Chicago Sandwich Canon: Maxwell Street

There is a good chance, if you’ve been reading this blog a while, that you have read this particular spiel before. Chicago has a culinary canon that, while not exclusively sandwich-related, features many bread-borne beauties, several of which I have profiled in the past few years. Of course we’ve written about some of the more well-publicized sandwiches of Chicago like the Italian Beef or the Puerto-Rican by ancestry but Chicagoan-by-birth Jibarito or even the Chicago-style hot dog. We’ve covered the breaded steak sandwich, one version of which was named the world’s greatest sandwich by a USA Today sports writer nearly 10 years ago. We tried several versions of the Big Baby, a style of double-cheeseburger native to the southwest side of the city.

We’ve delved into the deep lore of the South Side to bring you the massive combo sub called a Jim Shoe, the heartburn-in-a-bun called the Mother-In-Law, and the Italian sausage patty grinder called a Freddy. And we braved almost certain mutters of disapproval to seek out the Francheezie in the “old person restaurants” that still serve it.

Today we’re covering Maxwell Street. Now “Maxwell Street” in Chicago is a street, yes, a short section of road on what is generally considered the Near West side of Chicago about a mile or so southwest of the Loop. Today, Maxwell Street intersects Halsted just a few blocks south of Roosevelt, extending a block east and a block west where it’s interrupted by the UIC campus. It picks up again a few blocks west where it extends only another block and a half or so, ending at Blue Island Ave.

Maxwell Street is more than that of course. It’s a street, it’s a market, it’s a neighborhood, it’s a cultural institution that for over 100 years was an important piece of the social and commercial lives of many of the less privileged inhabitants of Chicago. But let’s start with the street.

We’re concerning ourselves today mainly with the section just surrounding Halsted, on the right of the image above, highlighted in yellow. These days, it is part of–or at least adjacent to–the University of Illinois at Chicago. The area around Maxwell and Halsted is a busy commercial sector with restaurants and other businesses to appeal to the student populace and their visiting parents.

Maxwell Street: a Brief History

Maxwell Street used to be wildly different though. Maxwell Street was named after Army doctor-turned-Illinois State Treasurer Philip Maxwell in the first half of the 19th Century. By the turn of the 20th Century, the area around Maxwell Street, settled in turn by German Jews and then other European Jews, had become something of a cultural enclave known in Chicago as “Jew Town.” Over time an open-air market, held on Sundays, became a weekly practice. In 1912, the city of Chicago officially recognized the market.

Over the course of the 20th Century, the demographics of the neighborhood changed. The Jewish Maxwell Street Market vendors of the early 20th Century began to make space for the African-American community that settled in the South and West sides of Chicago during the Great Migration, fleeing the Jim Crow laws and agricultural depressions of the South for jobs in industry and the railroads in Northern cities.

These words were associated with the Maxwell Street Market of old: “Cheat You Fair,” whether that was an unofficial motto or a punny nickname. It was a cultural nexus; an incubator of business, of fashion, of music. The Chicago Blues musical style was born here, when the earlier blues of the Mississippi Delta met the urban life of the city. Muddy Waters got his start busking at the Maxwell Street Market. John Lee Hooker played the market, in his early career as well as more famously in a scene from the 1980 Blues Brothers movie.

By the mid-1980s, Maxwell Street Market was still going strong–but Maxwell Street itself had seen better days, or so claimed this 1985 Bill Granger column in the Chicago Tribune:

Sunday morning always starts early on Maxwell Street, when the first hustlers stake out corners or favored spots on the rubble-strewn street. The hustlers and sellers array their old junk, new junk and antiques, and then is a good time to see the carnival all set up fresh for a hard day`s bargaining. No, Maxwell Street is not what it was, but then nothing is. It was known as Jew Town at the turn of the century and for a long time after because of the Jewish peddlers, tailors, jewelry salesmen and haberdashers and cobblers who filled the narrow shops along the narrow street and promised such a deal that the very act of bargaining on Maxwell Street was a constant joy and challenge to the city-bred wit.

Now it is a ghost. Most of the buildings have been torn down, but the open air is as good a place to sell as any, isn`t it? It is a wonderful Babel, full of Spanish voices and black urban accents and ethnic rumbles and Appalachian drawls. The Don`t Cheat You Fair store has changed hands, but the more things have changed, the more they haven`t.

