IT IS SUNDAY, LATE AFTERNOON, AT THE Maxwell Street Market, and she is methodically packing up what she hasn`t been able to sell all day-a collection of flotsam and jetsam from city attics, basements and garages, a stock of dusty trinkets and rusty clutter neatly arranged since early that morning on a plank of plywood. Trash being offered as treasure or, at least, a bargain.
”I`ll give you five bucks for everything you got left,” a man watching her says.
The woman looks up, utter disbelief on her face. ”Mister,” she says,”
I`m not going out of business. I`m just going home. I`ll be here again next week.”
An easy $5 for the leftovers is not what she wants. So nobody wanted used baby shoes this Sunday. So there`s next Sunday. Be surprised who`ll come walking along next market day and find just the old vacuum cleaner or extension cord they are looking for. The woman is not just trying to unload her stock; she wants to stay in business. As a regular vendor in the infamously grubby, smoky, dusty, inner-city Third World flea market that is the Maxwell Street Market, she knows she`d be back again and so would the customers.
But for how long? The Maxwell Street Market is under siege. Having lasted for almost 100 years, it may not be around-at least as it has been through those years-much longer.
The neighboring University of Illinois at Chicago is looking to expand its campus and would like to acquire the land where the market has been since the turn of the century. That was when poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe spilled out of their bursting Near West Side tenements and, in their exuberance for free enterprise and a job, set up shop in shacks, stands, carts and even sacks on their backs to sell from the street.
They sold anything. They sold everything. Old and new. Stolen or legit. Gold, leather, cart wheels and vegetables. Trash and rags. Watches and watch parts. Fresh apples and near-rotted potatoes. They hawked. They conned. They hustled. They bargained. They feigned heart attacks when the price offered was too low. They argued and pulled their beards. They closed deals and shook hands. And they made vibrant and colorful the streets they did business on, transforming the Maxwell-Halsted Street area southwest of the Loop into a classic Old World market.
They were survivors, those rough and tenacious immigrants, the whiskered men and women in babushkas who began it all-struggling for survival, staking out the evening dinner on what they sold during the day. Some got rich, and some stayed poor. But they all made a living, fed their families, earned some dignity and survived in America. What they began-a raucous, free-wheeling, you-get-what-you-pay-for, buyer-beware open-air bazaar-remains today.
It is not pretty. It is not clean. It is not organized. But it is fun and not like any other place in America. There is no gourmet ice-cream stand here nor anyone selling French chocolates. No pink-and-green country quilts nor dried-weed wreaths. Rather, used wheelchairs, rusty chain saws, a bag of old baseball bats, World War II binoculars, half-filled cans of paint and the sweet odor, from food stands, of onions being fried in ripe grease.
”Think of this,” says Robert Tutman, a TV cameraman who serves as president of Friends of the Maxwell Street Market, a group of vendors, neighbors and aficionados interested in preserving the market as it is.
”There are no telephones, no bathrooms, no places to park. No roof overhead, no places to sit down, no aid stations, no blocked-off streets. Nothing offered by the city to lure people there, and still 20,000 people come down here every Sunday.”
Most of the vendors aren`t Jewish anymore. They are black. Gypsy. Eastern European. Puerto Rican and Mexican. People in the same shoes the Jews were in when they first came. And although the market once was alive with cries of hawkers every day of the week, the real Maxwell Street Market now exists only on Sundays. The once-crowded tenement buildings are almost all gone-torn down or collapsed-from the market area, which extends from Maxwell Street on the north to the viaduct at 15th Street on the south and from Halsted Street on the east to Morgan Street on the west. At 6 a.m. on Sunday it is the only stretch in the city that has aready been wide awake for hours.
”Give me offer, give me offer, very cheap, very cheap,” calls a man who is selling used children`s teddy bears, two bicycles, a lime bookshelf, some old golf clubs, eight Thermos bottles, hundreds of rusty screws, four bird cages and some cans of tomato sauce. Like everyone else, he must, by law, sell on the street, not up on the curb and not on the litter-strewn and mudholed vacant lots that now abound in the area. Like everyone else, he pays $25 a year for a special peddler`s license that is good only at the Maxwell Street Market.
