An internationally recognized Chicago photographer, designer, and artist who started his career taking photographs in the Maxwell Street neighborhood during the 1930's, Nathan Lerner died February 8, 1997.
His handwritten notes on Maxwell Street were made in the 1980's. They were provided to the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition in the hopes that putting them on the Internet may open up the hearts of the University of Illinois administrators who now determine the fate of that important and once vibrant neighborhood that he so loved.
Nathan Lerner's photos can be seen in a special State of Illinois Art Gallery exhibit, June 20 to August 15, 1997.
Chicago's lower east side was at the center of several rich cultures. Maxwell Street became its heart and what started out as a marketplace where everything could be found and some things sold. A gigantic garage sale where one searches for the past like a lover for his departed.
Where people gather for the comfort of warming at the same fire with other seekers of the real. Maxwell Street is a dream world where, while everything cannot be found, everything can be looked for.
The activity covers perhaps a square mile - the whole thing, as it is now. The entire activity, the smells, the music, the pushing, the crowding together to avoid the creeping autos, is the totality known as Maxwell Street. This mysterious ritual, repeating itself with the regularity of religious compulsion, has fascinated me for most of my life.
Over the years, Maxwell Street, with its over-ripe smells, garbage, open show of poverty, its setting as a native ghetto, occupied anew each decade or so by a new poverty group, a way station. A source of deep embarrassment to its own "establishment", who attempted to dignify Maxwell by decreeing that all stands were to be the same size, color, and shape. This was done, and miraculously, in a few Sundays, it seems the stands started to take on their own characteristics and became paint spotted, dirty, broken, splintered. They became Maxwell Street again.
But, the weeds refused to die. The need that Maxwell Street satisfied, where buying was not only a search for merchandise but, like all great marketplaces, an excuse for human contact. This need could not be destroyed and Maxwell Street had its own "establishment".
It was a celebration of life, a paradise for the artist who could see here the rich natural vari-colored maze of life, and he cherished it. Now, of course, all of us know how rare and precious it was. The true intercourse between people, a feel for real objects, unpackaged, that life had scarred and made more beautiful by use.
Our new prepackaged culture is premeasured and sanitized, explicit and pasteurized so that all danger of infecting the imagination is killed. We live in a world remote from our sensibilities, where the product is hidden from view by glass, by boxes, and expressed not by itself, but by secondary images and words. Thus, an enormous barrier separates and shields us vivid reality, making our sensibilities more and more muted from disuse. The real world of objects, facts and feelings are filtered.
Maxwell Street, failing fast, still remains as a reminder. It is the same, but the people have changed as our culture has changed. The unique sense of an individual, setting him apart as an individual, is gone.
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