Corporations formed by two of Maxwell Street's most famous alumni, Barney Balaban (Paramount-Viacom) and William Paley (CBS) have proposed a merger to form one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Viacom Inc., the owner of Paramount Pictures, is buying CBS Corp.. Balaban and Paley were powerful and successful men with humble roots in Chicago. Through motion pictures, radio, and TV, they shaped who we are as Americans.

Barney Balaban became president of Paramount Pictures in the 1930s after a Paramount buyout of his Chicago theatre chain and upon the request of the prior Paramount president Adolph Zukor ( a former Chicago furrier), who wanted to avoid a hostile takeover by Joseph P. Kennedy (father of JFK). Balaban rescued the company from expected bankruptcy. Mr. Balaban was born in Chicago in 1887 and was raised in the Maxwell Street area in an apartment in the back of his parents' grocery store. His earliest introduction to the media industry was from his Uncle Luzor who played violin and drums in the Jewish Theaters in the area and from brother A.J. who went with Barney to the Halsted Street nickelodeons. Balaban said, "We knew by 1909 that moving pictures were more than just a novelty." He continued working at Paramount into the 1960s, died in 1971, and Viacom bought Paramount in 1994. Sumner Redstone (Rothstein), the current president of Viacom, like Balaban, started in the media industry by working in his family's chain of local movie theaters.

William Paley's father Samuel came to Chicago in 1883 and became a cigar maker. In 1896 his cigar shop and home was about a block from Halsted and Maxwell. They later moved a mile west where William was born in 1901. The family business grew rapidly and became the Congress Cigar Company. Eventually, in the aftermath of a strike, it moved to Philadelphia. William learned about radio as an advertising vehicle for the family's La Palina brand cigars. William was sent to the Wharton School of Finance and then left the cigar business in 1928 to buy, from a family friend, what was then a small radio network called the Columbia Broadcasting System. He built the network rapidly during the depression by giving unsponsored programs free to affiliates; the more affiliates he had the more advertising dollars he could charge. He continued working at CBS until his death in 1990. Mel Karmazin, current president of CBS, like Paley, started out in the media industry working with radio networks.

Says Steve Balkin, member of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition, "The new Viacom will be innovative. Look at their predecessors Balaban and Paley. They both embraced the new technology of their day. Balaban practically invented the modern movie theater by booking some of the earliest (turn of the century) quality movies, adding fancy architecture, and putting air conditioning in them. Paley quickly embraced radio in the 1920s and was a television pioneer in the early 1930s."

The Maxwell Street neighborhood that produced these great American entrepreneurs is threatened with annihilation by expansion of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition is a grass roots organization that seeks preservation of this historic neighborhood. Says Balkin, "First we have to save the old buildings from demolition and then we need to create museums in some of them to honor Balaban and Paley and other immigrant and migrant families of all races and ethnicities, who started on Maxwell Street and stepped into success. Maxwell Street is Chicago's gift to the world -- its people, food, music, culture, and ways of doing business. We pray that Chicago does not destroy the last remnant of that which made it great."

For more information about Maxwell Street, visit the Coalition's website <http://www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html>.

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