By Ben Joravsky
“This is pretty powerful, not at all what you would expect to see,” says Steve Balkin, a Roosevelt University economics professor and key advocate in the recent unsuccessful effort to preserve the Maxwell Street open-air market from development by the encroaching University of Illinois at Chicago. “It’s a fair portrayal of the history of the west side.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Using a grant from the Joyce Foundation, Tracye Matthews, Susan Samek, Russell Lewis, Laura Kamedulski, and other CHS historians held several meetings during the last few years with west-side residents. “We developed a long list of contacts of people who lived in the neighborhoods and had important stories to tell,” says Kamedulski. “It was come one, come all. We wanted to hear what people had to say.”
By the 1920s, bustling working-class communities of African-Americans, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and Mexicans had taken root in the area. The exhibit doesn’t sugarcoat the early years–one placard explains that “poverty and overcrowded sweatshops were all too familiar to neighborhood residents and the housing decayed as it was subdivided to house more people.”
Much of the racial harmony was destroyed as blacks streamed in from the south, white families moved out, and the entrenched Democratic political organization became more distant and less responsive.
Those joints that didn’t fall apart were knocked over to make way for projects such as Presidential Towers, a federally subsidized upper-income residential complex whose advertising brochures (also exhibited) promised “a complete health club.”
“I was hung in effigy by some people who thought I should be hung in reality for taking the side of the university,” says D’Angelo, in a video on the struggle.