Even in that scene from the Blues Brothers, most likely shot in 1979 or thereabouts on location at Maxwell Street, the street scene is bustling, true, but some of the lots appear empty; some of the buildings, decrepit. By 1990, those buildings were being torn down under pressure to allow the University of Illinois, adjacent to the northwest, to expand and take over the area. Neighborhood groups and historical preservation societies put up a fight.

In the last few seconds of the above video, a man being interviewed says the following, which neatly sums up the thesis:

If you get rid of this here, you get rid of the best part of Chicago

But they did get rid of it. In 1994, the push to grant historical status to the Maxwell Street location was denied and the City moved the market a few blocks east to Canal Street. UIC took over the land, much of which was eventually dedicated to private, for-profit condos and commercial space rather than the public uses that the state university had claimed it needed the land for.

And this is what Maxwell looks like today: looking west, toward the original market; looking east, to the commercial district that replaced it. There are historical plaques and monuments celebrating the uniqueness of the market; a blues musician, a hawker, reliefs depicting some of the vendors and unique characters that appeared throughout the market’s near-150 year history at this spot. But little sign of the market itself.

Maxwell Street Off Maxwell Street

I first encountered the Maxwell Street Market–as it was still called, even after it was moved–at that Canal Street location. The above video, shot and posted to YouTube by my friend Tom in 2007, features a group of foodies trying some of the market’s fare, including a sequence beginning at 1:49 or so where my eldest son Damian and I both try a taco de ojos. In 2008, the market was moved again, 3 blocks west to a less busy Des Plaines Street, where it was still called Maxwell Street Market.

It was always an adventure to walk the market, to see the beautiful cases of produce, the lines of hats and socks and still-greasy used tools for sale at the various stands. For a time, Maxwell Street Market was a great place to find and try some more unfamiliar-to-me Mexican cuisine–I had elotes for the first time at Maxwell Street Market, and Oaxacan tamales, and huitlacoche. Search YouTube for videos from the 2000s about Maxwell Street Market and in nearly every one of them you’ll see the proprietor of popular taco stand Rubi’s, who opened a brick and mortar shop in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood in 2021 and can be seen in the Chicago episode of Netflix’s Taco Chronicles. The Market, even in its decline, is still incubating new businesses.

I visited the market many times during its tenure on Des Plaines, but had tuned out a bit in recent years. I heard it was closed during the pandemic, but reopened again in June 2021 to fewer vendors and less interest. In 2022 and 2023, instead of being a year-round open-air market, Maxwell Street launched in May and ended in October, appearing more sparsely attended than I remembered from even the reduced state it had been in when I first learned of it. I truly wondered if the market would survive.

So What Does This Have To Do With Sandwiches?

During the changing cultural dynamics of the Maxwell Street area of the 20th Century, Yugoslavian-born Jimmy Stefanovic opened a hot dog stand on the northwest corner of Maxwell and Halsted. It was called Jim’s Original.

A few years later, Jimmy Stefanovic introduced the Polish sausage sandwich at his stand, a style that came to be known as the Maxwell Street Polish. A Maxwell Street Polish sausage consists of a griddled salty-smoky-garlicky Polish-style sausage–generally, in the past, I perceived these to be a thicker sausage like an actual kielbasa, but a good quality, natural casing, coarsely-ground Polish link will serve as well, as long as it isn’t a cheap extruded gas-station-style Polish sausage–in a cheap hot dog bun with yellow mustard, grilled onions, and the option to add a hot pepper or two. The hot peppers are pickled serranos, more substantial and hotter than the thin-walled sport peppers used on a Chicago style hot dog.

The sausages spend quite a bit of time on the griddle, so long that they become nearly blackened in spots and the surface tends toward a crisp texture, lending additional teeth to the expected natural-casing snap. Some imitators will deep-fry the sausages to approximate that crisp snap, but as far as I’m concerned, this is wrong. Maxwell Street sausages are not served with ketchup, nor raw onions, nor pickles. “Everything” at a Maxwell Street stand means mustard and grilled onions. Order a burger with everything and you’ll get a burger with mustard and onions. Similarly the hot dog and the pork chop sandwich, also ubiquitous at the true Maxwell Street stands. Everything means mustard and grilled onions, and you have to ask for the hot peppers separately–but every sandwich includes an order of fries.

