The artists arrived and opened galleries, but many left for lack of foot traffic. Depending on who you ask, this was either intended to:Ī) Revitalize the nearly vacant eastern half of an economically depressed neighborhood by creating spaces where exciting young artists could live, work, and exhibit, a "SoHo in Chicago" ī) Jump-start the process of gentrification that happened in Wicker Park several years earlier, driving up property values by exchanging low-income residents for wealthier ones looking to trade on that artistic "cool."
And with the city's once-thriving West Side Italian community mostly wiped out by that same construction, a single block of the industrial Heart of Chicago neighborhood drew new focus as a place where Italian Chicago survived, remaining today as an alternative to the more heavily touristed Little Italy near the university.įears of gentrification began several years ago when the Podmajersky company began converting the old warehouses of East Pilsen into cheap studios for artists. Though they inherited an area in economic decline, Pilsen's new residents built a set of cultural institutions that far outpace many wealthier neighborhoods, crowned by the excellent National Museum of Mexican Art. Meanwhile, many of the original Eastern European residents relocated to the suburbs due to government policies encouraging suburbanisation of the white population, while at the same de facto banning non-whites from the suburbs and confining them to the inner cities. In the 1960s, the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago displaced a community of Mexicans from the Near West Side, and many resettled in Pilsen. As Pilsen escaped relatively unscathed from the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, many of the buildings here are among the oldest in the city. Adalbert's and Thalia Hall loom over buildings with colorful turrets and dashes of ornamentation completely absent of the Prairie School influence found elsewhere in Chicago. The streets of Pilsen still bear their mark - weathered stone castles like St. Those industries attracted Czech and Polish immigrants next, and in the late 1800s, the neighborhood was named in honor of the city back in the former's home in Bohemia. The first Europeans to settle Pilsen were Irish and German immigrants, who came to work at the factories and stockyards nearby. Marked by riches in art and historic architecture and occupied by a community that's fiercely proud of where they live, this neighborhood is at once distinctly Chicagoan and something entirely unique. Only a few minutes from the center of Chicago by train, Pilsen is a working-class predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood.
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