Maxwell Street

41.864319564455 - 87.646908760071Koordinaten: 41 ° 51 ' 52 "N, 87 ° 38' 49 " W Maxwell Street is a short street in Chicago (USA). It runs from the Blue Iceland Avenue east to Clinton Street, where it is interrupted between Union Avenue and Jefferson Street Dan Ryan Expressway and through a warehouse. Approximately in the middle it is crossed by the Halsted Street.

Although there were also many shops located, the whole area was still decades more in the nature of a large market and was also in many places just such, forerunner of the Chicago flea market scene: You could buy there almost everything and sell, whether legal or illegal.

The Maxwell Street was later, after many African Americans came in the 1930s and 40s because of there racial discrimination in the South of the United States to Chicago, known for its blues music and its street musicians (eg Arvella Gray, Jim Brewer ) and was thus an important part of black culture in Chicago. Documentary filmmaker Michael Shea shot his film And This Is Free ( 1964; published as Music And This Is Maxwell Street).

In the late 1970s, this stretch of road has been used for some exterior shots for the film The Blues Brothers.

In 1994, the market on Maxwell Street in the wake of an extension of the adjacent University of Illinois, Chicago campus was destroyed and a few blocks to Canal Street, reinstalled away, now under the name New Maxwell Street Market. In September 2007 he moved again, this time in the nearby Desplaines Street, just north of Roosevelt Road.