When you order the sausage, it is taken off the griddle right in front of you, placed into a mustard-lined hot dog bun, quickly covered in grilled onions and wrapped in wax paper, with a pickled serrano pepper or two wrapped in with it if you requested them. The finished sausage is slid into a brown paper bag on top of an order of fries, a couple napkins, and a packet or two of ketchup. The entire process takes 15 seconds or less–it will probably take you longer to get your wallet out and pay for the sausage. There are no tables, just a stainless steel counter bolted to the cinderblock walls of the stand. The sausage is hot, HOT, fresh off the griddle, hotter than the fries are, and the crisp casing snaps and bursts as you bite into it. It’s salty and fatty and garlicky and smoky, pungent with mustard, sweet and aromatic with cooked onion, with a spicy-sour kick from the hot peppers if you chose to add them. The bun is mere afterthought, a handle to protect your tender fingers as you navigate that blisteringly hot sausage to your mouth.

In early 1995, when the rest of Maxwell Street was being torn down but before Jim’s and its neighboring stand Express Grill were forced to move a block east to Union Avenue just off the interstate, I was working as a delivery driver for a moving company. I drove a box truck around the city delivering moving supplies to clients, and my coworkers would then bring one of the big trucks around to help them move. I touched on this job a bit in a previous piece, about a Peruvian rice and beans dish called Tacu-tacu that my dispatcher Cesar and his wife introduced me to when they invited me to their home for dinner one evening.

Some of those coworkers were the first to introduce me to the Maxwell Street Polish Sausage. They had grown up in and around the market and were astounded at my ignorance of the subject, but I was a quick convert. As it often happens when you have competing businesses within a stone’s throw of eachother, both Jim’s Original and Express Grill, with nearly identical menus, each had their own appreciators. My moving company buddies were both Express Grill guys, so that is how I came to experience the Maxwell Street Polish the first time–at the smaller stand set off from the corner, less busy than its more storied rival. I never dallied with the burgers or the hot dogs in those days, and I didn’t even know that the pork chop sandwich existed. The Maxwell Street Polish was Chicago to me, more than a deep dish pizza, more then an Italian beef, and at least as much as the dragged-through-the-garden hot dog. And it came with a free order of middling fries for I believe $2.25 at the time.

But by the time I moved back to Chicago 11 years later in 2006, Jim’s Original and Express Grill had moved to their current spots on Union Avenue. It’s not a picturesque spot–a southbound one-way street that services an on-ramp to the interstate before petering off into weeds and the backs of buildings. At the time, after trying both, I decided that I was a fan of Jim’s instead of Express Grill.

The price for a Polish with fries was, in 2006, something like $3.65 I think. It’s higher today–this is not surprising, and at $6.50 a Polish sausage with fries is still one of the best, cheapest lunch deals you’ll find in Chicago.

For years I have been telling people that Jim’s is the spot to stop for a Maxwell Street Polish, and I have been describing their sandwich as essentially a 6″ section of kielbasa in a bun. The below example of a Maxwell Street Polish, from Express Grill, certainly matches that description. The fries are, as always, middling, but the Polish was fantastic, hot and snappy and bursting, absolutely enveloped in the sweet cooked onions whose smell inundates the surrounding area. Veterans of the Maxwell Street experience often advise not to bring your sandwich back to your car or you won’t get the onion smell out for weeks.

The Jim’s Polish was different than I remembered, though. Still good, quite good. But thinner, looking more like a packaged Polish sausage link in a natural casing than the fat, chopped-off section of kielbasa that I remember. One side did appear to have been cut off to resemble a segmented kielbasa but the sausage was far thinner than my memories told me it should be. It’s possible that, had I ordered the “All Beef” version of the Polish sausage, I’d have received the thicker kielbasa section I remember–but I don’t remember needing to order it that way before.

I also ordered the pork chop sandwich from Jim’s. A Maxwell Street pork chop sandwich is a standard bone-in pork chop maybe a half inch thick, seasoned simply and griddled until browned and cooked through, then held on the grill until it’s served.

