Chicago's Polish Community
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Chicago's Polish Community
Both immigrant Poles and Americans of Polish heritage live in Chicago, Illinois. They are a part of worldwide '' Polonia'', the Polish term for the Polish Diaspora outside of Poland. Poles in Chicago have contributed to the economic, social and cultural well-being of Chicago from its very beginning. Poles have been a part of the history of Chicago since 1837, when Captain Joseph Napieralski, along with other veterans of the November Uprising first set foot there.Parot, Joseph J. ''Polish Catholics in Chicago, 1850–1920'', Northwestern University Press (1981), p. 19 As of the 2000 U.S. census, Poles in Chicago were the largest European American ethnic group in the city, making up 7.3% of the total population. However, according to the 2006–2008 American Community Survey, German Americans and Irish Americans each had slightly surpassed Polish Americans as the largest European American ethnic groups in Chicago. German Americans made up 7.3% of the population, and numbered ...
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Gateway Theatre (Chicago)
The Copernicus Center (formerly Gateway Theatre) is a 1,890-seat former movie palace that is now part of the Copernicus Center in the Jefferson Park community area of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The Copernicus Center is located at 5216 W. Lawrence Avenue. The former Gateway Theater was designed by architect Mason Rapp of the prestigious firm of Rapp and Rapp, famous for their design of deluxe theaters not only in Chicago (Chicago, Oriental, and Palace Theatres) but throughout the United States. It is the architect's only surviving atmospheric theatre in Chicago. History June 27, 1930, was the opening day for Jefferson Park's new deluxe motion picture palace. Weeklong festivities in the area leading up to the opening were capped off by a gargantuan parade sponsored by area businesses. All the Chicago dailies covered the event, and in fact, the ''Chicago Herald-Examiner'' put forth a full-page spread proclaiming the new theater as "the most acoustically perf ...
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Józef Chłopicki
Józef Grzegorz Chłopicki (; 14 March 1771 – 30 September 1854) was a Polish general who was involved in fighting in Europe at the time of Napoleon and later. He was born in Kapustynie in Volhynia and was educated at the school of the Basilians at Szarogrod, from which in 1785 he ran away in order to enlist as a volunteer in the Polish army. Chlopicki entered the army in 1785 and fought under Kościuszko in the Kościuszko Uprising, Uprising of 1794. Warsaw was surrendered to the Russians on 8 November 1794, after which Chlopicki went to France and joined the Army of the Cisalpine Republic under General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. In France he is known as Grégoire Joseph Clopicki de Necznia. He was present at all the engagements fought during 1792-1794, especially distinguishing himself at the Battle of Racławice, when he was General Franciszek Rymkiewicz's adjutant. On the formation of the Italian legion he joined the second battalion as major, and was publicly complimented ...
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Peasant
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants might hold title to land either in fee simple or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold. In some contexts, "peasant" has a pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers. As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term villain/villein. In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person". The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its c ...
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South Chicago
South Chicago, formerly known as Ainsworth, is one of the 77 community areas of Chicago, Illinois. This chevron-shaped community is one of Chicago's 16 lakefront neighborhoods near the southern rim of Lake Michigan 10 miles south of downtown. A working-class neighborhood, it is bordered by East 79th Street on the north, South Chicago Avenue (the Chicago Skyway) on the southwest, a small stretch of East 95th Street on the south. With the Calumet River on the community's southeast side, South Chicago can be considered the gateway to the Calumet Region and the first among the four Chicago neighborhoods ( East Side, Hegewisch and South Deering) that are considered by the locals as Chicago's Southeast Side. The Southeast Side is a description that the city itself continues to resist, including this neighborhood with all of Chicago's South Side communities. History Once a separate community, South Chicago began as a series of scattered Native American settlements before becoming a ...
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US Steel
United States Steel Corporation, more commonly known as U.S. Steel, is an American integrated steel producer headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with production operations primarily in the United States of America and in several countries across Central Europe. It was the 8th largest steel producer in the world in 2008. By 2018, the company was the world's 38th-largest steel producer and the second-largest in the United States behind Nucor Corporation. Though renamed USX Corporation in 1986, the company was renamed United States Steel in 2001 after spinning off its energy business, including Marathon Oil, and other assets from its core steel concern. History Formation J. P. Morgan formed U.S. Steel on March 2, 1901 (incorporated on February 25), by financing the merger of Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Steel Company with Elbert H. Gary's Federal Steel Company and William Henry "Judge" Moore's National Steel Company for $492 million ($ billion today). At one time, U. ...
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Back Of The Yards
New City is one of Chicago's 77 official community areas, located on the southwest side of the city in the South Side district. It contains the neighborhoods of Canaryville and Back of the Yards. The area was home to the famous Union Stock Yards until it closed in 1971, and the International Amphitheatre until it was demolished in 1999. Neighborhoods Back of the Yards Back of the Yards is an industrial and residential neighborhood so named because it was near the former Union Stock Yards, which employed thousands of European immigrants in the early 20th century. Life in this neighborhood was explored in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel ''The Jungle''. The area was formerly part of the town of Lake until it was annexed by Chicago in 1889. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area was occupied largely by Eastern European immigrants and their descendants, who were predominantly ethnic Lithuanian, Bohemian, Moravian, and Slovak. In the 1930s, the activist Saul Alinsk ...
