MAXWELL STREET

If you look at a map of Chicago from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century the neighborhood was labeled "The Ghetto." No, not the ghetto of late Elvis fame. At the turn of the century there was no Black ghetto in Chicago, only the Jewish ghetto. By the time I lived there, starting in 1983, everyone just called it Jew Town. Everyone, that is, on the South side. As soon as you crossed Madison Avenue heading north, people tended to assume that there was a slur implied by the local moniker. But back in the ghetto even the last remnants of the once-dominant Jewish presence just called it Jew Town. They didn't live there anymore. They lived in the affluent suburbs on the North Shore. They maintained family businesses there, not because that's how they made their living, but because they loved the old sod. There was still a lot to love.

There was a blind man selling pencils on the corner by Jim's Original Maxwell Street Polish Sausage stand. Small crowds clustered around a sharp dressed man with a small table as he engaged some sucker in a game of Three Card. There were guys selling fake gold chains who used their disposable lighters to do a quick street assay. I guess that did prove that they weren't plastic! A neighbor of mine had collected them for years just to see how long it would take for them to turn green. She had dozens, each with a little tag attached noting the date of purchase. And there was Cookie, the toothless prostitute, famous for...oh, use your imagination. The air was thick with the alluring aroma of grilled onions.

The guy selling the Sun Times on the corner just below my window had full blown Tourette's Syndrome. I would wake up in the morning to the sound of his bellowing. "You motherf&@#ing coc$&+@#%ker....." And then a car would pull over and roll down the window. He'd trot over and sell them a Times before returning to his rant. Everyone had a handle. There was Hatman, always shambling up and down the street with his hands in his pockets wearing a shabby fedora, and Sissyboy, the crackhead/bicycle thief, and on and on.

And there was music. Lord was there ever music. Music blared from a cheap horn in front of every fourth or fifth store. If you stood in the right place you could hear five or six different things going at once. It was like a Charles Ives symphony, only set in the ghetto rather than a New England town square. Blues, soul, jazz. Even gospel. There was a church a couple of blocks away that just ROCKED for hours on Sunday. Occasionally there would be a group of four or five very proper church ladies standing out on Halsted St. wearing flower print rayon dresses and extravagant hats, preaching and singing hymns into bullhorns, each in her own key. I was in heaven.

How Much You Want For That?

Sunday was the open air market. It was a tradition going back to the 19th century. Part old world market, part third world market, part farmer's market, part flea market, utterly unique. It started long before the sun came up and sprawled for blocks and blocks west of Halsted, from just south of the church on Roosevelt Road to the railroad viaduct just south of 15th street. East of Halsted it was smaller. It only went for a block before you hit the expressway. As big as the market was, it was tiny compared to how big it had been before the expressway and the UIC campus were built.

Tens of thousands of people converged on that shopping vortex every Sunday for much of the year and thousands came even in the dead of winter. You could buy or see just about anything, legal and otherwise, at the market. It was a wild mix of languages and cultures. Young, old, rich, poor, brown, white, black, Mexican, Chinese, Arab, Polish, Nigerian, Russian, Korean; all rubbing elbows, shopping, eating, and reveling in the market.

It was always quite a scene at Nate's Deli on Sunday. Nate's may have been the only Black-owned kosher deli anywhere. Nate had started working at the deli as a teenager when it was still a Jewish neighborhood. Probably the only job he ever had. As the neighborhood became more and more Black and as it came time for the couple that ran the deli to retire -- since their kids had followed the usual second-generation Jewish immigrant pattern by becoming professionals -- they sold it to Nate.

Even though he had worked there for years and knew every aspect of the business, there was some concern that since Nate was Black and since the neighborhood was changing, the deli would change too. Not a chance! Nate took great pride in maintaining the exacting standards the customers had come to expect, right down to the very end, when the bulldozers were at the gates. It was quite a place. Nate was quite a man.

One Sunday I was out at the market looking for a winter hat. I came upon a table full of fur hats made and sold by a recently immigrated Russian, also named Nate. As I looked over a beautiful Racoon hat, Nate explained in his broken English that it was a woman's hat. "Not if you put the tail on it! Do you still have the tail?" He said that he did and agreed to sew it on for me. We exchanged phone numbers. I knew someone else who might want one. The next week I walked out of the market with the most beautiful Davey Crockett hat I had ever seen. It had cost me $30!

