About Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood

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The Pilsen Neighborhood is located Lower West Side of Chicago, extending approximately from Western Avenue and Blue Island Avenue to Sixteenth Street and Canal Street. (Pero.) Today Pilsen has transformed into a colorful, artistic, and beautiful community with the population majority shifted towards the Hispanic. Over the course of these years Pilsen has gone through many changes ranging from cultural to economic and societal changes that have shaped into its present day form. Pilsen’s residents have resisted attempts to gentrify their neighborhood, and have preserved the community as a gateway for Hispanic immigrants.

Pilsen bloomed from its early start in the late nineteenth century by German and Irish immigrants, followed later by Czech’s, also known as bohemians. (Mead-Lucero.) This boom was caused by the Southwestern Plank Road, which was a major trade route in construction at the time. (Pilsen.) The Czechs adopted the name Pilsen from a city in the Czech Republic known as “Plzen.” (History of Pilsen and Little Village.)

After the 1871 fire, Pilsen became a neighborhood of industry; industrial jobs became the mainstay that shaped Pilsen’s neighborhood. These jobs not only boosted the Pilsen population but also developed a community amongst the people. (Pilsen.) The Pilsen neighborhood began to boom and only continued to accelerate forward.

While there has been a shift in the communities’ ethnicity, the neighborhood has remained a working class society. Mexicans have now become the majority race in the Pilsen area, but this wasn’t always the case. Because of labor shortages during World War One, allowed many immigrants into the neighborhood, most of Mexican decadence. (Pilsen.) When UIC began expanding this further pushe...

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