Are we overreacting? Or do we really need to quit living with past hostilities?

There’s a site on Facebook I enjoy checking out from time to time called Original Chicago. Basically, it’s a place where long-time city residents (and others who no longer live here) can reminisce about the way things used to be.

The Maxwell Street of old, as memorialized in this pre-World War II postcard. Image provided by Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia

Favorite roller rink? Is the novel, “The Devil in the White City” (set during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892) accurate? Things like that.

BUT THINGS GOT a little more serious Thursday when the site’s administrator felt the need to post a critical note about people who referred to the old Maxwell Street district as “Jew Town.”

It’s a sign of “racial disrespect” that “will not be tolerated” at the site, the administrator wrote.

Which is an attitude I can respect because I often think it cowardly for website operators who refuse to control the content of their own sites – trying to claim that letting people randomly post their often stupid and ridiculous comments encourages free expression of thought.

Actually, it just encourages the idiots of our society to engage in bullying behavior. My own thought to people who want to make such rants is they ought to create their own sites (I’ll gladly offer them technical advice on how to do so). Although I suspect what they really want to do is undermine other peoples’ activity online.

BUT BACK TO “Jew Town,” which triggered an extensive series of responses from people who want to think the phrase has significant historic character to Chicago. Of course, most of them will go on to tell tales of all the stolen goods that wound up being resold there.

How dare we want to think it is wrong to use the phrase to describe a part of Chicago that once upon a time contained a heavy presence of people who were Jewish in religion and were the operators of the original businesses that existed in the area (which now is an upscale area by the University of Illinois at Chicago campus).

Some people literally are claiming that “Jew Town” is no different than “China Town” or any of the nicknames given in the past to enclaves of Polish immigrants (don’t forget Chicago used to brag there were more Poles, not Polacks, living here than in any city on Earth except Warsaw – the capital of Poland).

I don’t doubt that people in the past used “Jew” freely when referring to Jewish people, the same way that “Jap” used to be openly used when referring to Japanese.

THE LATTER ALSO is a slur that was meant to make those from the Asian island nation sound less than human – which I’m sure seemed right to those who came of age during the Second World War and wanted to forevermore think that Japanese people were worthy of derision.

But just as now we think it ridiculous whenever some old coot complains that we need to “Remember Pearl Harbor!” because they’re not willing to let go a war our government ended many decades ago (and rebuilt Japan in our own capitalist image), somehow, the idea of somebody thinking that “Jew Town” isn’t absurd is the real ridiculous notion.

The notion is that we need to let go our old obsessions and terminology that we used to justify them. It’s called advancing as a society. Even though some are going to complain it’s “political correctness run amok.”

The latter concept always struck me as being the thought process of old bigots who don’t want to be called out for the stupidity of their thoughts.

Is Chinatown similar to Maxwell Street in history, meaning?

SERIOUSLY, WHEN WAS the last time you ever heard anybody call a police squadrol a “Paddy wagon?” Even though I can recall that once was a commonly accepted term for the vehicle used to haul large loads of arrestees (a batch of drunken Irish?) from a crime scene – or take corpses to the morgue.

It’s time for some people to get with the program. Jewish people are “Jewish,” and “Jew” is only used by people who feel the need to think derogatory thoughts. Consider the dictionaries that give an alternate definition for “Jew” as “someone tight with their money or not very generous.”

Who still uses the old slur?

That certainly doesn’t sound like somebody trying to think seriously about an issue. It sounds like pure religious-motivated bile to me, which ought to be further reason to dump “Jew Town” from our city’s lingo. It’s embarrassing to our civic memory, and it’s not like people using the term now are trying to illustrate how absurd we used to be.

Better to get back to debates such as the man who asked Original Chicago readers what to do about the girlfriend who persists in putting ketchup on her hot dogs. Largely because I don’t put ketchup on anything, I say, “Dump her!”

  -30-

Chinese takeover of stock exchange? Used to be Chinatown neighborhood

Perhaps I just have an odd way of viewing things. But I couldn’t help but be amused by the news reports about how the Chicago Stock Exchange was going to be sold to Chinese business interests.

What 99.9999 percent of Chicagoans today think of as Chinatown

Specifically, the Chongqing Casin Enterprise Group wants to buy the stock exchange that has been located in Chicago since 1882 as a way of getting themselves involved in the U.S. financial markets.

A FACT THAT may appall those of us more xenophobic individuals, but one which I find ironic.

For the stock exchange is located at LaSalle and Van Buren streets in the South Loop neighborhood – not far from that tall, thin triangular building that serves as a detention center for those people awaiting trial on federal criminal cases pending in the nearly U.S. District Court.

But there’s something else that used to be on that strip of Van Buren Street – Chinatown.

Generations of Chicago know of Chinatown as being that great big pagoda at Cermak and Wentworth avenues, along with a few blocks surrounding that entrance site.

IT IS A place where one can find Chinese-oriented shops, along with the restaurants. I know many people who insist that a trip to Chicago isn’t complete without a stop or two in that area – whose residents are growing in such a way that the neighborhood’s boundaries are spreading further and further south in the direction of U.S. Cellular Field.

Anyone upset by Chinese interests being in control here ...

But that Chinatown didn’t develop until about a century ago – in those years when the world was at war the first time around, but the United States’ isolationist sentiments made it think it could stay out of the brawl.

But the Chinese had been in Chicago for decades before then, coming here because our city was more hospitable to their ethnic presence than many of those West Coast places like San Francisco – which now may want to think it always had an international character but then was more than willing to run them out of town for not being “white enough.”

Chicago’s original Chinatown enclave centered around Van Buren and Clark streets – literally one block to the east of the stock exchange.

ANYBODY WHO THINKS the Chinese have no business being at the stock exchange would probably be appalled at what the surrounding neighborhood once looked like.

... would despise what surrounding neighborhood once looked like

Old Chicago Tribune reports indicate the Chinatown business strip along Clark Street included eight grocery stores, two pharmacies, two butcher shops, two barbers, a cigar factory and a restaurant. Although in due time, all of that moved south as the Loop tried to adopt a wealthier image that priced small business types such as what often exist in ethnic enclaves out of the neighborhood.

Personally, I always get my kick out of seeing the La Cocina restaurant on Clark Street – the one whose sign includes a Chinese pagoda design even though they serve Mexican food.

A touch of the past in modern-day Chicago

Not that I’ve ever eaten there. But the fact that current occupants felt no need to erase the neighborhood’s past is something I find appealing.

AND NOW, THE Chinese could potentially restore a presence to the area if they succeed in taking over management of the Chicago Stock Exchange, although the deal is not expected to be signed off on until the second half of this year and would still need approval of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Although it is interesting to see that the Chongqing group says it will keep the exchange’s trading platform in place and has no plans to replace the exchange’s CEO.

Almost as though we can relax our fears because nothing significant will change in the daily character of life in Chicago!

  -30-