The very next day as I walked down Halsted wearing my prize, a red pimpmobile slowed down. As the tinted windows lowered a voice inside called out, "I'll give you $200 for that hat." Deal! I called Nate and had him make me five. Within a couple days of picking them up I called again to have him make me a dozen. That winter I made a good living all but selling the hats off my head. I even sold one to Bishop Magic Juan, long before he became the spiritual advisor to Hip Hop stars and NBA thugs. And business was brisk. I was the only supplier in town and sold five or six dozen a month. The following year I had competition. All the stores where players bought their fur coats had them. I had to lower my prices, but mine were still the best hats and I could sell them as fast as Nate could make them.

The year after that came the cheap knockoffs made of fake fur and dyed squirrel tails. Every Black teenager, it seemed, was wearing one. And not just in Chicago! Detroit, Cleveland, St Louis, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, just about any place that had winter and Black folks. I had never started a fashion craze before, and I haven't started one since. I guess if you're only going to start one, that was a good one to start. Last year I was waiting for a bus next to a young woman decked out in full resale-shop-boho who was wearing one of the squirrel tail cheapos. Hadn't seen one in many years. I asked where she'd gotten it. Unique thrift store. She had just found it and was thrilled. She was too young to remember when I was a fashion mogul. I'll admit to getting a little dewy eyed over seeing it.

Be It Ever So Funky...

There wasn't much housing left in the neighborhood but the few lofts were amazing. 5,000 square feet and a freight elevator for $125 a month. And a party roof with a spectacular view of the loop! My neighbor Allan, who later joined a UFO cult and married the high priestess whose ex-husband subsequently murdered and buried him in the crawl space under the house, had a 16mm theatre in his loft, complete with projection booth, big screen, comfortable chairs and lots of cool movies. The out-take/blooper reel from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was priceless. Who needed a job? You could always make a little cash on the street. And it didn't really matter if you didn't pay your rent.

When I moved into my first place in the neighborhood, the landlord, Irv, was very adamant that he wanted the rent on time. And I did pay on time for a couple months. Gradually I got later and later and finally just stopped. One day Irv knocked on the door. He was apoplectic. "You haven't paid your rent in six months!" His face was purple and he was shaking violently. I gave him $125 and promised to pay on time. There was no discussion of back rent. The next month I paid my rent on time and started the cycle over again.

And it wasn't just Irv. Years later when I was living in a different place, after the first loft slid into the street (I'll get to that in a bit), I ran into one of my landlords, Lenny, on 13th Street. He was pissed. He was on his way over to the Max Works, the hippie commune over on Maxwell. "Those sons of bitches haven't paid their rent in almost a year! Do they think I'm their father? I've just about had it! I'm about ready to throw them all out and put a padlock on the door!" The fact that I hadn't paid my rent in three or four months never even came up. And I'll bet the hippies never paid any back rent either.

Lenny and his brothers Donny and Howard were impressive guys. They let out spaces to deadbeats like me because they owned a lot of property,some of which was profitable. They were too busy to pay much attention to the spaces they were just sitting on, the ones they weren't going to do the upkeep on, but they did like having a variety of people around. I would read about them in the financial sections of the newspapers trying to take over some company or another. They ran their business empire out of Howard's Style Shop, a clothing store their dad had started probably sixty years earlier. Everybody who worked there was a major character. They had pullers on the street in front of the store who would size up everybody walking by and say something, anything, trying to get them into the store. Pretend you're walking by Howard's wearing glasses. "We got the smart boy look. Best deals in town." (For those of you who don't know, the young Wynton Marsalis would make a good poster child for the smart boy look.) It was all part of the three brothers' business schtick. They'd cut big deals in that dingy little office over the store, with MBAs from the suburbs who couldn't have imagined the existence of anyplace like Maxwell Street.

I was living in the Garden of Eden. Hungry? Eat the fruit from the tree. Perfect place for a bohemian musician like me. Of course if something broke you didn't call the landlord. I had to fix everything myself, including the ancient freight elevator, but I'm pretty resourceful so it worked out rather well. There was one thing I couldn't fix, though.

Gabriel, Blow Your Horn!

