As Sumlin knows, what happened to Maxwell Street is an all too familiar Chicago story, it found itself in the way of a combine of greedy developers and corrupt politicians. In the end, all that was preserved was a tiny sliver, a few whole buildings from the 1920s, and a few 19th century façades stapled onto the front of a new parking garage.

Maxwell Street was always the name of a neighborhood, not just a street. It was one of Chicago's first neighborhoods, erected to house railroad workers. Never a fancy place, Maxwell Street is sometimes called Chicago's Ellis Island because it was the first stop for so many immigrants. The name also became synonymous with the neighborhood's most prominent institution, the Maxwell Street Market. The Market became world famous in the late 19th and early 20th century, when the neighborhood was inhabited predominantly by Eastern European Jews, for whom the freewheeling open air bazaar was a reminder of life in the rural villages they left behind. Other American cities had open air markets but the Maxwell Street Market was the biggest, practically a city itself.

In its heyday, the market operated every day except the Jewish Sabbath. It sold food, clothing, shoes, linens, cooking utensils, tools, fixtures--basically, anything and everything. All prices were negotiable. It was shopping, dining, socializing and entertainment all rolled into one. For merchants, it was the purest form of entrepreneurship. Day by day, they turned their pennies into nickels, nickels into dimes, and so on. The merchants were independent and the market was self-managed through a system of informal but commonly understood rules and customs. City officialdom didn't have much to do with it and hated it as a result. Chicago politicians had been threatening to "clean up Maxwell Street" for 100 years before they finally did.

Although the push cart street market made Maxwell Street famous, there also were permanent shops in most of the buildings, larger stores on Jefferson and Halsted Streets, and wholesalers on 12th Street. There were theaters, synagogues, social clubs, public baths and other institutions.

European immigration was halted by World War I and never really resumed at its former rate. As they bettered their economic condition, the Jews of Maxwell Street moved out and were replaced by African-Americans from the Deep South, mostly Mississippi and Arkansas. The Market, by then a phenomenon that transcended the neighborhood, evolved into primarily a weekend affair that drew merchants and customers by the thousands from all of the city's neighborhoods, and all of its different racial and ethnic groups. Everybody came to Maxwell Street.

The newly-arrived African-Americans who were by then the neighborhood's primary residents (along with a small but growing Mexican-American contingent) adopted the market as their own and added their own touches to it. In the small communities of the Mississippi Delta, much of life was lived outdoors. Wherever a few people gathered there usually was music. Musicians were able to earn a little money at these gatherings through voluntary payments (i.e., tips) from the audience, a venerable tradition known as "busking." Busking musicians, singly or in groups, quickly became a fixture at the Maxwell Street Market.

This practice, common wherever there are large groups of people, gained particular significance in Chicago because it had a direct and profound effect on the development of popular music, first here and ultimately throughout the world.

Because everybody came to Maxwell Street, the newly-arrived could hear what established city musicians were playing, and the locals could sample authentic sounds from the Delta, fresh off the train. The Great Migration, as historians now call it, continued for several decades and so did the musical exchange on Maxwell Street, which led to a style of music known as Chicago Blues. In the 1950s and 60s, white kids from the city and suburbs heard this new sound when they visited the Market with their parents, who often were themselves only a generation or two removed from living there. Scouts from Chicago record companies scoured the market for talent and records made by Maxwell Street musicians transformed the sound of popular music, first in England, then here, then everywhere.

I came to Chicago in 1987, not on the Illinois Central but on Interstate 65 from Louisville, Kentucky. I knew about Maxwell Street for its part in rock and roll lore, admittedly more from Michael Bloomfield than Muddy Waters. During that year and the next I worked on a program called "Music As a Metaphor" for the National Afro-American Museum near Dayton, Ohio, which added to my blues knowledge. In 1995, because of that earlier experience, I was commissioned to write a book about Blues, which became Blues Legends.

It was because of that book and some publicity surrounding it that I received a call one day from Steve Balkin, a professor of Economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago. That is how I learned the University of Illinois was threatening to demolish the Maxwell Street neighborhood. Steve was spearheading a group that was trying to save it. He was realistic about their chances. "How would you like to get involved in a losing cause?" he asked me on the phone that day. Implausibly, I said okay.

Attending a few meetings of Steve's group, I found it to be diverse, passionate and thoroughly disorganized. Though he is an avowed Marxist, Steve has no talent for central planning. The meetings were chaotic. Soon I was running them and when it became desirable to formalize and legally incorporate the group (known as the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition [MSHPC]), I was chosen as its first president. Although I bore that title, I had no illusions about being the group's leader. Among people who had little use for formalities of any kind, I saw my role as providing a veneer of institutional respectability. We observed the legal formalities of a not-for-profit corporation under Illinois law and obtained a 501(c)(3) designation from the IRS, which allowed us to accept tax-deductible contributions. Our Treasurer opened a checking account and got us an address (a post office box). Beneath the veneer it was still a group of individuals, each doing their own thing, coming together from time to time to hold a meeting or stage a demonstration.

In 1994, before I got involved, Chicago's city council had moved the Maxwell Street Market from its traditional home to a site a few blocks east, along Canal Street. Though a fraction of its former size, the Market is still pretty cool and continues to operate every Sunday morning, 52 weeks a year.

With the Market relocated to clear the way for University expansion, most of our efforts during my tenure as president of the MSHPC were in trying to persuade the university and city to agree to preserve some portion of the historic neighborhood itself, just literally the buildings, since by then many of the businesses and most of the residents were gone. We offered the example of Beale Street in Memphis, an area with a similar history near that city's downtown that had been converted into a popular entertainment district.

We never got very far.

The destruction of Maxwell Street has always seemed tragic to me for several reasons.

• First, the area has tremendous historical significance as a "port of entry" for virtually every immigrant group to come to Chicago, especially Eastern European Jews, African-Americans from the Mississippi Delta, and Mexican-Americans.



• Second, the area has tremendous significance to the development of popular music. The Chicago Blues, born on Maxwell Street, revolutionized the sound of popular music throughout the world.



• Third, Maxwell Street represented the accomplishments and contributions of people too often ignored by mainstream American history and historic preservation: the poor, non-white and non-Christian. Honoring Maxwell Street would have been a way to correct some of that inequity.



• Fourth, although architecture was never the most important reason to save the neighborhood, there was significant vernacular architecture there, including wooden cottages that survived the Great Fire of 1871, excellent examples of late 19th century commercial buildings and tenement housing, and early buildings by several Jewish architects who later became prominent, all in a fairly compact area that had been largely intact until demolition began in the early 1990s.



• Fifth, this combination of immigrant and "outsider" history, a cultural legacy of worldwide significance, and a large, representative collection of 19th century vernacular architecture, seemed like an attractive package for an economically viable historic district.



• Sixth, the process that brought Maxwell Street down was power politics at its most despicable: corrupt, greedy, arrogant, crude, dishonest and undemocratic.



• Seventh, the entity at the center of the process was a university, the University of Illinois, acting for a combine of powerful, politically-connected developers, aided and abetted by the City of Chicago and its mayor, Richard M. Daley, who hated Maxwell Street because it never fit his vision of a sanitized and orderly urban utopia.