Polish Downtown (Chicago)
[3] The historian Dominic Pacyga notes that this district was not exclusively Polish, and that Italians, Ukrainians, and Jews each possessed their own enclaves within the area.
East of his land stood a thickly wooded area guarding both the both banks of the nearby North Branch of the Chicago River which swung noose like around Goose Island.
Schermann's closest neighbors were other Polish settlers, perhaps landless tenant farmers, numbering approximately thirty families during the American Civil War.
[5] This rustic idyll would change dramatically as Chicago's population would grow exponentially following the American Civil War, with increased immigration from Europe.
Fueled by the dramatic expansion of industry as well as the city's central role as a transportation hub, immigrants, predominately from Eastern and Southern Europe flooded into Chicago.
[10] Much of this was due to Saint Stanislaus Kostka's first pastor, Reverend Vincent Michael Barzynski, who is described as "one of the greatest organizers of Polish immigrants in Chicago and America".
Division Street was referred to as Polish Broadway, "teeming with flophouses and gambling dens and polka clubs and workingman's bars like the Gold Star and Phyllis' Musical Inn".
Polish bars that Algren frequented for his notorious gambling, such as the Bit of Poland on Milwaukee Avenue, figured in his novels such as Never Come Morning and The Man with the Golden Arm.
His memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (Aquila Polonica Press) chronicles the author's experiences growing up among the immigrants and DP living there.
Completion of the Kennedy Expressway in 1960, whose construction had displaced many residents, disrupted the network of Polish-American churches, settlement houses, and neighborhood groups.
The Northwest Community Organization was founded in 1962 to stem white flight by promoting home ownership and integration between longtime ethnic Eastern European residents and the newcomers.
The Latino community, which had begun to organize around issues of affordable housing and other redevelopment strategies designed to stave off displacement, increasingly came into conflict with the mostly European-American artists and other urban-pioneer types.
Numerous prominent Polish-American cultural and civic institutions continue, from the Polish Museum of America to the Chopin Theatre and the Society for Arts.
