Ok, so neither the University of Illinois nor its Chicago branch, UIC, made the NCAA basketball playoffs. No shame in that. No Illinois college made the field of 64. Our unofficial motto hereabouts remains: “Wait ’til next year.”
There is, however, a more important opportunity that awaits our premier state university–a one-time chance to distinguish itself like no sports achievement ever could.
It is an opportunity to establish, once and for all, that the U. of I. can practice what it preaches about values such as urbanism and ethnic diversity.
We’re talking here about Mayor Richard Daley’s forthcoming plan to create a Maxwell Street historic district.
By seizing on Daley’s concept and pushing it to reality, U. of I. President James Stukel and UIC Chancellor David Broski would make a hugely important statement. They’d be saying the big school finally gets it. They’d be saying the campus once named for a nearby expressway interchange (the Circle), the steel-and-concrete enclave whose construction required demolition of much of Little Italy, has finally come to terms with the city that surrounds it.
Mind you, Daley doesn’t want to bring back the open-air flea market. The Sunday morning bazaar has been moved east, across the Dan Ryan Expressway, to the sidewalks along Canal Street. What’s left of old Maxwell’s “cheat you fair” tradition gets revived there once a week, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Daley’s plan has no place for the pimps, porno-vendors and wristwatch fencers who stunk up the old market before the city shut it down in 1994. This is the politician, after all, who is out to make over his father’s industrial city with wrought-iron fencing and median-strip flower beds. Daley understands that one of the U. of I.’s reasons for expanding south of Roosevelt Road is to boot out the unsavory characters. It was tough signing up students for UIC’s new dormitories once their parents had been pan-handled on that first visit to campus.
No, the mayor has something very tasteful in mind–something that will remind those who pass the corner of Halsted and Maxwell Streets that this was once a special place in Chicago history.
Whereas the university wants to knock down all but a handful of the old storefronts along Halsted and Maxwell, Daley would preserve 26 of the stores. But in order to give UIC a clear slate for expansion, salvageable buildings west of Halsted would be moved east, to vacant lots that now interrupt the streetscape on both Halsted and Maxwell.
The idea is to create a compact, old-time shopping district that evokes yesterday’s Maxwell Street but serves today’s college community. Some of the still-surviving merchants might elect to stay, or in some cases, move east across the street. Jimmy’s Original hot dog stand, for instance, might find a home across Halsted for its famous polish-sausage-smothered-in-fried-onions concoction. Other storefronts would be leased to local entrepreneurs. Imagine bookstores (new and used), a software exchange, a UIC Flames sports bar, an acoustic blues coffee shop, a Mexican bodega, a Jewish delicatessen. Think cobblestones and gaslights, Italian ice and a newsstand.
It does, however, take some imagination.
To a lot of people, including some in the U. of I. administration, the old storefronts along Halsted are unmitigated eyesores. It’s hard to imagine they could be rehabbed, much less moved, and harder still to see them leased by The Gap, Old Navy or one of those cappuccino-and-best-sellers booksellers.
The university already has sunk $40 million into the expansion, buying up most of the stores along Halsted Street and installing ball fields and other space-holders to the west. Not much state funding has been forthcoming, forcing UIC and its team of hired developers to subsidize campus buildings with hoped-for revenues from townhouses and retail stores. There’s no room in the budget, according to a university spokesman, for the extra $10.5 million it would take to save and restore 26 tired storefronts.
They’ve got a point. But Mayor Daley has a better one. According to his advisers, Daley doesn’t want South Halsted lined with institutional slabs and suburban-style convenience malls. He knows why people are moving back to the city . . . and it’s not to find chain stores or left-turn lanes.
The mayor also has been listening to the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition, a citizens’ group that loudly protested the 1994 rousting of the outdoor market but has since concentrated on saving storefronts. William “Bill” Lavicka, a structural engineer with the coalition, helped persuade Daley to do a feasibility study. That report, by the prestigious McClier Corp., has been submitted to the U. of I.
Daley has the power to force-feed his plan, if it comes to that. It may be state property, but the campus expansion is subject to city zoning approvals, and it is financially dependent on city certification of a special property tax (TIF) district.
Still, creation of the UIC-Maxwell Campus Town (as Lavicka calls it) doesn’t really work unless President Stukel, Chancellor Broski and the U. of I. Board of Trustees lend their full support. Sullen acceptance won’t do.
And why should it? This has the look of a win-win deal. Or, like the peddlers say: “Cheat you fair.”
