Jim’s Original is open from 6:00 am through 1:00 am. On a recent Wednesday, the first rush of customers appeared at 6:12 am – people both going to and getting off work in search of a gut-filling snack.
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Jim’s Original as It Prepares to (Possibly) Leave the Maxwell Street Area After Nine Decades
Jim’s Original has enticed passers-by with the smell of grilled onions and Polish sausages for decades, even if the Maxwell Street market it served has moved. Now, Jim’s also has to leave.
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Jim’s Original had been here before. For the second time in its 87-year existence, the scrappy hot dog stand known for Polish sausages and pork chop sandwiches was relocating to make way for new development by the University of Illinois Chicago. This time, however, it would fully sever its roots in the Maxwell Street Market area and move three-quarters of a mile south, over the railroad tracks that separate Pilsen from the Near West Side.
“Thank you for all the support over the more than 85 years on or near Maxwell Street,” the business wrote on social media in announcing the closure of their shop by June 30. “We’re grateful for this community – and we can’t wait to serve you in East Pilsen soon.”
Jim’s Original moved to its location at 1250 S. Union Ave. in 2005, after another round of development by UIC pushed it from its original location at the corner of Maxwell and Halsted streets to an interim location in 2001. Now it would move again, to the former Ken Tone’s Drive-In at 551 W. 18th St.
And then, two weeks before the deadline, Jim’s and UIC announced that they had agreed on a lease extension that would allow Jim’s to stay put for a few years more, while the new Pilsen space got into gear. (No opening date has yet been announced for that location, which still needs to be built out.)
“It is an awesome responsibility,” says Jimmy Christopoulos, the 57-year-old, third-generation owner of Jim’s, about carrying on the business. “I talk to third-generation customers. It’s third generation on our side and the customer side.”
He purchased the building in Pilsen, which means no more lease negotiations.
“I need to ensure that this business will continue for at least a couple more generations of Chicagoans,” he says.
All images by Kathleen Hinkel for WTTW unless otherwise noted.
Until 2021, when it was told by UIC that it had to close for some hours overnight to deter crime, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim’s was open 24 hours a day. Jimmy Stefanovic, the original Jim who named the stand, had the opposite view on the effect of an all-night restaurant on crime.
“When you keep closed, they break inside, they steal everything,” he told the journalist Ira Berkow in a 1977 book about Maxwell Street proudly excerpted on the Jim’s Original website. “Nighttime here on the corner is dead when we be closed.”
Stefanovic – Christopoulos’ grandpa – came to America in 1939, after fleeing his native Macedonia during the Russian Revolution of 1919 and then waiting years to immigrate to America because of quotas on Yugoslav immigrants, according to his own telling in Berkow’s book. He made his way to Chicago on the basis of a recommendation by his father’s chauffeur when he was a child, in his recounting – although it probably also helped that he had family here. (Credit: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-039256; Patty Carroll, photographer)
He took over his aunt’s hot dog stand at Maxwell and Halsted in 1939, renamed it Jim’s Original, and eventually began selling the item that made Jim’s famous: the Maxwell Street Polish sausage.
A garlicky beef and pork sausage served on a bun with highlighter yellow mustard, a sport pepper, and sweet griddled onions, the Maxwell Street polish has become a beloved Chicago street food, a lesser-known cousin to the Chicago hot dog. (Jim’s doesn’t sell those: even though they offer Vienna Beef hot dogs, they, too, come with grilled onions.) And Jim’s was, well, the original, even if a neighboring stand opened by relatives also offers the Maxwell Street polish.
The other classic for which Jim’s is known is the pork chop sandwich, which features the same trio of mustard, onion, and pepper as an accessory to a pork chop with the bone still in for added flavor.
While his grandfather Jimmy Stefanovic died when current owner Jimmy Christopoulos was eight, Christopoulos remembers double-parking with the family, entering through the back, and enjoying a pork chop sandwich and grape pop from the stand.
Nowadays there’s a pick-up window for that – but there are still bottles of grape pop. And yes, they call it “pop.”
It wasn’t until Christopoulos was an adult in law school that he actually ordered from the front of Jim’s Original and experienced it as a customer, when a friend took him there. “We ate outside on his car,” he says. “You finally understand when you do it yourself.”
Or you can eat from the narrow metal counter along the ketchup- and mustard-colored exterior wall outside Jim’s, like two visiting Texans and 65-year-old Rickey Culver, who says he’s been coming to Jim’s since he could talk.
Culver used to make some cash shining shoes outside the original Jim’s at Maxwell and Halsted back when the Maxwell Street market was still there. The lively market featured hustling vendors selling everything from clothes to LPs to furniture off of tables, rolling racks, and car hoods. Over the decades, it changed with patterns of migration to Chicago, beginning as a Jewish market, turning over to Black southerners, who then ceded to Latin Americans. The scene in The Blues Brothers where John Lee Hooker gives a rollicking performance in the street was filmed right by Jim’s on Maxwell Street and was true to life: Chicago electric bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf did play on the street there.
But waves of development starting with the construction of expressways in the 1950s and the new UIC campus in the 1960s under Mayor Richard J. Daley started an inevitable process that led to the closure of the original Maxwell Street market in 1994.
By the time Jim’s Original moved to its current location in 2005, the seedy old Maxwell Street market area was being replaced by new condos and parking garages visible from the Dan Ryan Expressway that first started to displace things.
But Jim’s continues on, drawing customers from around the city like Pan Panayotov and Jake Nelson, who took a hot dog tour around Chicago, rating them on a variety of metrics. Panayotov awarded Jim’s Polish “most craveable,” while Nelson gave it “best snap.”
The Polish is Jim’s most popular item, with 400 to 500 sold every day. The stand serves 800 to 1,000 customers on average daily.
Sisters Cindy and Isabelle Medina came to try Jim’s for the first time when they heard it was closing. Now it has received a new lease on life, carrying on for a while longer in this location near its historic roots, while the Pilsen spot is readied and an offshoot at Diversey, Elston, and Western avenues continues to bring Maxwell Polishes and pork chop sandwiches to the North Side.
“I was a history major,” says Christopoulos. “I understand the importance of preserving history.”
