|
Past-President (1997-2004) |
||
| Maxwell
Street's story is almost as old as Chicago's. The end is still unwritten.
Powerful forces are trying to obliterate Chicago's historic Maxwell Street
neighborhood, while tenacious forces are struggling to keep it alive. Here
is a quick look at the last 150 years or so.
Chicago was incorporated in 1837. Maxwell Street, named for Dr. Philip Maxwell, an early settler, first appears on a map in 1847. It was a wooden plank road that ran from the south branch of the Chicago River west to Blue Island Street. |
||
| The
Maxwell Street neighborhood is part of the Near West Side. Hull House,
the largest and most famous of the 19th century settlement houses, began
here. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 started only a few blocks away but
burned north and east, sparing Maxwell Street and the rest of the Near
West Side.
Almost from the beginning, the Maxwell Street neighborhood was an immigrant gateway, the first stop for most new arrivals. The analogy to Ellis Island is only partially apt; Ellis Island was a processing center, Maxwell Street was a neighborhood, where new arrivals could find work, housing, clothing, food, family, and friends old and new. It was never a rich neighborhood but it was always hospitable. Everyone came to Maxwell Street. Before the Jews began to arrive from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the rest of eastern Europe in the 1880s, the Greeks, Bohemians and Russians called Maxwell Street home. Before that it was the Germans, Italians and Irish. There is a story that new Irish immigrants were met at the train station by relatives and the men were taken immediately to the Maxwell Street police station. There each was given a uniform and a gun, and within hours after their arrival they were on the street working as Chicago policemen. Other nationalities had their own support systems. For eastern European Jews, it was the Maxwell Street Market (although the name didn't become official until 1912). The market probably happened on Maxwell because it was a fairly wide street that didn't really go anywhere. The market started with push carts, then |
||
