A history of Pilsen from wikipedia.com
Pilsen is a neighborhood made up of the residential sections of the Lower West Side community area of Chicago. In the late 19th century Pilsen was inhabited by Czech immigrants who named the district after Plzeň, the fourth largest city in what is now the Czech Republic. The population also included in smaller numbers other ethnic groups from the Austro-Hungarian Empire including Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Austrians, as well as immigrants of Polish and Lithuanian heritage. Many of the immigrants worked in the stockyards and the surrounding factories. As many early 20th Century American urban neighborhoods, however, Pilsen was home to the wealthy as well as the working class and doctors lived next to maids and laborers amongst businessmen with the whole area knitted together based on the ethnicities, mostly of Slavic descent, who were not readily welcome in other areas of the city.
Development adjacent to Pilsen grew significantly on its northern border over the past decade with new construction as well as restoration of National Historic Register properties such as the 800+ unit South Water Market, an old concrete cold storage warehouse, and the Chicago Housing Authority‘s plan for transformation of the ABLA projects. That development has now spilled over into Pilsen proper with the now nearly complete Chantico Loft development, Union Row Townhomes as well as the defunct Centro 18 on 18th Street in East Pilsen. Infill construction of condominiums and single family homes is now in full force on the east side of the neighborhood as Pilsen becomes one of the next major development area for that type of infill construction.[citation needed] Some local advocacy groups have formed urging the neighborhood’s alderman to curtail gentrification to preserve the Mexican-American cultural and demographic dominance. These groups have met with limited success, as many of the neighborhood’s property owners are in favor of redevelopment and increasing property values, as well as increasing the diversity of the area both ethnically and economically. However, Pilsen became a National Historic Register District on February 1, 2006 at the behest of the alderman.[4]
18th Street is an active commercial corridor, with Mexican bakeries, restaurants, and groceries though the principal district for Mexican shopping is 26th Street in Little Village, Chicago’s other formerly majority Pan-Slavic community, which is currently the main area of successful Mexican immigrant commerce. The east side of the neighborhood along Halsted Street is one of Chicago’s largest art districts, and the neighborhood is also home to the National Museum of Mexican Art. St Adalbert’s dominates over the skyline with the opulence typical of churches in the Polish Cathedral style. Pilsen is also famous for its murals. The history of the murals is often misspoken of as a purely Mexican cultural type which is historically and factually inaccurate.[citation needed] The original murals in Pilsen along 16th Street started as a cooperative effort between Slavs and Mexicans when the neighborhood was undergoing change.[citation needed] If one looks closely one finds amongst the latter Mexican images the earlier ones which are decidedly non-Mexican and include storks, scenic European farms, and lipizzaner horses.