His collection of wares is as eccentric as anyone else`s. Next to his stall is a vendor who has laid out an assortment of aperitif glasses next to some electric saws. A few stands down is a table with a stash of Oscar Mayer baloney sitting beside five rusty hoes. Along the market`s western edge are produce stands loaded with pyramids of oranges, peppers, bananas, cilantro. The vendors here are almost all Hispanic, and so are many of the customers who haggle in Spanish and call the market La Garra, Mexican slang for flea market. The market`s eastern portion, along Halsted Street, is black, and there they still call the market by its old name-”Jewtown,” or ”JT” for short. Almost every hubcap and tire that ever disappeared off a car is here, arranged in distinctive junkyard design. The men who sell in this section live here, often in the backs of abandoned semitrailers or in junk-filled vans. They do business seven days a week.
In between is everyone else-the knife man, the mattress lady, the shell-game shark, the gold buyers with their jeweler`s loupes, the family that sells car-seat covers.
”I`d hate to see it go,” says Chicago police Lt. Wayne Wiberg, who worked the Maxwell Street Market for years. ”It`s the original flea market. You go to a flea market in the suburbs now, and you don`t have the black blues bands, the lady selling pig`s ear sandwiches, the blind woman with her dog playing guitar, the man walking around with a rooster on his head. You can`t get freshly killed raccoon or rabbit. The smoke, the stench, the smells, the fun of just being there-that`s Maxwell Street, and it`s missing everywhere else.
”You move the market off Maxwell Street, you`ll lose it. You lose the characters like Big-Nose Pugh, Crush Shannon, Straight-Shooting Bob, Fast Black the hooker and the twins-Jerry and Barry, who wore clown hats, glasses with hearts on them and checkered suits and sold phony gold.”
”People go down there to get fleeced or hoping maybe they can outsmart the fleecers,” says state Sen. Walter Dudycz, who once worked the market as a Chicago detective looking for stolen property.
”They go for the adventure of it. The mystery of buying something at the Maxwell Street Market is similar to that of meeting up with Gypsies from the carnival. There is a mystique to the place. If you move it, organize it and plan it out, the mystery and mystique will be gone. And that is the essence of the market.”
Moving it is exactly what the University of Illinois at Chicago plans on doing. Needing more space, the school would like to acquire the 12 square blocks, now owned by the city, that make up the market and move the 650 vendors to a still-undefined area east across Halsted Street. The city has hired the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to draw up plans to clean up, pack up, reorganize and move the market to this new area. Acquiring the 12-block area will cost the university an estimated $6.5 million, and many view the expansion as a fait accompli. The state legislature has yet to appropriate the money, however, nor has the Chicago City Council approved the move.
Opponents of the plan say moving the market and whittling its size down would change the character of the market forever and may even mean its death. ”A MESSY VITALITY” IS what one UIC professor has seen in the Maxwell Street Market, and this quality is not easily transferred into a block or two of prebuilt stalls designed by architects, installed by urban planners and run by the city`s bureaucrats.
The city and the university have been conducting rounds of talks on the subject for more than a year. No final plan has yet been reached.
”We are putting the finishing touches on a concept for relocating the market,” says Deputy Planning Commmissioner Pat Dowell Cerasoli. ”We are also talking to the university, but I can`t tell you how big an area it will be moved to-six blocks, four blocks-I just don`t know. I can`t tell you management options. I can`t tell you funding. Not yet.”
”It is a political hot potato, so the city has been real quiet about it all,” says Tutman of Friends of the Maxwell Street Market. ”We don`t want it moved to 3000 south or under the viaduct or east of Halsted Street or nothing. Let it co-exist with the university when it moves down here. The market is open on Sunday, the university is closed on Sunday. The two can coexist. The vendors don`t need to use nothing but the street.”
While the politicians, architects, urban planners, university administrators and city officials gather in meeting rooms to discuss the future of the Maxwell Street Market, the market itself goes on as it has for most of this century.
Despite the potholes and the lack of parking spaces, hundreds of cars continue to roll into the area every Sunday. Despite the absence of phones, bathrooms and covered malls, and though the wares are old, used, rusted or half-busted, thousands continue to flock there.
Why? Because there is always a deal-or the chance of a deal. By noon on Sundays the place is jammed.
No wonder the lady took no time at all to respond to the man who offered to buy out her stock for $5: ”Mister, I`m not going out of business. I`m just going home. I`ll be here again next week.”
