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hicago’s
well-storied Maxwell Street neighborhood has never been short on folklore. The
jumble of life here has lived harder than most Chicagoans, seeing the place
through from its tough days as the city’s sprawling ghetto, to its glory days as
urban marketplace extraordinaire, to the hard times of a last stand of locals who remain despite the sacrificing of most of the area to the University of Illinois. Myths, too, are more monstrous here
than in the city’s other environs, from the legend of the devil baby who showed
up in the early twentieth century on the doorstep of Jane Addams’s nearby Hull
House to the rumored ravings of former prisoners from the shuttered dungeon of
the notorious Maxwell Street Police Station.
Indeed, some of the very first ghost stories I ever heard were as a child, sitting on the watch commander's desk at Maxwell, one of the places my dad and I would go on our frequent outings together, as he has worked out of the station during is time as a cop. I still remember my wide eyed silence as he told tales of the phantoms of Maxwell Street. I remember wanting to go home . . . but also wanting to go downstairs!
By the time it was glorified nationwide in
the early 1980s, in the opening frames of the popular TV crime drama Hill
Street Blues, the Maxwell Street Station (943 W. Maxwell Street) had already
endured nearly 100 years of notoriety in its own town. From its inception, it
ruled over the precinct the Chicago Tribune christened “Bloody Maxwell,” a
turn-of-the-nineteenth-century name that would fit well into the twenty-first.
For this was “the crime center of the country,” filled with “[m]urderers,
robbers and thieves of the worst kind.” And in those days of Eastern European
immigration, and the later days of African-American and Hispanic infusion, the
Bloody Maxwell station was known variously as “The Old Red Ship,” “The Old
Fortress,” and “The Rock of Gibraltar.” Built to last in 1888, the red and gray
stone building towered above the incessant swarm of life here, staking a claim
for good at any cost in “the wickedest police district in the world.”
Like the facts behind the beatings alleged
to have occurred here with alarming frequency until its closing in 1951, the
ghosts of the 12th District dungeon are hard to lay hands on. Despite their
vagaries, however, they are easy to believe in. The dungeon’s history is rife
with shock tales: the dozens of prisoners who “fell” down the two flights of
marble steps to the front desk; the reported beatings on the kidneys with phone
books; the sudden and numerous deaths of perfectly healthy inmates. Whether any
of these stories are true, the living hell described by one prisoner was fact:
31 cells, four of them women’s, were installed in the station’s cellar during a
surge in crime at the beginning of the twentieth century, during which officers
at Maxwell wrote up a murder a day. For half a century, prisoners in the station’s
near-catacombs urinated, vomited, and bled into troughs dug from the floor, the
refuse flowing under the cells of a dozen fellow convicts. Rats flourished. The
walls grew black and blue with graffiti.
Though the allegations of “lower Maxwell”
beatings were halted by the mid-century shutdown of the basement cells, rumors
of the cells’ continued use abounded, in and out of police circles. The city finally sawed the dungeon bars down to
the floor sometime in the 1970s. They said it was to usher in a new era at Maxwell. The cops say it was to try to stop the screaming.
Though the Old Red Fortress has, like much
of the Maxwell Street neighborhood, been consumed by the University of Illinois
at Chicago, stories of its dungeon prevail, along with reports of bloodcurdling
cries seeping from the basement windows. Also alive and well is another Maxwell Street mystery: a local legend known only as the Lady in Black.
Hailing from the earliest days of “Bloody
Maxwell,” as betrayed by her 19th century period clothing, a silent female phantom has been
known to play both guardian angel and prophetess to unsuspecting citizens. The
country was introduced to the kindly specter through television’s Unsolved
Mysteries, which documented the rescue of a motorcyclist in the Maxwell Street
area by a mysterious black-clad woman who saved the stranger and vanished into
thin air. Paramedics testified to the incident, adding to the credibility of
the tale.
Similarly, in the late 1960s, a Chicago
Police recruit encountered a mysterious woman outside a local eatery at Maxwell Street. The
meeting would remain with him more than 30 years later:
I was twenty years old. I was enrolled in the Chicago
Police Academy, which was located near Maxwell Street and the Dan (Ryan)
expressway. I had been attending the academy for several months and was taking
lunch with two other academy students.
As we entered a small restaurant in this area, I remember a white lady
dressed in all black clothes. Her dress reminded me of someone from the 1800s,
and the reason I mentioned her color is because the area was basically a black
neighborhood and seeing a white lady in this area made this individual
encounter even stranger.
Now, as I stood in the entryway to the restaurant with my
friends on either side of me, this Lady in Black came up to me and looked right into my eyes. Without a word
or hand gesture or even a facial
expression, she somehow communicated to me to hand her the pen and small note
pad I had in my upper left hand shirt pocket. I did just that without knowing
exactly why. She took the pen and note pad and wrote something into the note
pad. Then she looked at me and shook her head in a gesture of no, no, no. She
handed me the pen and note pad and left abruptly.
I looked into the note pad and noticed what she wrote: my
name and my birth date. But then I also realized that it was in my own
handwriting. I quickly turned to my friends and asked them, Did you see what
the lady just did? They responded to my question as though I was crazy: What
lady? They acted as if nothing unusual happened, and we went into the
restaurant and had lunch.
Well, this strange little encounter stayed with me. ... I felt she was telling me to leave this career in order to
save my life.
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