It was Sunday, the first of February, 1987, 4:00 AM. I was sleeping peacefully when I was roused by a cracking noise. I assumed somebody was trying to break in and fumbled in the dark for the baseball bat I kept in the bedroom for just such a situation. Suddenly the whole facade started to slide into Halsted, pulling a big chunk of the building with it. As the floors above came crashing down I was swimming upstream, pushing off from things that were heavier than me as they went down, finally grabbing a piece of conduit as the wall it had been fastened to fell away. Tarzan would have been proud! I pulled myself up to the top of the conduit and grabbed a pipe.  I pushed off of a bit of wall that was still there and vaulted up onto the remaining floor as the pipe too went down. And then it stopped. The bed I had been sleeping on no more than ten seconds earlier was buried under tons of rubble. And there I was standing upright, peering into the chasm with only minor scrapes and bruises. The front third of the building was gone, including my bedroom and the huge walk-in closet where I kept all my clothes and most of my stuff. (More on the contents of that closet later.) Good morning!

Needless to say, I didn't have a plan for this particular event. What does one do? Who do you call? I was in shock. Or was it a state of grace? And it was February and I had no clothes. I found a pair of blue snakeskin pointy toed shoes with cuban heels and a pair of dirty blue work pants. Hey, I matched! I was relieved to find that I had thrown my coat over a chair in the kitchen, pulled on my coonskin cap and climbed down the fire escape to face the world. I walked down to the sub dive on the corner and the guy who worked nights was already outside. Almost immediately I had a cup of hot coffee in my hand and was being interviewed over their phone. I was live on the radio. Then the TV crews showed up. And the city workers. It was surreal! There I was re-enacting my dramatic ordeal for the cameras. Happy to be alive, I still didn't have a plan.

It was a slow news day.  I was the local news, on all the major media outlets. My friend Boshi heard me being interviewed on his alarm clock radio and got on the phone. People just started showing up to help. People I barely knew, people I hadn't seen in years, people I haven't seen since. They brought clothes and food and cash and spent the whole day helping me get my things, such as they were, squared away. Local restaurants sent food to feed everybody. It was such an overwhelming outpouring of generosity, concern, and love.  I went from being completely alone and bereft of almost everything I once owned to being the guy with a million friends. And I was famous.  I think it was the most beautiful day of my life.

Vanity of Vanities! All is Vanity!

But, did I ever lose a lot! Let me tell you about some of the cool stuff that was in that huge closet that went down with the front third of the building. I must have had close to a hundred pairs of shoes. At least a dozen suits. Racks of vintage shirts and pants in an astounding array of colors and styles. Long sleeves, short sleeves, prints, weaves, solids. Western wear? You bet! There was even an outrageous tuxedo from the forties that fit perfectly. I had options for every conceivable occasion. Was I into shopping? No, not at all. I was never going to buy anything other than socks and underwear for the rest of my life, and it had all been free. You see, I had found the vintage clothing motherlode.

Maxwell Street had once been a garment district, among other things. My loft had been a sweat shop. When I moved in there were still fixtures hanging from the ceiling above where the sewing machines had been. When I first explored the unlocked fourth and top floor I thought it was a crawl space with a bunch of old clothes laying around and spilling down the stairs. In truth it had twelve foot ceilings and an eight foot tall pile of old clothes and shoes over the entire 5,000 square feet. Hundreds of thousands of articles of clothing from the thirties through the sixties. Many tens of thousands of shoes. Much of it had dry rot, or was moth eaten, or damaged in some fashion. Many of the shoes were impossible to match up with a partner. But much of it was perfect or easily repaired. And many of the shoes were tied to their mates by the laces.

I called in my friends Mickey and Brenda who had a little resale shop. Veteran rag pickers, they spent almost a month sifting through it all. Must've hauled out five or six hundred garbage bags full of every imaginable type of garment. And everything they found that looked like it might fit me went into a pile for my inspection. There was so much that I had to be very selective. And I still needed to build a 400 square foot closet with many hanger poles just to store it all. Truly an embarrassment of riches! And after it was cleared of all that was salvageable, that fourth floor made the best haunted house for Halloween parties. The runaway teenagers who stayed at the Max Works had a blast being zombies and goblins and with a little careful lighting it really looked spooky. And there were real pigeon and rat skeletons! And the building was actually haunted, but that's another story. (See "Ghost Story")

And it all came crashing down on that February morning. End of an era. Along with the clothes I lost some musical instruments and gear, a couple of steamer trunks full of extraordinary NOS fabric (Oh! The cowboy suits I would have had made!) and all sorts of other cool stuff that one only accumulates by virtue of living in the middle of a giant flea market. A city bulldozer pushed all the debris into big piles and then loaded the piles into dumpsters. But for four years I had been quite the clotheshorse. I even wore something stylish when I went to the grocery store or did my laundry. Now I can't be bothered, except when I'm performing. There's just no way I can recapture the sartorial glory of those days. So I don't even try.

