“A Maxwell Street block lined with well-preserved facades from the late 19th and early 20th centuries has plenty of designs: Art Deco, terra cotta, initials and owners’ names embossed on the stone and a baroque doorway whose arch is held up by two carved cherubs.
“Halsted Street is at the west end of the block and at the east lies the entrance to a parking garage that bridges the street, its archway emblazoned with the words ‘Maxwell Street.’
“Enormous change swept through this and nearby blocks of Maxwell Street and the nearby blocks between generations.
“Several of the handsome facades have only been there about 25 years. That includes the one where Woodson’s daughter’s orthodontist practices at 714 W. Maxwell, a three-story yellow brick building with a pair of stone urns and a stone shield at the roofline. From 1919 until the turn of the 21st century, that façade was around the corner on Halsted Street at 1302 S. Halsted, where there’s now the blocklong Thomas Beckham Hall. On its upper three floors is a University of Illinois Chicago dorm for 450 students.
“In the late 1990s, the University of Illinois Chicago completed a massive redevelopment…Part of the area had long been the site of the Maxwell Street Market, a beloved slice of the city known for decades as a bargain-shopping district, a place to hear real Chicago blues performed in the streets and get a Polish sausage sandwich with grilled onions from places like Jim’s Original.
“The city moved the Maxwell Street Market out in 1994, in large part to make way for UIC’s expansion. By 1999, the university had made a deal to memorialize the market in some way — and did so with the facades.’
“In the late 1990s, preservationists fought UIC’s plan to do ‘facadectomies’ and said the street would look like Disneyland. But then-Mayor Richard M. Daley said in September 1999 that grafting the old facades onto new structures ‘is a good compromise’ that recognized both ‘the contribution of Maxwell Street as well as the redevelopment.’
“The 700 block of Maxwell today is certainly nothing like the crowded, rocking Maxwell Street Market scene in the 1980 Blues Brothers movie, where Jake and Elwood pass through a crowd listening to John Lee Hooker perform on their way to see Aretha Franklin and Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy in the Soul Food Café. The scene was filmed a block west, the other side of Halsted, at Nate’s Deli, which was there from the 1920s through its closing in 1996 for the UIC expansion.
“None of the buildings seen in the Blues Brothers seem to have made it into the collection of restored facades on the 700 block of Maxwell Street. The facades along the block are cataloged in a walking tour map.” (Rodkin, WBEZ, 9/30/24)