Maxwell Street

Writing and Thinking Place

Tim Cresswell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226604251, 9780226604114
• eBook ISBN: 9780226604398
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago's iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different.
 
In Maxwell Street, Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an "assemblage" of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.

PART ONE

Writing Place

How to write about a place? Where do we start? One way is to plot our location—to specify its coordinates:

41°51'53" N, 87°38'49" W

Or, shifting from global, latitude-longitude coordinates to the local, urban grid:

the intersection of South Halsted Street and West Maxwell Street

This is a book about the area around this intersection, located in Chicago, a couple of miles south and west of the downtown Loop. It is about the market that existed there for over a century and what became of it.

The roadways from curb line to curb line of the following streets: West Maxwell Street from the west line of South Union Avenue to the east line of South Sangamon Street, except the roadway of South Halsted Street; West 14th Street and West 14th Place, from the west line of South Halsted Street to the east line of South Sangamon Street.

LEGAL DEFINITION OF MAXWELL STREET MARKET, MUNICIPAL CODE OF CHICAGO1

It is a book about the things, stories and practices that gathered there and were dispersed from there.

The heart of the ghetto is marked by two great thoroughfares: Halsted Street and Maxwell Street. The former is lined on both sides with imposing emporiums: furniture stores, sausage stores, fur stores, cloak and suit, silk and dry goods, shoe, hat and cap, tobacco, and department stores. On Halsted Street business goes on as it would in the Loop. The stores advertise and have one price. Not so with Maxwell Street. Maxwell Street is as native to the ghetto as Halsted Street is now foreign to it. On Maxwell Street there is life; on Halsted Street, decorum. Maxwell Street is the Halsted Street of a generation ago. The proprietors of the substantial establishments on Halsted are the graduates of Maxwell, for the most part. The modern business man on Halsted Street represents the ideal of the sons of the pushcart owners on Maxwell Street.

LOUIS WIRTH2

This is a book about the specific area around Maxwell and Halsted and about the idea of place. It is about the ways we might think and write about place (this place) and places in general. It is a work of local theory or, perhaps, topology.

But where, Benjamin wonders, does the thought about place take place, or what is the place of place, understood as a philosophical concept? When one reads theoretical musings about the subject, one usually gets the impression that they could have been written anywhere and be about anywhere. Benjamin shows very little interest in ideas about place, Instead, he draws his attention to the ideas arising from this place. His is one of the rare philosophical works that begins with the question where rather than the usual what or how or why. Call it, for the time being, a topology, or a theory in situ. Benjamin calls it “presence of mind.”

DAVID KISHIK3

There is something a little archaic, even quaint, about a geographer writing a book about a place. I have written plenty about “place” as an idea. I have written about specific places in passing. I have never tried to write a book about a particular place. Even critiques of the universalism of metatheory rarely fall back on the particular as a refuge. But here I want to linger a while in all that a place has to offer. I want to offer one version of what place-writing can look like in the early twenty-first century.

Local Theory/Place-Writing

Local theory is both a way of engaging with place and a way of doing theory. It is different from ways of engaging place that focus on uniqueness and particularity—separating one place from all others. It is also different from constructing theory that universalizes and generalizes. It is different from traditional forms of place-writing in its willingness to take theoretical tangents from the specificity of a particular locale. It is different from much theory in its insistence on staying where we are—staying located.

There is a persistent belief that writing is the end of a process. Read. Research. Write. To me, writing is all of these things at once. Writing is my primary method. The idea of “writing up” research makes little sense to me.

As academics we still carry with us the trappings of science. Some form of detachment is necessary for our work to be properly academic. Writing about a place is supposed to be more than an act of listing its contents. We are called to construct narratives and provide interpretations.

The act of writing is part of the process of relating to place—not just a record of it.

Jane Rendell has invented a process she calls “site-writing.” It is a practice of art criticism that acknowledges that the critic and the art are both situated. There is no view-from-nowhere, no god-trick that allows an easy narrative.

Site-Writing explores the position of the critic, not only in relation to art objects, architectural spaces and theoretical ideas, but also through the site of writing itself, investigating the limits of criticism, and asking what it is possible for a critic to say about an artist, a work, the site of a work and the critic herself and for the writing to still “count” as criticism.

