Decades of customers began paying their respects early Sunday morning, stepping into Nate’s Delicatessen for the rare kind of wake at which the deceased serves the food.
Owner Nate Duncan remains very much alive, but by day’s end his legendary Maxwell Street hole in the wall would cease serving deli food for the first time since 1921.
The joint’s uncommonly friendly mixing of people and cultures-typified by Duncan, a black man, having maintained the deli’s kosher standards since he bought it from the Jewish Lyon family in 1972-would follow the formerly adjacent Maxwell Street Market into history.
“I just know when I close that door after 47 years, it’s going to be a funny feeling,” Duncan, 64, said in a near whisper from behind the counter at 807 W. Maxwell St. before spotting a familiar customer and barking out a salutory “Yes, sir!”
Saying goodbye to Duncan, who began working at the deli in 1947, was on the mourners’ minds, even as the taste of corned beef was on their tongues. Sure enough, the slicing machine was running at an almost constant whir, the steam rising up from the pickled brisket, its pungent aroma overpowering the occasional cigarette of a visitor seated at one of three small tables nestled into the intimate room that had been featured in the movie “The Blues Brothers.”
The final-day customers, who came in all hues and ages, included young preservation architects taking photographs for their personal records and old-timers who had lunched at the deli when it anchored a Jewish neighborhood decades earlier.
Manny Lopez, who used to run a furniture store around the corner on South Halsted Street, returned for the first time in five years to pay tribute to “the food, the personality that (Duncan) has, the people that you meet here. He’s unique. He makes you feel like you’re a relative of his.”
Steven Balkin, a Roosevelt University economics professor who hopes to recreate the deli’s interior at the school’s planned Schaumburg campus, said that in Nate’s “I hear street rap, I hear Spanish, I hear Yiddish and I hear English. I don’t know very many places where you can hear all four languages spoken at the same time and where everyone gets along so well.”
Paul Evans, who works around the corner at a clothing store, recalled Duncan’s ability to cheer people up with a kind word, good advice, corned beef and coffee. “I’ve been in here three times today already because I know after today there’s no more Nate’s,” he said. “This is a sad day for the community.”
This day didn’t come as a surprise.
Duncan sold the building to the University of Illinois at Chicago three years ago and then signed a three-year-lease that expires Jan. 31.
But the deli’s fate had already been sealed by the university’s plans to expand onto the grounds that held the Maxwell Street Market.
When the market finally was dismantled last August-and fences were erected that cut traffic off from the west-the weekend flood of visitors to the area slowed to a dribble.
“It’s a terrible feeling,” said Duncan, who hasn’t determined his future plans. “I’d just like to get it over with already because they really killed my business by moving the market.”
Evans said he saw Nate’s closing as the final blow to the area. “It’s like killing a giant,” he said. “The body’s dead-now the head is gone.”
Greg Longhini, spokesman for the city’s Department of Planning and Development, said the deli was an unfortunate casualty in the city’s need to upgrade the “run-down area.”
“Obviously we’re sorry to see Nate’s have to go. It’s an established institution. But unfortunately times change,” Longhini said, adding that the area might have avoided an overhaul “if all of the other property owners in the Maxwell Street area had been as committed to keeping up their businesses as Nate’s.”
By late afternoon, Duncan said he had sold out of everything, yet about 15 people remained to wish him well.
“The day is fine,” he said. “I’m just trying to forget that this is the last day. Oh, here comes someone else I haven’t seen in years! At least they’re sending me off.”
