September 5, 1999
Excerpts from Dennis Byrne's Anti-Maxwell St. Editorial and our response
From the Chicago Sun Times, September 6, 1999, p. 17
Best Maxwell Street plan? Pave it over.
By Dennis Byrne <dbyrne@interaccess.com> Dennis Byrne is a columnist and on the editorial board of the Chicago Sun Times.
Reply #1 to Dennis Byrne's Anti-Maxwell Street editorial.
By Steve Balkin, <mar@interaccess.com> Vice President of the Maxwell St. Historic Preservation Coalition
Point 1. Dennis, UIC administrators have already anticipated your mind. UIC's latest plans are to destroy the whole of Maxwell Street and make it into a parking structure. The 13 facades it plans to save are just to be ornaments pasted on the sides of the parking structures. UIC is not at all trying to please us. They despise us! But they know that there is worldwide public pressure for preservation on Maxwell Street. This is documented on our website http://www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html.
Pasting facades on a parking structure is a way to deceive those who are not experienced preservationists and not close to the scene. Many don't know the difference between the historic preservation rationale for saving whole buildings and the architectural preservation rationale: saving buildings because of who used them vs saving buildings because they were built by a famous architect. Abraham's Lincoln's home in Springfield was not built by a famous architect nor was it grand architecture.
By the time the UIC South Campus Expansion will be finished in the year 2009, most of the present administrators will have been retired or left for other jobs. They won't be around or have to live with what they intend to create. They are not in this for the long term.
While I disagree with the class-biased values of UIC administrators and their short term vision, I know that they read. They read and know that the Maxwell Street neighborhood is a place of important Chicago History. This history includes being a main entry neighborhood for Chicago's early Irish and German inhabitants; the site of Holy Family Cathedral, the first beachhead of the Jesuits in the Midwest and the founding of Loyola University; the site of the start of the Chicago Fire; the site of the D.F. Bremner's first bakeries (founder of the Nabisco Corporation); the site of the Battle of the Viaduct -- an important pre-Haymarket labor confrontation; the home to many Eastern European Jewish immigrant families including William Paley (founder of CBS), actor Paul Muni, Jacob Arvey, Saul Alinsky, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, and Benny Goodman; an early entry neighborhood of Chicago Mexican immigration and site of St. Francis of Assisi Church, Chicago's first Spanish-speaking Catholic Church; but most importantly, it was an important entry neighborhood of the Great Migration for poor African-Americans from the Mississippi Delta.
As part of this migration came the musicians who played out on Maxwell Street's corners and empty lots. It was on Maxwell Street where blues got transformed from a rural acoustic music to an urban amplified music, from which came rock n' roll, the root of world popular culture. Blues (and Jazz) are America's only indigenous art forms and its most influential form came from Maxwell Street. I am not African-American but I am an American, a patriotic American, and the music from Maxwell Street and the culture that created it are a piece of our American Heritage that should not and must not be destroyed. If that is a cult in your eyes, so be it.
Chicago is known worldwide for the Chicago style of blues, copied by U.S. and British musicians alike. If Chicago allows UIC to destroy Maxwell Street, it will have tarnished itself which could escalate into boycotts and loss of esteem in the eyes of the world. What if the City of New Orleans allowed the proposed destruction of the French Quarter in 1941, or if Memphis allowed the destruction of Beale Street in the 1980s?
Point 2. Maxwell Street must be preserved because most people are like you Dennis, they don't read. Maxwell Street's stories and lessons of immigrant struggle, family sacrifice, old world values, and bootstrap entrepreneurial capitalism will be forgotten over a generation or two unless they are embodied in a bricks and mortar historic district. Whose history gets saved? It is the history of the rich and power elites. They want their own history saved and have the power and resources to do it. What about the history of ordinary working class people and people of color, without clout or wealth? Just because you never heard of their accomplishments doesn't mean they are not important, that extraordinary accomplishments can't come from ordinary people.
We find great similarity between you and UIC administrators. They too have never been to the old Maxwell Street area except in an automobile. They and their faculty, like Dean Stanley Fish, have refused every offer of a walking tour of the area. They (and you) seem afraid to meet face to face the people whose livelihoods and social center they (and you) will destroy. They (and you) are willing to stereotype a people and a neighborhood they have no first hand knowledge of.
