Wrecking Ball Blues
With the remaining buildings from the beloved market area looming behind them like ghosts, speaker after speaker battered the University of Illinois at Chicago. The school was practicing “ethnic cleansing”; it was a “rogue elephant,” a “destroyer of history.” And the signs kept going up. “Save Chicago’s Ellis Island”; “Heritage Is America.” One speaker called the gathered “the feisty core that refused to go away.” Pilsen activists warned that the university’s plans to redevelop Maxwell Street were intricately tied in with the city’s plans to do the same to Pilsen. With one photographer or reporter present for every five activists, everyone was trying to get a point across.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
People stood in the middle of the street and passed out flyers or wandered around the intersection with signs, looking sort of lost. Chuck Cowdery, a writer and lawyer and the president of the effort to preserve Maxwell Street, spoke into the megaphone. “What you see before you,” he said, “what you can see to the length of that street and the length of this street, is all that’s left of something that was very important to thousands and thousands of people for 100 years, and for a lot of different reasons. It was where they could come and they could shop. It was where they could come and get food. It was where they could come and see their friends, meet people from home, get a beginning, get a start. And a lot of them left Maxwell Street. Quite honestly, a lot of them are a little bit embarrassed about the fact that they started on Maxwell Street. Maybe that’s why they’re not here today. But Maxwell Street got a lot of people started, and Maxwell Street will be a loss.
“So this is it! You’re looking at it! You may be one of the last people to see it! Maxwell Street! People will be talking about it, people will remember it, people will continue to record songs about it, but you may be the last people to stand on it! You may be the last people to walk down it! Now would it be so impossible to save this? Would it be so impossible to keep this and build it up, make it something good, something special that people could come and enjoy? Would that be so difficult? Would that be so wrong?”
Joe Stefanovic recalls a meeting that the coalition had last year with UIC chancellor David Broski. Balkin brought along someone who had led the effort to preserve Memphis’s historic Beale Street district. Stefanovic brought along the Polish sausages. Lavicka brought his temper. He stood up and said, “You’re not gonna like what I have to say, David,” and then proceeded to call the chancellor an “ethnic cleanser.”
More than two months ago, Balkin, Lavicka, and a coalition member named Janelle Walker met with Carl Byrd and Shannon DeWith from the city’s Department of Planning. They showed the city’s people a video about Beale Street and presented Lavicka’s plan. The Planning Department people doubted that the coalition’s proposal was affordable, but were otherwise receptive and friendly, Balkin says.
Balkin was furious. “We expected a good-faith negotiation, and they said they don’t want to do anything to accommodate us. Everything we suggested they rejected….They mostly live in the suburbs, so they don’t see any value to Maxwell Street or its history. There’s nothing there for them to preserve….We’re just a volunteer citizens’ group. We’re not asking for control of the buildings. We just want the buildings to be saved and reused. We have no financial interest in them. Admittedly, some of the buildings on Maxwell Street aren’t by important architects, but their value is that we’re preserving the physical remnants of important culture, the built environment of the Jewish and black and Mexican people as well as the other people who came here. Historic preservation ought not to be just saving the relics of rich white men. It’s about preserving working-class history as well.”