The pork chop is served in a cheap hamburger bun with the standard yellow mustard and grilled onions and optional pickled serrano peppers, and it’s honestly the only other sandwich besides a Polish that I generally order at a Maxwell Street stand. It’s ordinary but unique; challenging to eat (you “grab it by the bone and eat your way around it” according to the advice I received years ago, or as my friend Dennis says, “The bone is the handle.“

Maxwell Street At Home

Making your own Maxwell Street Polish Sausage at home is not difficult. I used a stainless steel griddle that I can mount on my propane grill, but you could do the same thing on a cast iron or non-stick griddle on a stovetop to some degree of success.

The first step is to get the right sausage. Do not get a shrinkwrapped plastic package of 30 “Polish sausages” for $6.99; they’ll be tasty, in the way that a gas station Polish sausage is tasty, but they are not Maxwell Street worthy. Do not get a finely-ground or casingless variety. In fact, I don’t even necessarily recommend getting Vienna Beef Polish sausages that I have pictured below, unless you’re able to spring for the 10lb Food Service pack of natural casing sausages, as I’m pretty sure that despite the “Maxwell Street” branding these are cheap, extruded, casingless sausages. If you go for a kielbasa instead, get a good one–again, look for verbiage on the package that says natural casing. The Slotkowski brand kielbasa I got at Jewel is a good option–if you look at one of the photos above of the original Jim’s location, you’ll see that at one time they served the Slotkowski sausages.

You don’t necessarily need to hit your local Polish deli and spring for the really good, extra smoky, extra garlicky kielbasas they have hanging from a hook behind the deli there… but if you do, nobody’s going to be mad about it.

How do you feel about hot peppers? If you can live without them, that’s easy enough. They are optional. But if you want that little kick of spice then there’s only one option. Sport peppers won’t do. Pickled jalapeno slices won’t do. There’s only one thing for it: you’re going to have to pickle your own serrano peppers. I used a slight variation of this recipe: less sugar and a little more salt, and I left the peppers whole but cut a slit into each one to help speed up the pickling process.

The mustard: yellow. I use Plochman’s. The onions: yellow. I cut them into half moons and cook them on the griddle with just a little neutral oil and salt, and I don’t start the sausages until the onions have already started to take on some color. But relax, we’re going to be here a while. Everything’s going to take on some color, including the griddle. Those sausages are going to coo longer than you think they should. Just keep turning them, turning and turning and turning, until much of the surface is browned to the point it’s almost black.

To assemble: spread a thick swipe of mustard along the inside of the bun, or just give it a good squirt out of the bottle. Place the sausage on the mustard, then fork a couple good gobs of the sweet, soft, cooked onions on top. Serve it like it is, or with fries, or with a pickled serrano or two. I like to take a bite from the sausage, then a bite from the pepper, then combine the two in my mouth rather than put the whole pepper stem and all onto the bun but there’s no right way to eat a Polish. Just eat it.

The Road Goes Ever On

Maxwell Street Market is still active this year, though it has cut its schedule down to 1 Sunday per month, May through October, and I recently drove to the usual spot on Des Plaines Street to check out the current iteration, but the market was not there.

That is because it has moved back to Maxwell and Halsted. Or more properly, to Maxwell and Union, where it stretches north in front of Express Grill to a set of picnic tables temporarily installed on the street in front of Jim’s, and south for part of the block, and west to the intersection with Halsted. There are stands for the Maxwell Street Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the history of the neighborhood and the market itself. There are interesting stands selling antique cameras and African masks and clothing and Barbies and a subset of the wild variety of odds and ends that I remember seeing at the market. It’s not what it used to be, though it seems that the Foundation is pushing to try and get it there; they seem to want to restore it to every Sunday, for a start.

One thing I did not see in the current iteration of the market–the street food vendors I grew used to during its tenures on Canal and Des Plaines. Maybe it’s because, between Jim’s Original and Express Grill and Cairo Kebab and a half-dozen other brick-and-mortar restaurants on Maxwell and just around the corner on Halsted, they are discouraging food vendors from taking part in the new/old location. Maybe the vendors just haven’t come back around yet, or they’ve moved on to other things. I don’t know, but I’m interested in finding out. I may contact the Foundation and see what they have to say about it. I’d sure like to get elotes there again, or one of the Oaxacan tamales I was so hooked on 15 years ago. But for now, I suppose I can just get myself a Maxwell Street Polish.