"Buy Much for a Penny: Commercial Side of One of Chicago's Oldest Neighborhoods,"

Maxwell Street Needs Money in Smaller Denominations than Copper Cents—Peculiar Traits of Merchants and Buyers—Sharp Practices of Sidewalk Trading—Where All Worn-Out Articles Have a Value—Great Number of Transactions.

Coppers of a smaller denomination and an international vocabulary of very much wide range are the needs of commercial Maxwell street. Ask a street merchant two questions in good English and he will express to you without words his desire for more freedom of speech; listen at his sidewalk bargain-counter for five minutes and you will understand how a coin of a half-cent denomination would simplify dealings with his customers, to whom the difference of one cent, which will not split, causes dissensions which often blockade the sidewalks and bring the Maxwell Street Station patrol wagon up on the run. For oratory, profanity, gesticulation, and fisticuffs are so often connected with the sharp bargainings of the street that the Maxwell Street Police Station exerts a not inconsiderable influence upon the trade of that whole section.

Literally, Maxwell street no longer exists. You might look for it a whole week by consulting lampposts on the West Side and you wouldn’t find it. The hand of the iconoclast has been busy with West Side tradition and the street to which the famous police station gave dignity is simply and flatly West Thirteenth place. But the Maxwell Street Station is still there; the street is still called Maxwell street by everybody except the postman; it is Maxwell street, and by that name it will be commercial as long as the great cosmopolitan district surrounding it must buy to eat and wear and live.

And it must eat. One look into the narrow, dingy side streets, swarming with children, will show how little in these warm days need be worn; the same glance, however, discovers in the illy-covered limbs how necessary is daily bread to the young animals in whose veins a kindly nature has sent warm blood surging. For you may find dirt and rags and squalor in every street while looking vainly for the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes of the starveling.

Poverty and not a single pawnshop. Can you reconcile the anomaly? Looking down any street in the neighborhood eight out of ten persons carry bundles. Morning, noon, and night it looks as if a bundle might be a passport upon which every pedestrian relied for freedom. The whole populace might be going to pawn.

Articles Too Old to Pawn

Why don’t they? Everything is too hopelessly second-hand. There’s never anything new in the neighborhood except babies. No resident of the district could buy a new thing, because the Russian tradesmen of the sidewalks lay in old stocks only. The average merchant moves his family into the back rooms of a tumble-down building, puts wooden shutters on the front windows, and spreads his stock-in-trade on the pavement. There is more room for haggling out-of-doors.

Somewhere in a little dingy den with gratings on the windows, and with a semblance of gilt lettering about the doorway, the visitor to the street will find the little jeweler’s shop, to which every child for blocks around has made its pilgrimage. A loop of gilded wire in each ear is the mark of it, and the child which has not this badge of the infantile torture chamber has lost caste. Men, women, children, and the very babies in arms are patrons of this small dealer, and his gilded wares are going down to a posterity which may better understand why he sold so cheap.

There is something of the pitiful in this small traffic of the curbstone. From the North and South Sides of the city are gathered the household gods which have been dethroned and cast out. No false pride embarrasses the purchaser who stands haggling. There is no sentiment regarding the material things which he needs; utility is the one thing dominant in his mind as he seeks to buy for the least money which his small Shylock will accept.

Children never buy for the Maxwell street district. Thee are no errands to the butcher, and grocer, and baker for them. It takes an older head, and a sharper tongue, and a wider judgment to compete with the curbstone merchants, who never set as a first price the same sum which they are perfectly willing to sell for.

“He’d whip his wife because she had failed to ask a higher figure,” said Sergt. Scully of the Maxwell Street Station.

Sergt. Scully has “booked” many a small dealer on the various charges of their customers and he knows the type.

Trading a Shrewd Game.

“Give a man enough of suspicion of his fellow-man and enough of a greed for money and he will do well in the business world of Maxwell street, provided that he measures his thumb into every quart package and doesn’t neglect to put in his spare time picking lead out of pound weights.”

Just now the city’s inspectors of weights and measures are filling “the book” at the station with unpronounceable names of the neighborhood. There is no distinction between dry measure and wine measure made by these merchants; the tin which measures molasses is washed and used to measure peas and onions; baskets, which are used as “approximate” bushels in the fruit trade, are made to do service in measuring turnips, potatoes, coal, and wood, while the standard measures, stamped by the city dealer, are tucked away conveniently behind a counter. For these transgressions the city inspectors, in quiet raids, are fixing still firmer in the minds of these small merchants the idea that every man’s hand is against them.

While the residents of the well-to-do three-fourths of Chicago are protesting against the impositions of the coal trust, denizens of the Maxwell street district are paying nearly double as much for the black, slaty substance, which there passes for coal. The manner in which a scant bushel basket is filled to the to top with lump coal—leaving hiding-places in it for a score of well-grown rats—approaches to the dignity of an art in Maxwell street. From 35 cents a basket for hard coal, these autumn prices range downward to three baskets for a quarter of the dirtiest, smuttiest, softest coal. Hard coal of indifferent quality is costing more than $12 a ton in these baskets; it may cost more if a license ordinance is not repealed, which would tax these small dealers $50 a year. Here, indeed, “the foreigner pays the tax,” but these foreigners are citizens of the United States who will take the tax out of other foreign citizens, who can ill-afford the additional burden.

Unique Live Fowl Market.

The chicken market in Maxwell street never fluctuates. It is a good, noisy, squawking, flapping, fluttering sort of trading which appeals to the spirit of trade. It has such a fascination for the woman marketers that a woman who knows that she intends buying only a pound of macaroni cannot resist thrusting her hands into chicken coops and feeling of squawking roosters and clucking hens. Dead fowls are not salable; they must be in full feather and lusty-lunged to pass inspection. They are never delivered at the customer’s home; once bought the customer holds on to her purchase till its neck comes under her own hatchet. Going home from market with one or two fowls grasped by the legs and hanging head down these women present comical figures when some street movement frightens the fowls, causing a flurry of wings and a series of squallings which require the attentions of a whole block.

Buying only one meal at a time in market and carrying home the purchases in infinitesimally small compass, one wonders where this great district finds use for its garbage boxes. In all the wildernesses of narrow by-streets garbage boxes are everywhere. They are not the boxes, greasy and foul-smelling, which are so often at the backdoors of Chicago’s mansions on the avenues; they line the sidewalks in front of the houses, mile in and mile out, encroaching on the space for pedestrians and worn shiny and smooth from the lolling contact of street gossips. As gleaners from the garbage boxes of every other section of this great city, the wonder of it is that these people should have such boxes at all. Their lives and interests are so based on the extravagant habits of others that it would seem that they should have nothing to throw away.

LaSalle street and Dearborn street may busy themselves with a business which involves millions every week. But both of them combined will not expend more nerve tissue, action, and volubility than does commercial Maxwell street in this very center of hard times.

Source:  Chicago Tribune (September 20, 1896): 34.