A Portrait of Its Vendors
TRT: 21:35
Maxwell Street was my earliest memory of Chicago from a day trip with neighbors as a 7 year old and one that haunted my childhood. When I moved to Chicago 14 years later I finally rediscovered the origin of this memory. In the 70’s and 80’s I spent almost every Sunday morning collecting household items, antiques and box cameras at the Sunday market.
These interviews are with some of the vendors and their feelings or hopes about the impending change in location during the fall of 1994 when the last market was being held at the Maxwell/Halsted Street location. Mayor Daley’s staff had created a reduction in numbers of vendors based on a lottery as it relocated this 100 year old tradition, that had started with Jewish immigrant cart vendors, to the city’s “New Maxwell Street Market” location on South Canal Street. This relocation allowed the University of Illinois to develop, build and sell condominiums in this area south of their main campus below Roosevelt Road and west of Halsted Street as the university for three decades had been buying up and demolishing 3 flats and leaving vacant lots that were only filled on Sunday mornings, with a melting pot of Chicagoans looking for a good deal.