Point 3. Oddly enough, Dennis, we agree with you on your third point. We want the university to use as soon as possible the 90% of the 58 acres of the neighborhood that is already cleared land. The more that UIC waits with this project, the longer it is that potential taxable property is off Chicago's tax base. We do disagree, however, with your totalitarian economics. We believe in the principles of private property rights and free enterprise. Maxwell Street is part of the story of American free enterprise. Most of the South Campus Expansion Area is for non-university purposes (retail and luxury condos) . We believe those non-university purposes are best left to the private real estate market to develop. They will be done cheaper and get property on the tax roles sooner, if the development is done by small private companies rather than a centrally planned totalitarian Stalin-like10-year-plan like UIC has in mind. Letting the few remaining private properties stay in private hands and removing the threat of Eminent Domain and demolition will more quickly jump start development in the area. The more centrally planned approach has the potential, if there is a stock market decline, to leave the area devoid of buildings and people, the city's next Block 37. UIC administrators are not business people, nor are they elected officials. They, like you, are control freaks because that makes life easier but it is harming the well being of our city now and in the future.
As to jobs, we also want more jobs for Chicagoans. Rehab is more labor intensive than new construction. So, diverting a fraction of the construction to historic rehab will result in more jobs created not less.
Conclusion: Dennis, just because you don't want to take the time to learn about all sides of an issue, doesn't mean the other side is necessarily wrong. You are like the rest of your one sided editorial board members, welcoming UIC to visit to present their case but refusing us the opportunity to present our side.
You remind me of the child in Andy Patner's famous quote when he first heard UIC was intending to destroy Maxwell Street: "It seems, to this descendant of Maxwell Street, the city has diminished its present. It has become like the child who commits the greatest sin of any immigrant culture -- who tells his grandparents that he doesn't want to hear their stories anymore."
Finally, the greatest reason for preserving Maxwell Street is its potential for positive impact on college students, like those at UIC. Says English Professor Pricilla Perkins,
"When students do think in terms of ethnicity or class background, they take their cues from television and other media, which present these identities in unproblematically sentimental terms. They certainly don't tell the whole story. Being able to walk Maxwell Street, to see the interaction of the groups that currently call it home, to read about the parade of peoples who have left their mark on the place and on our national culture, and, finally, to write about what they have witnessed: this, in my view, might enable our students to see themselves as more than consumers disconnected from geography and history. It might, in other words, give them the critical tools they need in order to knit their futures--as stockbrokers, health care professionals, writers, parents--to the pasts about which our consumption-driven society teaches them so little. This kind of "knitting" requires particular attention to the points of contradiction--between what history books say and what survivors remember, between the perceived values of the university and of the bordering neighborhood--that forcefully appear to students who are confronted with places that are so "intimately foreign" to their experiences. In the most everyday of language, tearing down Maxwell Street teaches students that history--their own, their neighbors'--doesn't really matter."
September 6, 1999
Reply #2 to Dennis Byrne's Anti-Maxwell Street editorial.
By Brian Mier <bmier@ameritech.net> Urban Planner, Sociologist, and member of the Board of Directors of the Coalition
I generally regard Dennis Byrne as a harmless loose cannon, but his September 6th column is too much. He admits he has never been to Maxwell Street and then says it would better serve Chicago if it was razed and replaced with parking lots. Does he know anything about the parking situation in this neighborhood that he has never visited? How many jobs does UIC's perpetually empty parking lot on the corner of Maxwell and Halsted streets provide today? 2? According to both Economic Development Quarterly (Morales, Persky, and Balkin:1994) and Crain's Chicago Business (Mier:1994) the last parking lots UIC put up in the area cost the neighborhood $10 Million annually in retail sales. The rationale that UIC gave at the time was that constructing a medical research lab on the land would serve the city better. Five years later they have still failed to build it.
Is ripping down businesses like Jim's originals, which provides jobs for 40 people, and replacing them with Byrne's cherished additional parking lots going to improve the neighborhood's economy? I'd like to apply Byrne's logic to his own case. I grew up in Chicago. I've never been to Mr. Byrne's house. Therefore, I think it would serve the city better if it was ripped down and replaced with a parking lot. What about poor Mister Byrne? Maybe he can get a job as a parking lot attendant and help his local economy.
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