the area wherein Chicagoans could converse in any one of a half-a-dozen languages. It was the area where families and fortunes were made.
This is the area where Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Picture Studios bought his first movie theater. Chicago is no longer a frontier city as it was thought of a century ago. Chicago can keep its memories but must also preserve its history in stone, set in a certain place memorializing a certain time. Assuredly this is no Hadrians Wall across northern England, but it is a section of the wall of Chicago's history.
Born and raised in Chicago, and having lived there for sixty-five years, the city still suffuses my psyche. I ask, can we please
Sincerely Yours,
Sidney Sorkin
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