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Bridgeport, Chicago
Bridgeport is one of the 77 community areas in Chicago, on the city's South Side, bounded on the north by the South Branch of the Chicago River, on the west by Bubbly Creek, on the south by Pershing Road, and on the east by the Union Pacific railroad tracks. Neighboring communities are Pilsen across the river to the north, McKinley Park to the west, Canaryville to the south, and Armour Square to the east. Bridgeport has been the home of five Chicago mayors. Once known for its racial intolerance, Bridgeport today ranks as one of the city's most diverse neighborhoods. History Bridgeport was initially called the " Portage de Checagou" (or Portage des Chenes), and Fr. Jacques Marquette and trader Louis Joliet traveled through in 1673. It technically remained under French control until 1763, then British control until 1783 or 1795 (since British traders based out of Detroit or Canada used it). A settler named Charles Lee or Leigh came from Virginia and settled along the so ...
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Union Stockyards
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world," the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades. The yards became inspiration for literature, and social reform. The stockyards became the focal point of the rise of some of the earliest international companies. These refined industrial innovations and influenced financial markets. Both the rise and fall of the district reflect the evolution of transportation services and technology in America. The stockyards have become an integral part of the popular culture of Chicago's history ...
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Lower West Side, Chicago
Lower West Side is a community area on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is three miles southwest of the Chicago Loop and its main neighborhood is Pilsen (). The Heart of Chicago is a neighborhood in the southwest corner of the Lower West Side. History In the late 19th century, Pilsen was inhabited by German, Polish, Italian, and Czech immigrants. Czech immigrants were the most prominent and named the district after Plzeň, the fourth largest city in what is now the Czech Republic. They replaced the Germans and Irish who had settled there before them, in the mid-nineteenth century. These German and Irish residents lived in poor conditions throughout the 1850s and ‘60s. The Pilsen area was overcrowded and suffered from flooding, lack of indoor plumbing, and illness. A cholera outbreak that killed hundreds, eventually led the German and Irish residents to move in search of better living conditions. The population also included smaller numbers of other et ...
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Polish Downtown, Chicago
Polish Downtown was Chicago's oldest and most prominent Polish settlement. Polish Downtown was the political, cultural and social capital of not only Poles in Chicago but Polish Americans throughout North America as well. Centered on Polonia Triangle at the intersection of Division, Ashland and Milwaukee Avenue, the headquarters for almost every major Polish organization in the United States was clustered within its vicinity, beginning with the Polish National Alliance to the '' Polish Daily News''. Description Located on the city's near northwest side, the area of Polish Downtown shifted and expanded over time as Polish immigration to Chicago exploded along with other Eastern Europeans amid Chicago's population boom in the late nineteenth century. Historian Edward R. Kantowicz gave the following boundaries for Polish Downtown: Racine Avenue to the east, Fullerton Avenue to the North, Kedzie Avenue to the West and Grand Avenue to the South. The historian Dominic Pacyga notes ...
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Milwaukee Avenue (Chicago)
North Milwaukee Avenue is a street in the city of Chicago and the northern suburbs. Route description True to its name, the street, which began as a Native American trail, eventually leads north to the state of Wisconsin and through Kenosha and Racine towards Milwaukee, though not directly. Starting with a short section at N. Canal and W. Lake Streets, it begins in earnest at the corner of N. Des Plaines and W. Kinzie Streets and heads northwest for about before joining Skokie Highway ( U.S. Route 41) in Gurnee, Illinois, which eventually merges at Interstate 94 where Skokie Highway and the Tri-State Tollway split off, continuing to Milwaukee. From Harlem Avenue northwards it is Illinois Route 21. Milwaukee Avenue is a popular route for bicyclists. The southeastern end of Milwaukee Avenue is the most heavily bicycled stretch of road in Chicago, with cyclists accounting for 22% of all traffic there on a randomly selected day in September. The street is lined with storefront ...
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Polish Triangle
Polonia Triangle ( pl, Trójkąt Polonijny), also known as the Polish Triangle, is located in West Town, in what had been the historical Polish Downtown area of Chicago. A single-tiered fountain made of black iron with a bowl about nine feet in diameter is installed at its center. Polonia Triangle derives its name from the Polish word ''Polonia'', which means ' Polish diaspora'. Polonia Triangle was considered to be the center or town square of Chicago's Polish Downtown, the city's oldest and most prominent Polish settlement. In many ways it functioned as the capital of the American Polonia with the headquarters for almost every major Polish organization in the United States clustered within its vicinity. It is bound by Division, Ashland and Milwaukee Avenue. Organisations located within its vicinity include the Polish National Alliance to the Polish Daily News. Polonia Triangle is one of 11 neighborhoods included in ''The Labor Trail'' which chronicles Chicago's histor ...
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