JANE RENDELL4

While working on Maxwell Street for over a decade I have been taking notes, copying pieces of texts in notebooks and on my computer (on at least three computers—the project outlasts the hardware). When I write out an interesting paragraph from the archive in a notebook, that is part of the research process. Writing enables me to think.

One way of writing place, prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century, was the regional monograph associated with regional geography and local history. These accounts tended to follow a pattern, a structure that entailed a common understanding of how knowledge was divided. They would start with the physical geography of a place—bedrock, soil types, topography, climate—and move on to human history: first settlers, important figures, incomers. Human geography would follow—house types, land use, boundaries, forms of government, settlement patterns, main crops. Key processes such as agricultural revolutions, urbanization, and industrialization would find their place in the narrative. Toward the end of the book we would encounter the arena of what might broadly be called “culture”—rituals, practices, beliefs.

Description

The narrative of a place that starts with rocks and ends with beliefs involves a number of assumptions. One assumption is that the place has an identity that is not shared with the places around it. It is a unique amalgam of all the items on the list—rocks, weather, soil, plants, buildings, practices, beliefs—a study in particularity. Another assumption is that there is some connection between the bedrock and the beliefs—a continuity through connection between “nature,” “economy,” and “culture.” Similarly, the present of a place can be apprehended through its past.

To express this another way: the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.

THEODOR ADORNO5

While the tradition of place-writing has never ceased, it became suspect in the social sciences from the late 1950s onward. Such writing rarely said much more than “this place is like this,” and this was never enough for science-minded social scientists. Yet much was lost in the setting aside of regional writing within geography and elsewhere. While many regional monographs were not well written, there was, at least, a degree of attention to the act of writing. At their best, they were, indeed, “the highest form of the geographer’s art.”6

It is a humiliating experience for a geographer to try to describe even a small tract of country in such a way as to convey to the reader a true likeness of the reality. Such description falls so easily into inventory form in which one unrelated fact succeeds another monotonously. How difficult it is to transcend a painstaking compilation of facts by an illuminating image.

H. C. DARBY7

It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers. It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

CLIFFORD GEERTZ8

It is not just “science” that has brought the act of description into disrepute. Even advocates of description have insisted on the need to add a layer of interpretation—to produce “thick” in place of “radically thinned descriptions.” Clifford Geertz famously argued for an act of description that would help to build an anthropological version of theory—“because the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them.”9

Perhaps it is the case that a “painstaking compilation of facts” might enact a kind of transcendence of its own. Perhaps description need not bow down to explanation. It was precisely the compilation and juxtaposition of facts and observations in the Paris arcades that Benjamin believed might provoke moments of “illumination.”

I have that continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head like icebergs or rocks or awkwardly shaped pieces of furniture—it’s as if all the nouns were there but the verbs were lacking—if you know what I mean, And I can’t help having the theory that if they are joggled around hard enough and long enough some bit of electricity will occur, just by friction, that will arrange everything.

ELIZABETH BISHOP10

In Species of Spaces Georges Perec asks us (readers, writers) to account for places through the construction of lists. Such list-making, he argues, will be dull and mundane but will eventually provide a spark—a moment where we are teleported to a different place and the extraordinary emerges. In his essay on “the street” he urges us to make lists endlessly “You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.” His instructions become quite precise:

The street: try to describe the street, what it’s made of, what it’s used for. The people in the street. The cars. What sort of cars? The buildings: note that they’re on the comfortable, well-heeled side. Distinguish residential from official buildings.

The shops. What do they sell in the shops? There are no food shops, Oh yes, there’s a baker’s. Ask yourself where the locals do their shopping.

The cafés. How many cafés are there? One, two, three, four. Why did you choose this one? Because you know it, because it’s in the sun, because it sells cigarettes. The other shops; antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don’t say, don’t write “etc.” Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out.

Force yourself to see more flatly.

GEORGES PEREC11

“Carry on” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART ONE   Writing Place
• PART TWO   Market/Place
• PART THREE   Thinking Place
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX