blues musicians with guitars and harmonicas, just off the train from Mississippi, played on street corners throughout the district for whatever an appreciative listener chose to drop into their tin cups. Here, between the wars and thereafter, wave after wave of country blues musicians hit town, played the street, and kept infusing the established urban sound with fresh tastes of Delta blues. That is how the Chicago Blues began, on Maxwell Street.

Maxwell Street itself started to shrink in 1926, when the Chicago River was straightened and new railroad tracks on its west bank pushed the eastern end of Maxwell further west, but that didn't affect the market much. The 1957 construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway did, cutting the street in two and pushing the market west of Union Street. In 1965, the Circle Campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) was built on the Near West Side, displacing what had been Chicago's Little Italy. In 1967, UIC started to expand south of Roosevelt Road, into the Maxwell Street neighborhood. A few years later, a subsidized housing development called the Barbara Jean Wright Courts Apartments chopped off Maxwell's western end at Morgan Street.

What remained was five short blocks from Morgan to Halsted and one long one from Halsted east to Union. The corner of Maxwell and Halsted was the neighborhood's epicenter. The market, by then primarily a weekend affair, was on Maxwell and spilled over onto some of the side streets. The major stores were on Halsted, from Maxwell north to Roosevelt and south almost to the train tracks. Lots of people still lived in the area. Much had changed, but much of the old neighborhood still remained. Many of the Jewish merchants were still there, but now the newcomers owned some of the establishments. Nate Duncan, an African-American, went to work at Lyon's Deli