Empty Faces: How Chicago’s Polish downtown had its heritage washed away over time
This story originally appeared in the September 2018 print edition of Fourteen East Magazine
For many Chicagoans, the 100th anniversary of Polish independence, celebrated this year, might not be the most relevant event on their radar. But a walk around the old Polish downtown in Chicago’s northwest side is full of reminders why this city continues to celebrate American Polonia, despite gradual washing away of the area’s ethnic history into what is now Wicker Park.
With 70,000 Polish immigrants — nearly 30% of the total Polish population in the U.S. — Chicago is home to the largest number of Poles in the country. When they began arriving in the area in large numbers around the start of the twentieth century, they settled in 5 main clusters around the city, the most populous being West Town.
The borders of the Polish Triangle were slowly encroached on until the area became unanimously known as “Wicker Park” among Chicagoans. Relative to Chicago being the most racially segregated city in the country, post-gentrified West Town represents a cosmopolitan mix of groups. Now touted as the cities hipster hub, there is always something new and fun to do in West Town.
“This neighborhood was absolutely the cradle of the Polish community,” says Barbara Kozuchowska, tour guide and assistant at the Polish Museum of American who has lived in West Town since the sixties. “Right now, that no longer exists.”
While modernity flourishes around the streets of Ashland, Division, and Milwaukee, large institutions, churches, and buildings, loom over the Polish Triangle, their dark, stone facades imploring pedestrians to ponder what once stood before the plastic, bright and disposable.
“It happens slowly. First you see some old stores have shuttered up, restaurants closing, and then I realized I was hearing Polish less and less on the streets.” says Ania Cooper, who immigrated to Chicago from Krakow at age 25 in the mid-1980s.
Cooper settled in West Town, before marrying a natural citizen and moving to the northwestern suburb of Crystal Lake to raise her two children. On her visits back to her old neighborhood in the city, she’s always curious to see what has changed. “It’s sort of insidious, the slow way that it happens. Doesn’t give you the good chance to notice it.”
“The only thing that remains are some of the buildings” Kozuchowska says. The culturally Polish institutions which remain are of the lofty, impermeable, charitable sort: mainly churches (such as St. Stanislaus Kostka), charities (like the Polish Lions of America and the Polish Women’s Alliance), and scholastic structures like the Polish Museum and Library.
Census records show that the population of Poles living in the West Town has steady decreased since about 1930. The decline started small then picked up rapidly after World War II, for many reasons.
Poles in Chicago participated in the wave of white flight which took place in urban America after the post-WWII housing boom. They moved Northwest, to communities like Palatine and Avondale. This spread outward became easier with the construction of the Kennedy Expressway in the 1970s, which sliced through vital centers of many communities on Chicago’s West Side.
As the Polish left, other groups started coming in and replacing them. Many Puerto Ricans and Mexicans who had settled in Old Town and Wicker Park were displaced by the new construction and moved westward. Once majority Polish, West Town has been, for almost two decades, majority Hispanic — at about 60 percent of the area’s residents.
Despite the culture shift that has happened right outside its door over the past decades, very little has changed inside of Podhalanka, the family-owned restaurant which has sat on the Polish triangle for over 30 years.
Podhalanka might seem like a time capsule to Chicagoans who aren’t used to being a minority English speaker in a room full of Polish chatter. The restaurants menu and interior has changed little in decades, making one of the last long standing Eastern European local businesses in Chicago.
Three decades of good business in Wicker Park is something a restaurateur in Chicago dreams of. The Madej family keeps business going by not changing their formula, and adapting with the city.
“That’s why we don’t leave the area, even though it has changed. Things are good here. Business is good.” says Helena Madej, Podhalanka’s owner and operator of over 30 years. From her point of view, the restaurant may not have changed but the clientele has.
“In the beginning, my customers were Polish people. Not many Americans. Some Germans. After people sell house and the area goes up, now, we have neighbors, young people, students.” Madej says.
Other small businesses that were opened in the area by Polish immigrants and their descendants were not so lucky. Walking down Division Street today, it’s hard to imagine that many of the storefronts used to have Polish names, that it was once the meeting place of that specific community. The shops, markets, restaurants, laundromats, florists… all lost in time.
“I love this one building that sits on Milwaukee facing the Polish Triangle, it’s all boarded up now but you can see this word — starsiak — on the facade.” Kożuchowska says. “The word means tailor. There were once two men who owned a sewing shop there, one Jewish and one Polish.”
Kozuchowska and I talk about how we both hope someone looks up at that and it makes them curious. What does that word mean? Who put it there and why? And, maybe, they might be curious enough to dig deeper and learn the answer.
The answers for someone looking into a sign like starsiak would likely lie in the archives of the Polish Museum of America and it’s connecting library. Their collections on history of Poles in Chicago is extensive.
