The Blues Brothers at 45

When the City Becomes the Star

DIBS. Quick takes worth claiming: fresh observations about neighborhood life and urban change.

Image Source: intoflims.org

There aren't many hills I would die on, but this is one of them: The Blues Brothers is the greatest Chicago film of all time. Full stop.

There are plenty of great Chicago films. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Barbershop, High Fidelity, The Untouchables . . . but none makes the city so integral to the story as Jake and Elwood's musical odyssey.

"1060 West Addison" might be the most famous Chicago address that isn't actually an address—it's Wrigley Field. And, we learn in a traffic stop that sets off a citywide car chase, it’s listed on Elwood Blues’ residence on his driver’s license. The Blues Brothers hit theaters 45 years ago this June, but that throwaway gag still makes Chicagoans smile. It captures something essential about how our city works: Chicagoans navigate by landmarks, not just street numbers, and everyone worth knowing gets the ballpark reference.

My argument for the primacy of this film isn't about the comedic car chases, peerless soundtrack, or insanely memorable one-liners. My argument, quite simply, is that, in The Blues Brothers, Chicago isn't some movie set or even mere backdrop—it's a character, a collaborator, hell, it’s a co-conspirator in Jake and Elwood's mission from God.

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The City as Character

Most movies use cities like stage sets. Directors of photography who scout Chicago tend to seek out a few iconic shots—the Bean, the skyline, maybe Navy Pier—and call it a day. (Looking at you, iconic Lake Shore Drive in When Harry Met Sally . . . where you are actually driving in the wrong direction from your purported destination.) The Blues Brothers does something different: it makes Chicago an active participant in the story. When Jake and Elwood need to escape, the city provides Lower Wacker Drive, that shadowy underworld skulking beneath the real streets. When they need to jump a drawbridge, Chicago opens one up along 95th Street. And when they need a hiding spot, it offers up Wrigley Field as scent-throwing sanctuary, a landmark that confounds the State Patrol and the Illinois Nazi Party (Jake and Elwood are resolute in their hatred of Illinois Nazis).

This isn't just movie making, it's neighborhood knowledge in action. Elwood Blues navigates Chicago the way locals do: through shortcuts and back alleys, through an intimate understanding of how the city's geography can work for you if you know it well enough. He's that friend we all have (or want to be) who knows every parking trick, every alternate route, every way to make the city bend to your needs.

The movie captures something social scientists call "cognitive mapping," or the ways people actually move through and understand urban spaces. Academic researchers might study it through surveys and GIS data, but The Blues Brothers shows it in action. This is the difference between knowing a city and truly knowing a city.

Maxwell Street and the Music

Take the Maxwell Street Market scene, where Jake and Elwood find Aretha Franklin working at Soul Food Cafe (after casually passing John Lee Hooker on the street singing his iconic "Boom, Boom, Boom"). Maxwell Street was Chicago's legendary open-air market, a place where Eastern European immigrants, Black migrants from the South, and Mexican families all converged to buy, sell, and—crucially—make music (among a great many other things). It is a central and sacred space in the history of Chicago blues, where musicians like Muddy Waters and Little Walter first plugged in electric guitars.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times, “Maxwell Street shines on the big screen — but it’s now ‘Anytown U.S.A.,’ critics say”

By 1980, when the movie was filmed, Maxwell Street was already under threat from urban renewal. The University of Illinois at Chicago would eventually demolish much of the original market area. Today, the space is all but unrecognizable. But the movie captures something essential about that space and its deep history: how music, commerce, and community intersected on those chaotic streets. When Aretha sings "Think," she's channeling the spirit of a place, the rhythm of its daily life.

The cultural appropriation critique of the film deserves serious consideration: two white comedians did center themselves in a story about Black music. But even this tension reflects something deeper about how Chicago has always worked, as a place where different communities collide, collaborate, and sometimes exploit each other. The movie's integrated cast wasn't political correctness, it reflected the actual Chicago blues scene of the 1980s, where white and Black club owners, Black musicians, and integrated audiences created something that couldn't exist anywhere else. Some appropriation happened, but so did the preservation and celebration of the music.

The Politics of Place

The Blues Brothers is surprisingly political for a comedy. Those Illinois Nazis I mentioned earlier? Well, as the Chicago copper who pulls over Elwood says, “Those bums won their court case, so they're marching today." It’s not a gimmick but a deep reference to the 1978 Supreme Court case National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, in which actual Nazis intending march through the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb were allowed to do so in the name of free speech. The court made its ruling, but the movie made a statement captured not just by Jake’s retort, “I hate Illinois Nazis,” but, more importantly, what happens next: when Nazis show up to Chicago, decent people don't debate them, they drive them off bridges (the bridge in this scene is located in Jackson Park, by the way).

Later, when the Nazimobile plummets into the Chicago River and one Nazi tells another "I've always loved you," the film skewers both homophobia and fascism in one perfectly timed gag. For a movie about guys in sunglasses trying to save an orphanage, it takes some pretty clear stands about what kind of city Chicago should be. This is Chicago's character distilled: a place that confronts hate with both righteous anger and dark humor, where doing the right thing doesn't require fanfare, just two guys in a 1974 Dodge Monaco on a mission from God.

How Cities Really Work

What makes this a Neighborhood Science story isn't simply its exquisite display of Chicago insider knowledge, but how The Blues Brothers understands urban dynamics. Cities (including but not only Chicago) work because people know how to navigate them, because informal networks connect seemingly unrelated places, because local knowledge gets passed down through generations. When Jake and Elwood collect their musician friends to “put the band back together,” they're rebuilding a social network that was scattered by time and circumstance (incarceration being one of the circumstances).

The famous chase through Dixie Square Mall captures another urban truth: places rise and fall, but their ghosts linger. The mall was already abandoned by the time they filmed there, a monument to suburban retail's devastating impact on urban commerce. Driving through its empty corridors becomes a metaphor for navigating the city's constant cycle of change and decay.

Even the practical filmmaking reflects Chicago's character. When director John Landis wanted to drive a car through the Cook County Building, he didn't build a set—he called City Hall. When they needed Lower Wacker for chase scenes, they were allowed to use it. The city became an active participant in its own mythmaking.

The Neighborhood Science of The Blues Brothers

Forty-five years later, Chicago has changed dramatically. Maxwell Street is gone. Many of the blues clubs have closed. Yet the L still runs, Lower Wacker still confuses tourists (and residents), Wrigley still sits at Clark and Addison, and the movie's deeper insight remains true: cities are more than buildings and streets. They're networks of people who know how to make the place work, who understand that every neighborhood has its own rhythm, its own rules, its own ways of taking care of its own.

In a city that often gets reduced to crime statistics and political scandals, The Blues Brothers offers a vision of Chicago as a place where community forms through shared knowledge, where local expertise matters, where music and mayhem can coexist on the same streets. Jake and Elwood's Chicago is a city that bends the rules for the right reasons, that opens its bridges and streets to those on a mission. That's not just fun cinema—it's the Chicago we recognize, the one we want to believe in.

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Further Investigations

Want to go deeper? Check out the original Maxwell Street Market, documented in Mike Shea's amazing collections of photos and videos on Folkstreams.net, or dive into Chicago blues history with Robert Palmer's Deep Blues or for a sociological take David Grazian’s Blue Chicago. For a good read on movie, check out Daniel de Visé’s The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic For the legal context, look up National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. And next time you're on Lower Wacker, remember: The Blues Brothers showed us the best urban stories are the ones where the city gets to be the hero.