All God's Children

One day some friends were over at my place. It was late and the buses didn't run very regularly at night so I agreed to drive them to the subway station. But when we got to my car there was somebody sleeping on the front bench seat. I startled him when I opened the door. He pressed his large frame against the passenger side door and cowered there whimpering. Terrified. He must have been around twenty five years old, about 6' 2". His hair was wild and matted with all sorts of crazy stuff sticking out of it. The eyes that stared out of his dark chocolate brown face were large and childlike. I had been reading in the papers about the "dumping" of the mentally ill on the streets as institutional budgets evaporated. Suddenly "dumping" had a face. And a name. I spoke to him calmly for a few minutes and he settled down. My friends climbed into the back seat and I sat down next to him and drove to the subway. When David and I returned to my place I got out of the car and he laid back down.

The next morning when I went to my car to run some errands he was still there. He smiled broadly as I greeted him and we went for a ride. He stayed in the car as I ran into the grocery store and the dry cleaner. It was a bit odd, but I liked having him there. And, I reckoned, his presence just might keep my battery from being stolen which was one of the banes of my existence at the time. I always went and got it back from the fence guys at stepvan city, who, after the second time, always put it aside for me when it came in. But it was still a huge pain in the ass, especially when the thieves cut the cables.

The biggest problem with David was the body odor. I was perfectly willing to let him stay in my car, but I drew the line well before doing his laundry and letting him come in to shower. So I festooned the interior of the car with air fresheners and used pimp oil liberally. Actually learned to like raspberry and cherry. I talked to the Palestinian guys who ran the sub dive on the corner. They were generous, gentle souls who agreed to feed him in exchange for his sweeping out the place and taking out the garbage. Since that worked out well I negotiated a similar arrangement for him at another restaurant down the street, a place locally famous as the location for the Aretha Franklin scene in the Blues Brothers movie. He varied his diet by eating out of dumpsters.

David was less trouble than any pet I've ever had. Other than making sure he had gloves, hat, and coat for the winter and bringing him some leftovers on Thanksgiving and Christmas, I just let him stay in my car. He didn't bark. Never had to take him to the vet for shots. And, although he appreciated the things I did for him, he didn't follow me around kissing my butt endlessly, as dogs so often do. Despite the obvious inequality of our arrangement, at a bedrock, human level we liked each other. David was fun. His conversation was wacky! Non-sequitur followed non-sequitur. He spoke a very personal argot. 15th Street was $15. He thought California Avenue was the state. He thought Lake Michigan was the Atlantic Ocean.

I once made the mistake of picking up a date with David in the back seat. Totally freaked the poor girl out. He had been asleep when she got in. She hadn't noticed him and we just started conversating. After we'd been driving a while David woke up. She simply couldn't understand why I had a big, smelly, crazy-talking black man in the back seat of my car. "It's David. He lives here!" I protested as she got out to hail a cab. "And it's cold and windy outside." Never spoke to me again. After that I would occasionally ask him to get out, but generally he rode shotgun with me whenever and wherever I drove.

Once I came home to find him being handcuffed. I asked David what had happened. "Do you know him?" one of the officers asked. "That's David!" I replied. "What's his last name?" I didn't know. "Where does he live?" "He lives in my car." I answered, gesturing at it. The looks on the officers' faces as they unlocked the cuffs were just priceless. He had been sitting behind the wheel pretending that he was driving. Oh, to have been a fly on the rear view mirror when they questioned him. What he must have said! He just stood there quietly, smiling sheepishly as they walked away, but as soon as they were gone he fell down on the ground laughing until he cried.

Then one day, after he'd been my ward for a couple years, David left all the windows open during an ice storm. The entire car was a solid block. And it had been such a great ride. Blue 1967 Dodge Dart, three on the tree, slant six. You couldn't kill that engine with a howitzer. I'd paid $100 for it and I'd had it for several years. The odometer only went to 99,999 but it must have turned over three or four times. And I had a parts car up on cement blocks in the prairie behind my building. There wasn't much on that car you couldn't fix with a couple screw drivers and a socket set. It's name was Barbecue Bob. My heart broke as I chipped away enough ice to pull off the plates and walked away. I never saw David again.

Watch Your Step!Watch Your Step!

