Coalition
Nominates Maxwell Street
As National Register Historic District.
Conflicts of Interest in Springfield
Prompt Direct Appeal to Washington.
Chicago, Saturday, March 25, 2000
The Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition has nominated the Maxwell Street neighborhood to be an official historic district in the National Register of Historic Places. The extensive nomination application was prepared by Lori Grove and other Coalition members. It consists of hundreds of pages of detailed documentation about buildings and other infrastructure in the proposed district, and about the area’s historical significance, as specified by National Register guidelines.
“Maxwell Street has a 150 year history as the Midwest’s most important immigrant gateway and as the birthplace of Chicago Blues,” says Coalition President Chuck Cowdery. “Forty-four buildings from the historic era remain in the proposed district. The University of Illinois at Chicago wants to demolish most of them for private development and campus expansion. Although National Register status in itself will not prevent their demolition, it will confirm the historic significance of the area, which the university and city have repeatedly tried to deny.”
Anyone may nominate a building, district or other historic landmark to the National Register of Historic Places, a division of the National Park Service. The normal procedure is to prepare the application according to National Register guidelines and submit it to the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) of the state in which the historic property is located. In Illinois, the application first must be reviewed by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA), which issues a staff opinion about its merits. The application and staff opinion are then submitted to the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council, a panel of 15 architects, archeologists, historians and other preservation professionals who make a recommendation to the SHPO. The SHPO then issues an opinion, which is forwarded to the Keeper of the National Register in Washington along with the nomination application. That is where the final decision is made.
Although the Coalition is submitting its application through these normal channels, as required, it is also appealing directly to Washington due to serious doubts about whether the nomination can receive a truly unbiased review at the state level. On March 23, a copy of the nomination application along with a letter explaining the reasons for the Coalition’s direct appeal was sent to Carol Shull, whose official title is “Keeper of the National Register.”
One reason cited for the direct appeal is potential conflicts of interest involving three highly placed individuals in the state’s historic preservation apparatus. One is the spouse of a University of Illinois trustee and two others are spouses of principals in companies hired by UIC to redevelop the Maxwell Street neighborhood. The spouses of the developers are members of the IHPA’s Board of Trustees, a six-member body. One of them is its chairperson. The spouse of the University of Illinois trustee is the governor’s policy director.
The effort to have the Maxwell Street area declared a historic district already has a checkered history, the details of which give the Coalition additional reason to doubt the fairness of the state process. In 1994, after the Maxwell Street Market was moved and all of the historic buildings between Morgan Street and Halsted Street, except the old police station, were demolished, a National Register nomination application was prepared and submitted by Grove and Elliot Zashin as individuals (before the Coalition was founded). That application focused on the Jewish immigrant history of the area and did not mention the blues history, because Grove and Zashin were not aware of it at the time. Still, the 1994 nomination received a 9-0 favorable vote from the Advisory Council.
What happened next was that William Wheeler, the SHPO, sat on the nomination for five months while the university demolished as many buildings as it could. Then he chose to disregard the Advisory Council opinion, conceding that he generally does not do this, and sent to Washington his recommendation against approval. Washington followed Wheeler’s lead and rejected the application due to the “irretrievable loss of historic integrity” in the area. The university had destroyed enough buildings while the application languished on Wheeler’s desk to get its way. Wheeler is still the SHPO.
One significant difference between the 1994 application and the current one is that, with the inclusion of blues history, the district’s period of historic significance is pushed up to 1950, the cut-off year for National Register consideration. (Places submitted to the Register must be at least 50 years old.) Forty-four buildings in the proposed district are at least 50 years old and continue to appear as they did during the historical period (1847-1950).
Despite the obvious political manipulation of the process in 1994, both UIC and the City of Chicago have repeatedly used the rejection of that nomination to deny the area’s historic significance and justify demolition of the remaining buildings. One example of this is in the current form letter sent by Jackie Taylor, Mayor Daley’s manager for the UIC project, to anyone who writes to complain about UIC’s plan. It says, “as you are aware, the buildings in this area were denied landmark status by the national and state Historic Preservation Councils.” University officials are fond of using similar phrases in letters and press statements.
As if to confirm the Coalition’s worst fears about Springfield’s lack of objectivity, on March 1 the IHPA staff issued its opinion of the new application. Despite acknowledging that “new information…has been provided regarding the role of Maxwell Street in the development and performance of electrified blues in Chicago,” the IHPA staff still recommends against National Register status because “the district does not retain sufficient integrity to convey its historical significance.” This is the same reason given in 1994. The Coalition has requested clarification as to how this determination was reached and has revised the nomination application to include more detail about the integrity of the buildings in the proposed district and how they convey its historic significance. A copy of the revised application was sent to Shull in Washington and will be reviewed by the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council in June.
The Coalition’s letter in answer to the IHPA staff opinion cited several facts to refute the lack-of-integrity claim. Under National Register guidelines, as few as three buildings can constitute a historic district. Forty-four buildings within the proposed Maxwell Street Historic District were built before 1950 and continue to convey their historic form, including at least one of every historically-significant type. Most of them are in a concentrated group covering the south side of Maxwell east of Halsted, the east side of Halsted south of Maxwell, and both sides of Halsted between Maxwell and Roosevelt. This group of buildings is very able to convey the district’s historic significance from 1870 to 1950, as a marketplace serving a culturally-diverse clientele, and as an area where the blues was performed on streets and sidewalks in front of a curtain wall of commercial properties.
The letter to IHPA concludes by noting that any “integrity” the area has lost is the fault of the city and UIC. It says, “The loss of building fabric throughout the proposed district is tragic, but most of that loss can be attributed to the efforts of the entities that have long wanted to develop the area without the inconvenience of historic preservation. Should we reward them for their past destruction by now deeming the area unsalvageable?”
All but 8 of the 44 historic buildings in the proposed district are slated for demolition in the UIC plan approved by the city. UIC intends to break ground on its project this spring and demolition could begin at any time, another reason for the Coalition’s direct appeal to Washington. The Coalition is also urging Chicago-area members of Congress to write Shull in support of the new nomination. Representative Danny Davis, whose congressional district includes the proposed historic district, has already sent a letter of support.
The geographic boundaries of the proposed Maxwell Street Historic District are from Roosevelt Road south to Liberty and 14th Streets, and from Union west to Halsted and Newberry Streets. The ten remaining buildings on Maxwell, east of Halsted, include a Civil War-era wood frame cottage (a rare survivor of the 1871 Chicago Fire), a fine example of an 1880s tenement, and several classic 19th century storefronts. Halsted Street between Maxwell and Roosevelt is a virtually intact collection of 19th and early 20th century commercial buildings. Most of the Halsted buildings are in good condition and contain operating businesses, which still serve the same low income, largely African-American clientele that patronized them during the later part of the historic period. Live electric blues still is played on Maxwell Street on many weekends during warmer months of the year.
(Click here to read the Coalition's National
Register nomination application.)
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