Fixes Needed for Chicago’s New Maxwell Street Market
(Draft – March 13, 2023)
by Steve Balkin, Professor Emeritus, Roosevelt University, Email: sbalkin@roosevelt.edu
I applaud the March 8, 2023 Chicago Tribune for writing about the success of Rubi’s Tacos, moving from the all-outdoors New Maxwell Street Market (NMSM) to a bricks and mortar restaurant in the Pilsen neighborhood. Their food is great and they attracted world class foodies to do cable TV segments about them and the Market. What is missing from your story is that they were pushed to a fixed location restaurant. They and other vendors have been pushed to move from the NMSM because of the consequences of the pandemic, bad weather, bad communication about upcoming weather, lack of Market promotion, and the lack of provision of indoor alternatives during periods of bad weather. For any face-to-face business to be successful it needs continuity to be at their location there during operating hours and it needs to know how to mitigate bad weather.
The old Maxwell Street Market began as an aftermath of the Chicago Fire in 1871 when the winds blew north and east from the barn where it was thought to have started. Those winds saved the Old Maxwell Street neighborhood that quickly became a place to provision the rest of the city with food and construction supplies. The residents were mainly German and Irish back then. With the pogroms following the assassination of Czar Alexander in 1881, poor Eastern European Jews started to move into that neighborhood (and to the Lower East Side in NYC), needing a cheap place to live, shop, and start a business.
Two other circumstances enriched the characteristics of the neighborhood: the Great Migration of African Americans from the Deep South to Chicago in the period right before World War 1 and just after it and the second wave of the Great Migration during World War 2 and two decades after that. Because the poorest Blacks moved there, the neighborhood was also called the Black Bottom. The other big circumstance was the migration to the Maxwell St. area of Mexicans displaced from the Mexican revolution starting in 1910. That led to a chain migration of relatives in the years afterwards, seeking jobs on the railroads and in steel mills and slaughterhouses.
The government of the City of Chicago was glad to recognize the Market as an official public street market in 1912 because it encouraged poor people to shop and stay out of the Loop. Blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and other lower income minorities were welcomed to work in Chicago but not to go into white neighborhoods.
Since then, that old Maxwell Street neighborhood (until 1994) remained a place for poor immigrants and minority people and became a generator of cultural riches: home to Benny Goodman and Little Walter, CBS founder Bill Paley and activist Saul Alinsky, the Stefanovich and Laserofsky familes (inventors of the Maxwell Street Polish) and Hal Fox (inventor of the Zoot Suit). Reasons for the Market’s success was that it had a good central location, was embedded in a residential neighborhood with 6 day a week fixed location shops, had tasty cheap food from stands and restaurants, was next door to the huge South Water Street wholesale produce market, and it had some of the best free Blues and Gospel entertainment on the globe. This was the invention of the retail strategy now called “shoppertainment”. The wealth caused by the acquisition of social capital grew enormously.
In 1994, as a gentrification policy, the Market was destroyed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the University of Illinois. A new Market was created six blocks away but with vendor fees increased 5000% and with only half the vendors, from 1200 to 600. Then the market was moved four times and each time the number of vendors and shoppers declined.
The Market is run by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). A couple of years ago, the Market was operating every Sunday during the year. Then it was closed for January and February. Now it is closed during Christmas and New Years in December, and January, February, and March. Reducing days of operation makes easier work for DCASE but less income for Market vendors. I have shopped at the mostly outdoor Swap-A-Rama Flea Market at 41st St. and Ashland on cold Sundays in December, January, and February when the New Maxwell Street Market is closed, and there are tons of shoppers there even when they have to pay an admission fee to get in.
Chicago in the past few years has lost population and tourists. Four Signature amenities for Chicago include its history, Blues, shopping, and food. The New Maxwell Street Market touches all four. Yet, most people in Chicago never heard of it and don’t know it exists. I contacted Choose Chicago the agency responsible for tourism promotion in Chicago and they replied it is not their concern. Whoever is the new Mayor, whether Johnson or Vallas, he needs to address the shortcomings of the way the New Maxwell Street Market is treated by the agencies who are supposed to run and promote it. Three issues confronting Chicago are violence, population loss, and the need for more economic opportunity in the South and West sides. The Market addresses all three. It promotes improved human relations within and across race and class, it’s an amenity that has attracted people to live here, and it is an entrepreneurial incubator for low income and working class people. It is important that the New Maxwell Street Market stay in its present location just six blocks from Union Station; and to improve it with added features like volunteer theatrical and circus performers, low rider displays, pony rides, a carousel, and a place to buy BarBQ ribs. In addition, there should be other Maxwell Street Markets especially in the South and West Sides. This is not rocket science but it is an institution that requires care, thoughtfulness, and respect for Chicago history.
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