The neighborhood looked a lot rougher than it actually was. Every day I would see people who had missed the entrance to the expressway after dark lock their cars nervously as they passed. They really didn't need to. They only made themselves potential targets by displaying fear. I never ran into a situation I couldn't handle. And I had female neighbors who lived alone. They felt just as safe as I did. Everybody knew everybody else. If you left your car's lights on somebody would yell up to let you know. It was like a small town in the shadow of downtown. Every once in a long while somebody from somewhere else who assumed that I didn't belong there because of my white skin would try to mess with me. Nothing I couldn't have finessed all by myself, but I never had to. Inevitably one of the guys selling gold chains, or tube socks, or XXX video tapes would walk over and ask me what was up. Just being a good neighbor. The thug understood that he was the one who was out of place.

One day a musician friend who was from a small town in southern Indiana came over to hang out and play music. He was pretty freaked out by the look of the area so I waited with him at the bus stop on his way home. While we were standing on the corner, some guy ran across the street towards us shouting incoherently and waving a pistol. "How much you want for the gun?" I piped as he got close. He mumbled something unintelligible. "Let's see it." He handed me the 9mm Beretta for inspection. It was loaded and chambered. I put the safety on and handed it back to him. "Can you get me a revolver? Short barrel 38?" I asked. "I need something more reliable." He mumbled again and trotted off. I have no idea what that was all about. I didn't need or want a gun, but it seemed like the thing to say. Everything was always for sale at Maxwell Street. "How much you want for that?" was a reliable ice breaker. My friend never came back.

City of Ghettos

It's conventional to call Chicago "the city of neighborhoods." It's a lot less true now than it was back then, but in the 80s and 90s I called it "the city of ghettos." It seemed everybody in Chicago wanted to live exclusively near people who were just like them. Bridgeport was full of city workers who grew up there, married their high school sweethearts, and bought the two-flats down the street from their moms' bungalows. Everyone in Hyde Park had a PhD or was working on one. There was Boys Town, the gay ghetto. Everyone in East Pilsen was an artist. Everyone in West Pilsen was Mexican. All the single suburban transplants seemed to live near all the singles bars. After they coupled they all bought houses in the same neighborhoods where everybody drove the same kinds of cars they did. As recently as five or six years ago every third or fourth person I'd talk to in Wicker Park was in an indie rock band, or their boyfriend or girlfriend was. All the lesbians were moving to Andersonville. I just loved the irony that Chicago's original ghetto was the great exception. It was wildly mixed. And everybody got along and respected each other. It was so tolerant. You could see street people smoking a joint while having a perfectly pleasant conversation with a beat cop, cuttin' up, doin' the dozens, and all on a first name basis. I could go on and on with one story after another but I won't.

It's long gone, of course, replaced by retail and food chains, and condominiums that nobody really wanted. Years later they still haven't sold them all or built all the units they had planned. When the University of Illinois exercised eminent domain, nobody believed they were really going to build the University of the 21st Century that they had models of. Where were they gonna get the money? The State? The Federal Government? Everybody knew they were lying so they could get it cheap and then turn around and sell it at a profit to politically connected developers who would build crap that would fall apart in 25 years so the children of those same developers could churn clout into more money. The first building to come down was the world's first prenatal care and gynecological facility for poor women, founded by Jane Addams. Since it was a genuinely historic building they had to tear it down fast before the preservationists could get organized.

Chicago has so little respect for culture. Can you imagine Florence razing the Palazzo Vecchio because it's so old, and besides, they could generate more tax revenue from the same footprint by building a mall? And because their buddies could get richer off the deal? But in Chicago having a couple chunks of cornice and some wrought iron hanging in the Art Institute is an acceptable substitute for a magnificent building.

It's so sad what they did to my beloved Maxwell Street. But I'd rather celebrate a magical life than bewail the tragic death. It was such a beautiful place, rich in history, culture, characters, music. It was the only place I've ever really felt at home. I treasure the fourteen years I was privileged to live there, play music there, and participate in the last stand of the best Chicago has ever had to offer. Ave atque Vale.

Again Comes The Rising Of The Sun

And I continue to play music at The New Maxwell Street Market on Sunday mornings. Twenty years! My favorite gig. Part singer, part puller for The Bossman's Bargain Pit. (See photos in Gallery) The market remains what it's always been, a welcoming place for recent immigrants, halfway between what they were used to back home, and the crazy strip-mall-cellphone world that will be second nature to their children. Right now that means mostly Mexicans. I'm learning Spanish songs as fast as I can.

Yeah, I know... It's a pale shadow of former splendor. But it's a whole lot better than nothing.