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west side and oak park 358 Pilsen/Heart of CHiCago/ little Village/lawndale The communities of Pilsen, Heart of Chicago, Little Village, and Lawndale grew up with Chicago’s industry, thriving in the 1870s when the city was becoming an industrial powerhouse and declining a century later as the manufacturing base withered away. The flats, cottages, and commercial buildings that met the needs of generations of factory workers suffer from decay and neglect, but lively areas persist in the immigrant neighborhoods, which continue to attract new arrivals. Pilsen, the oldest community, is bounded on the south by the Illinois & Michigan Canal (1848) and was developed with lumberyards and breweries; on the north, Pilsen ends at railroad tracks laid in the 1860s. Its major development occurred after the Great Fire of 1871, when burned-out industries and workers moved west. Immigrants from Bohemia were the earliest settlers, and they named the community for their homeland’s second-largest city. Polish and Yugoslavian immigrants arrived in the early twentieth century and were replaced beginning in the 1950s by Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Pilsen’s early role as a port of entry called for flats, apartments, and combination retail-residential buildings, built mostly by investors for rental. It remains a first-stop immigrant neighborhood but has also attracted artists priced out of the city’s North Side. The area has a concentration of buildings from the 1870s and 1880s, many of which feature the mansard roof characteristic of those decades. In 1875, the city’s ongoing sewer project reached the Pilsen area. This process of raising streets and sidewalks above new sewer and drainage systems left many buildings with their first floors eight to ten feet below street level. Heart of Chicago, which is west of Ashland Ave., also boomed after the 1871 fire, when industries began to cluster along the river. Germans, Poles, and Northern Italians were the major ethnic groups. The leading industry was the McCormick Reaper (later International Harvester) works at Western and In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about finding the option. Job Name: -- /359560t west side and oak park pi l se n/h e ar t o f c hi c ag o/ l i t t l e vi l l age /l awndal e 359 Blue Island Aves.; like other large employers, it is long gone. The southern stretches of both Pilsen and Heart of Chicago contain many barren former industrial sites, but the residential portions remain vital. Little Village, or La Villita, was originally known as South Lawndale and was renamed in the mid-1970s by its Mexican American majority. Both Lawndales were primarily open swamplands west of the city limits at Western Ave. in 1863, when the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad was laid out on a southwesterly course that became the boundary between the two areas. Annexed by Chicago in 1869, South Lawndale witnessed residential development around 1885, with the general westward expansion of the built-up city, but it was contained on the south and west by the accelerating development of industry. Immigrants from Bohemian Pilsen were among the first occupants of the area’s small brick houses, followed in the 1930s by Poles and since 1960 by increasing numbers of Hispanics. By 1980, the community had the city’s largest concentration of Mexicans. Ogden Ave., built in the 1850s as a plank road along the portage trail linking Lake Michigan to the Des Plaines River, largely demarcates North Lawndale. Residential development progressed westward along Roosevelt Rd., the commercial street at Lawndale’s northern edge, after 1895, when the Garfield Park elevated train inaugurated service to Cicero Ave. The bulk of the residential construction—primarily rental apartments and two-flats—took place between 1910 and 1925. The earliest occupants were Russian Jews moving from the Near West Side; in the 1920s, the area had seventy synagogues. After World War II, African Americans began following the same westward route and constituted 90 percent of the population by 1960. The West Side riots following the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. closed some businesses, and the refusal of insurance companies to renew policies closed many more. In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about finding...

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