Provided by OPENAIR-MARKET NET. Reprinted with permission from the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. Copyright Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. 1990
You'd be lucky to live for as long as Maxwell Street's been dying. The cluttered, dirty market district, once the pushcart-jammed core of Chicago's Jewish ghetto, has been falling down for most of a century. Its original inhabitants have long fled. Its streets have been chopped by urban renewal. One by one, most of its storefronts and tenements have been bulldozed, so that visitors, six days out of seven, see little besides lots piled with rubble and old tires.
But show up early on a Sunday - by 7 a.m. if you don't want to miss anything - and Alexander Kelter, 40 years a vendor here, will sell you an old silver-plate statue of a dog and a pile of National Geographics.
"You want them all?" he asks a prospective customer. "I'll give you a bargain. A dime each, take 'em."
Down the street, Jeff Jackson is selling souvenir sweat shirts by the bundle and a home exerciser that his sons are finished with. Nearby there's a guy offering six-month warranties on new - guaranteed - vacuum cleaners. A crowd surrounds another table laden with batteries, electric shavers and porno videos. Down the way, Mexican women are filling plastic bags from tables piled high with dried ancho chilies.
"If you got the money, we got the honey!"
"Cuatro por diez!"
"Tamales, tres por un dollar!"
Today, the Maxwell Street market is threatened - again. Just like in the 1920s, when reformers tried to clean the market up and many of the area's inhabitants left for better neighborhoods farther west; or in the 1950s, when the Dan Ryan Expressway cut the neighborhood in half, or the 1960s, when urban-renewal authorities declared it blighted and began knocking down the old tenements, one by one.
This time, the neighboring University of Illinois at Chicago, fed up with the market's mess, its garbage and traffic, wants it to make way for a science lab. Under a plan making its way through the city bureaucracy, the sprawling Sunday open-air market would be moved within two years to a smaller space, and the fixed shops that do business all week long would face an uncertain future as part of a designated "university expansion" zone.
School officials are adamant on two points: that they must have the land to grow into a respected urban research institution, and that Maxwell Street isn't what it used to be.
"I bought my first suit on Maxwell Street when I was 16 years old," said university spokesman Dennis Church. "It was a fascinating place. It's not so fascinating now. It's a sinkhole."
Tell that to Jackson, who has been peddling dry goods here on Sunday mornings, winter and summer, for 30 years, earning enough to finance two sons' college tuition. "It's the best flea market in the whole city," he said. "Anybody can make it in this market. It's the only one that's really multiracial. You got your Spanish people, your Mexicans, your blacks, your whites, your Asians. If you don't sell to one group you sell to another."
The neighborhood, about a mile southwest of Chicago's downtown, has never been exactly posh. A century ago, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most of them Jewish, settled here, crowding in between the Italian and Greek neighborhoods to the north and the Polish, German and Irish areas west and south.
Social scientists ranked the area among the worst slums in the nation; one estimated that if all Chicago was as dense as the Maxwell Street area, it would contain the population of the whole Western Hemisphere.
Jane Addams' Hull House, the forerunner of modern social-work agencies, was founded a few blocks away to help relieve the dirty, overcrowded conditions.
But many famous Americans emerged from the ghetto, from jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, CBS founder William Paley, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and actor Paul Muni, to boxers Barney Ross and "King" Levinsky and mobster Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik.
In the 1940s and '50s, blacks from Mississippi moved in, shopping and working in Jewish-owned shops when they were still shut out of many stores downtown. Hustlers and entertainers followed them, and the sidewalks rang with the sound of three-card-monte men and blues musicians such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, infusing Chicago's electricity into their Delta guitars.
Asians, Mexicans and others eventually joined them, creating an ethnic mishmash united behind an elemental capitalism apparently as unconquerable as it is unruly. In a city of retailing giants such as Sears, Montgomery Ward and Marshall Field, Maxwell Street remained an incubator for those with little but their wits.
This is where Ron Popeil first excelled as a huckster, where he mastered the rat-a-tat pitch that became familiar to late-night television audiences who listened to commercials for his slicing, dicing Ronco products.
"This area's always been a place where you could come in with very little capital, work seven days a week and get a foothold," said Irving Federman, a lawyer whose father went from a vendor's stall to a retail store here after fleeing Europe in the 1940s.
A neighborhood planning group that studied the area last year agreed. "The area shares, even while buildings are physically depleted and lots are in terrible condition, a strong mercantile history that has a spiritual and cultural presence," the group wrote. "The market also allows for an important cultural transition for those new to Chicago who are used to the ways of the Old World haggling, because the rest of the world still haggles."
Indeed, for a few hours each Sunday morning it looks as if the whole world is haggling right here. Mexicans and Guatemalans hawk produce. Black vendors from the South Side offer used tools and bomber jackets. Koreans and Pakistanis sell sandals and kitchen knives. And nearly everybody stops in at Nate's Delicatessen.
"Nate's has the best kosher food in town," says Jackson, who, like Nate Duncan, the owner, is black. "That's all I eat, is kosher food. It's better for your body."
Nate's is a relic, a tiny downstairs deli founded when Maxwell Street was still Chicago's equivalent of New York's Lower East Side. Duncan began working there as a teenager in the '50s and took it over when the previous owner retired in 1973.
This morning a clutch of thick-coated regulars, whom Nate describes as big men in the jewelry trade, huddle over coffee in the corner. A poster on the wall advertises the semiannual Ju-Town Gospel Jubilee, a reunion for those who grew up in what they still call, casually and without malice, Jew Town.
Duncan himself holds court over a steaming corned-beef slicer. "Nem the gelt," he jokes with a vendor who has come in for a bite. "Get the money. Those were the first words I learned in Jewish. Nem the gelt."
But his good humor freezes on the subject of Maxwell Street's future. "This was the melting pot," he says. "Everybody's roots are here. They can't replace this." He calls the university's relocation plan "a phony. They got 21 blocks here now; they want to put us in four. You figure it out."
University officials say the market not only can survive a move, but also will become cleaner and more active under their management. "We want to maintain the market, either a teeming market or a tamed market, whatever it takes," Church said. "The only requirement is going to be that it's cleaned up."
"It's not going to be the same," Jackson said. "It's going to kill the market." He plans to quit rather than move. "I'll sell out my goods and go," he said with a shrug. "I've done what I wanted to do; I sent my two sons to college."
But Kelter, shivering by his stack of old magazines, is more optimistic, and maybe more in tune with the market's secret of long life. "I don't give a damn," he says in a Polish-Yiddish accent. "I take things to a different street. I make my own Maxwell Street."