In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area was occupied largely by Eastern European immigrants and their descendants, who were predominantly ethnic Lithuanian, Bohemian, Moravian, and Slovak.

[4] Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, cites the Back of the Yards as an area able to "unslum" in the 1960s, due to a beneficial set of circumstances.

This included a stabilized community base with skilled members who were willing to trade work to upgrade housing, as well as active and well-led local social and political organizations.

[5] Some time after the 1970s, when the stockyard operations closed and the number of nearby jobs decreased, many people left to move to newer housing and work in the suburbs.

The area's residents experienced the development, and then decline, of the meat packing industry, when Chicago was, in the words of Carl Sandburg, "hog butcher for the world".

They were deeply entrenched in the neighborhood, considering it their territory, and attempted to defend it against later arrivals of all races—including non-Irish White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people.