A museum can only collect things, not the people and faces who owned them. Whether or not it was intended, the solitude experienced inside the museum coupled with the hollowness of the artifacts makes a striking experience as a visitor.
The halls of the museum itself are often empty, guestbook entries are few and far between. Kozuchowska tells me the museum staff busies themselves mostly with renting out their main ballroom for private events. Yet it still stands as a stone monument, sacred enough to protect all of its artifacts inside, probably never to be moved.
How does a community erase their sidewalk of the memory of those who walked before them? The answer lies somewhere between human design, and the complicated nuances of cultural assimilation.
Years after the Kennedy Expressway broke up the center of the Polish Donwtown, the city of Chicago infuriated many Polonians with an attack on the geographical heart of the neighborhood, the Polish Triangle, and the naming of the Nelson Algren Memorial Fountain.
Nelson Algren was an American author who wrote extensively about the city of Chicago, and called West Town home for most of his life. However his book “Never Came Morning” (1942) was condemned by leaders in the Polish community of Chicago upon its release, who said Algren promoted anti-Polish stereotypes, and even sent the book to the FBI as evidence of Anti-Polonism. The city of Chicago had the novel banned from it’s libraries for almost 20 years.
In 1981, shortly after Algren’s death, the city of Chicago decided to rename Evergreen St., located in West Town and the home of the author’s final residence, to Algren St. The decision was massively controversial and almost immediately reversed.
Nearly 20 years later, in 1998, Algren’s literary fans petitioned to have the Polish Triangle renamed in commemoration of the author. Leaders of the Polish community, including the Polish Museum of America, spoke out against this, saying it was erase the history of that important piece of land. An agreement was reached in where the Polish Triangle name was kept, and a newly installed fountain was named the Nelson Algren Fountain.
“We felt that that was somewhat unfair” said Kozuchowska, speaking on behalf of the Polish theater and literary circles of the area that she operated within at that time on t. The Polish community expressed their discontent to the city that a monument in such a historic place, so important to that community, should be dedicated to someone outside of that context entirely. “It should be ours, it should be named after one of our distinguished countrymen who contributed here” says Kozuchowska.
Today, the fountain and triangle stand on top of each other, forced to cooperate despite the different aspects of that community represent. It remains a sign for people to reflect on the sacrifices the Polish have had to make to keep some degree of their territory in the ever-changing cityscape which often looks forward before looking behind.
The loss of an identity from a community is a process that manifests itself slowly, like a pick chipping away at marble a millimeter at a time, and months later revealing a statue entirely different in meaning from the stone block which once stood.
And we are left to wonder where all these people and their identities have gone, having left so slowly it was like they tiptoed.
“It could be as a sign that the Polish neighborhood goes away because they become less and less Polish. They no longer need that specific area to feel community.” says Cooper, reflecting on her own move from the geographical Polish community center.
The change in identity that the streets of Ashland, Division, and Milwaukee have underwent can be both lamented as a cultural loss and understood as a natural step in the complicated process of urban spread.
“When we moved north and west, we displaced someone else, and they moved somewhere else, farther, to the suburbs or wherever,” says Kozuchowska. “Maybe it is a natural kind of process.”
The story of Polonia in Chicago contains many elements which have been experienced by other ethnic immigrant groups in the city’s history, becoming tropes in the ever-changing map of gentrification in urban America.
Referring to the construction of the Kennedy Expressway, Kozuchowska says that “for the Polish community there was some harm done, but with the others — the Italians and the Irish — there was nothing to pick up after themselves.
Kozuchowska is right about how Polonians are not alone in having their ethnic history lost from certain Chicago streets, as the Irish and Italian communities have likely even less of their heritage still standing in the city.
But what she views as a loss others could say is a symbol of positive change — a sign that these groups have successfully assimilated into the melting pot enough so that they no longer need a specific geographical place that makes them feel like they have a place in that city.
Compare, for example, the history of the Polish, Irish, Italian, and Czech immigrant communities with the ethnic neighborhoods of Pilsen, Chinatown, and Little India. Do white-passing groups have it easier in eventually growing out of the need for an ethnic community?”
“My mom is Polish and so am I,” says Josh Cooper, “But since I’m second generation I basically just consider myself American at this point.
“I wonder if it would be different if I was the son of a Chinese or Indian immigrant and not Polish. If I would have had such an easy time abandoning my Polish identity for an American one”
Kozuchowska tells me, “At the museum recently we received this box of medals from Polish war heroes from the twentieth century. And here was this box of medals, all sitting together with no necks to go around. Who was this medal for? Someone had done something important enough to cast into metal, to create something permanent in the world that would last. They were made from real metals, not something disposable, which is why they ended up in a museum and not a dumpster. But here is this medal — now, where is the face? Where is the body? Where have the people gone?”
