7th District Police Station - Chicago, IL
Posted by: 
adgorn
N 41° 51.882 W 087° 39.060
16T E 445971 N 4634959
The 7th District Police Station, or Maxwell Street Station in Chicago, Illinois was built in 1888 in response to the need for increased police presence in "Bloody Maxwell", known colloquially as "the Wickedest Police District in the World."
Waymark Code: WM76GM
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 09/09/2009
Views: 2
From wikipedia
The neighborhood, a changing melting pot of Irish, German, Italian and European Jewish immigrants, grew mightily in the years following the Chicago Fire of 1871. The housing and sanitation situation in the district was substandard, and the residents poor. Criminal activity flourished.
The Romanesque style station is architecturally significant as an example of pre1945 police stations in Chicago. It was designed by Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. The Chicago Police Department vacated the station in 1998. After extensive renovation, the red brick and limestone building became the home of the University of Illinois at Chicago Police Department. The renovations were done in a manner designed to uphold the historic significance of the building's architecture. "The building’s original windows were sent to a company in Kankakee for restoration, the masonry cleaned and repaired, the roof replaced, and parapets at the top of the station rebuilt using custom-made bricks, the exact texture and color of the originals."
The building is known in popular culture because the outside was used as the picture of the precinct house in the opening credits of the iconic Television series, Hill Street Blues.
Fr (
visit link)
Today the Maxwell St. station stands rather forlornly amid acres of parking lots, empty weed lots, and the university buildings intruding upon the community from the north. Imagine a time in the distant past when this once-densely populated neighborhood echoed with the sound of 50 foreign tongues, the clatter of the push cart wagon and the ragged vendors peddling their produce and wares in the market a block due east. Imagine thousands of ram-shackle wooden hovels and airless worker cottages with the outhouse inconveniently located in the alleys of the tenements pushing up against this police station. Very often the Maxwell Street police officer, bewildered by the old world customs and buzz of strange languages he heard on the street, was the foreigner in a foreign land. In 1898, the city census taker counted 48,190 residents living in the squalid tenement buildings along Taylor, DeKoven, Forquer, Loomis, Lytle, and other streets comprising Little Italy nearby. It was a tough assignment in a dangerous area of the city for a young police officer learning the ropes. Poverty, then as now, bred crime. And in time the district became known as “Bloody Maxwell” because of the escalating homicide rate and the scourge of the Black Hand terrorists who preyed upon the immigrant Italians living near Taylor Street in the 1890s and early 1900s. The term “Bloody” was loosely applied to many police districts and city wards in the old days, but it seemed to take on special significance along the Near West Side corridor, especially during the wild and woolly 1920s when Taylor Street, located in the heart of the old 19th Ward, evolved into the production and distribution center for bootleg alcohol in the City of Chicago. It was a vast criminal enterprise controlled by the “Terrible” Genna brothers - Angelo, Pete, Jim, Tony, and Mike from Marsala, Italy, who were graduates of the Black Hand. Their liquor warehouse stood at 1022 Taylor Street. It was rumored that at least half of the uniformed patrol working out of “Bloody Maxwell” in the early 1920s received $15 every Friday from the Genna brothers by simply stopping by the warehouse for their weekly envelope. Lieutenants and captains from neighboring districts were said to receive upwards of $500 a week - quite a sum in those days.
The 7th District, anchoring the western end of the Maxwell Street market, quieted down considerably following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. After World War II, the district witnessed the slow exodus of its immigrant population - a process that greatly accelerated in the early 1960s when hundreds of acres of residential property west of Halsted Street were bulldozed to make way for the University of Illinois campus.