You wouldn’t have known it from watching or reading the news, but 1st Ward alderman Theodore Mazola picked exactly the right moment to get into a wrestling match with 27th Ward alderman Dexter Watson. It was during the City Council meeting on April 13. The council was debating whether to sell the land on which the Maxwell Street market operates to the University of Illinois at Chicago; Mazola observed sarcastically that none of the aldermen objecting to the sale had welcomed the market into their wards.
Did the city engineer its disappearance? The vendors and the media are sure of it; they say the city had Dumpsters there until a couple of years ago. According to Krystin Grenon of the Friends of the Maxwell Street Market, in the spring of 1990 the city cleaned the market and agreed to empty Dumpsters and to ticket and fine dumpers, but the enforcement soon collapsed and the Dumpsters were removed a year or two later.
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But Mazola denies any cutback in city services. He stated in the council that the city now spends $250,000 a year on cleaning the market, and would have to spend three times as much to do it right. Terry Levin, speaking for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, says the annual cost is closer to $300,000, including weekly rodent control required by the large amounts of food left behind every week. According to Streets and San officials, the 1990 agreement fell apart because Maxwell Street vendors quit using the Dumpsters after a month or two.
Another rearguard action comes from the Levine Hillel Center at UIC, where Elliot Zashin and Lori Grove have nominated the neighborhood associated with the market between 1880 and 1944 to the National Register of Historic Places. But even if that neighborhood got on the register it wouldn’t include much of today’s market, and designation wouldn’t protect what it did. But it would require any owner to consult with the state before making changes, and Zashin hopes National Register designation might eventually nudge the university away from its historic predisposition toward building an all-new, walled-in campus.
She won’t get any help from the vendors association. German Leyte of that group describes the Consumer Services meetings as “brainwashing the people,” and adds, “They’ll regret it if the market moves over there.” He predicts the Canal Street market will fizzle out by winter.
And “pay your own way” applies only when you’re poor. (“Now that the market is African American and Hispanic,” thundered Alderman Watson, “now the market is to be changed.”) Where were the bean counters in 1987, when Sears got $200 million to move out to Hoffman Estates? Or last month, when the state gave Motorola “only” $36 million to move even farther out? As Fifth Ward alderman Lawrence Bloom said in the April 13 debate, “If the city of Chicago subsidized this economic development enterprise [Maxwell Street] the way it does those whose lobbyists wear suits and ties, it might be more welcome.”
If that’s your kind of town, sit back, let the mayor bring it on, and hope you can buy your way inside its walls. If it’s not your kind of town, don’t expect the Maxwell Street vendors to stop it for you. The genius of Maxwell Street is making deals, not confronting political gentrifiers. Charles Henderson is not especially enthusiastic about being moved to Canal Street. But he comes to some of Shoenberger’s meetings anyway. He has a problem Consumer Services didn’t foresee. At Maxwell Street his crew spends all day Saturday setting up tables for vendors to sell from the next day. (Then they watch them all night, but even so “we lose some almost every week.” A few years ago they had to raise the price from $5 to $7 a table to cover their losses.) At the new market on Canal Street, they may not be able to start setting up until midnight Saturday. How can they be ready in time?
