Justin O'Brien <justin_o'brien@frankel.com> Date: Thu, 05 Nov 98
Dear Mr. Broski,
I am a 1974 LAS graduate of UIC ("Circle" then), 3rd generation Chicago born and still living in the city and raising my family here. I studied to be a teacher at UIC and was a teacher's aid at Holy Family school for a time. My degree in literature has helped me in my career as a pre-press specialist and free-lance writer.
My great grandparents were parishioners at nearby St. Gabriel's and my grandfather had a saloon and blacksmithing business in that parish where my grandmother was born and lived until she met and married my Irish born grandfather who whisked her off to faraway Lakeview on the north side. Until that time I believe they must have frequented the Maxwell Street market.
Little is left that they would recognize of their old neighborhood or the market. That's a shame. As a member of the Chicago Irish Folklife Society in the 1970s and '80s, I followed the efforts to restore Holy Family Church, built largely with the contributions of immigrant Irish (like St. Gabriel's was) who had very little to contribute, but who believed. Even though those people are gone and their descendants moved on, people remembered and contributed to save this important symbol of their forebears' struggle and their faith and their love of community.
I first came to Maxwell Street with my parents around 1962 after attending mass one Sunday at St. Francis on Roosevelt Road. We went to look for clothes but what my brothers and I discovered was far better. Maxwell Street was an amazing place for young boys like us: the smell of frying onions, the cries of street vendors, the push and cross-flow of the crowd which represented seemingly every nationality and ethnic group known. This was an education. This was a living lesson in sociology. A barechested man pounded nails into a board with his fist and bent steel rods in his mouth. Casey Jones "The Chicken Man" may have been there that day with his dancing rooster. Blind Arvella Gray strolled the market singing of John Henry. Other musicians may have included John Lee Granderson and Robert Nighthawk that day.
I came back as a teen and as a college student to hang around and play bass with the musicians which then included Big Walter Horton, Johnnie Littlejohn, Playboy Venson, Snooky Pryor, Pork Chop, John Henry Davis, Left Hand Arthur, One-Armed John Wrencher and Floyd Jones--all of them long connected with Maxwell Street and many of them now internationally recognized for their blues artistry. I will always treasure those Sundays and my memories of those musicians. Through hearing their music--in their neighborhood--I came to better know a culture.
UIC was built on the immigrant neighborhoods of social reformer and Nobel Winner Jane Addams' Hull House. The University commemorates that with the Jane Addams Graduate School. I cannot understand how the university fails to see the important symbol that the remains of the Maxwell Street market represents to them and their purpose as an educational institution in the heart of this great city.
Justin O'Brien
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