By Mark Dawson
Contributing Writer
If you were to tell your friends tonight “Let’s have dinner in Greek Town,” you would be understood to be asking to dine on Halsted St., west of the Loop. If your father had said to his friends “Let’s have dinner in Greek Town” 50 years ago, he and his pals would have met on Halsted St., too. In between, for a brief period in the 1970s and 1980s, an invitation to dinner in Greek Town might have landed the eager party at the corner of Lawrence and Western avenues instead. For a time, Lawrence and Western avenues enjoyed the largest concentration of Greeks in the city of Chicago. It was fun while it lasted.
Lincoln Square had a very early Greek presence that apparently served as a nucleus for the new Greek Town that formed later. In the 1920s and 1930s Germans and Irish dominated Lincoln Square, but Greek merchants bought commercial property at the corner of Western and Lawrence avenues as early as 1905, and had a variety of ice cream parlors, grocery stores, bakeries, and other businesses in the area by the 1920s.
The St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox parish was established near Carmen and Washtenaw avenues in 1928. The Adinamis Funeral Home at Lawrence and Talman avenues served the local Greek community in the 1920s, as did the Hollywood, Presto, California, and Legion restaurants.
The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) had a chapter at Lawrence and Western avenues in the 1920s, one of 10 chapters in Chicago, and the Sons of Pericles, a youth organization, attracted 900 boys, including many from the neighborhood. They played All Star games against Sons of Pericles chapters from New York at Wrigley Field. The local Greek American Legion Post in the 1950s was the fifth largest post in the state of Illinois.
Greeks started migrating to Chicago from their homeland shortly after the Great Chicago Fire, though the first waves were of men and boys, seeking to save money to send home. Women started emigrating, and making homes in Chicago, after 1900. In those early days about 40 percent of the Greek immigrants returned to the Greek islands, and between 1919 and 1928, Greek residents of Chicago sent some $52 million to their relatives back home.
The Chicago Herald & Examiner estimated that in the late 1920s Greeks owned some 10,000 businesses in the city, including 500 in the Loop, and they dominated the city’s restaurant trade, ice cream manufacturing, and fruit and vegetable vending, earning some $2 million a day. The waves of immigration largely ended in the early 1920s with restrictive immigration laws passed by Congress. Migration picked up again in the late 1940s, as Greeks fled their homeland both from the devastation of World War II and from the civil war that followed.
Later, when the University of Illinois campus was built in the early 1960s at Halsted and Harrison streets, some 50,000 people lost their homes, including about 30,000 Greeks. Many of these Greeks migrated north and west to help create a new Greek Town near the corners of Rockwell St. and Lawrence Ave. Still others migrated from Greece itself to the neighborhood in the early ‘70s in response to political oppression at home.
According to John Schwenk, who was born on Leland Avenue in 1918 and lived there until his death in 2001, the Greeks seem to have displaced a fairly large Cuban community. “All of the sudden, there were no more Cubans,” he said. “It was all Greek.”
Starting about 1970 and continuing for five or six years at least, 15 to 20 Greek families a month moved into the area bounded by Western Ave., the Chicago River, Foster Ave., and Wilson Ave., buying up more than half of the buildings in the community from the original German and Irish residents. They offered good prices, and often paid in cash.
Like their forebears these Greeks were entrepreneurs, opening restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, grocery stores, and many other businesses, catering to a national fad at the time for sounds and flavors from the Greek islands. The Family House, Grecian Psistaria, and Deni’s Den restaurants all kept Lawrence Ave. lively, while the Athens Nightclub, on Western Ave. south of Lawrence Ave., offered belly dancing.
The men worked in the restaurants and businesses, the women worked in factories or cashiering, everybody put in long hours, and everybody saved their money. So the Greeks prospered quickly, but their success hastened the decline of the original German community in Lincoln Square. Older locals complained that the Germans were moving to the suburbs, and leaving the old neighborhood behind for their new Greek neighbors. Actually, the Greeks were doing that too, moving out almost as quickly as they moved in, abandoning Lawrence and Western avenues for places like Des Plaines and North Park. But the Greek influx to Lincoln Square continued, both from other parts of the city and from Greece itself. For the German community, in contrast, immigration from Germany ended abruptly with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and never recovered.
But the new Greek Town didn’t last long. By the summer of 1974, the area from Wilson to Foster avenues and from the Chicago River to Western Ave. had the largest concentration of Greek citizens in the city, and the metropolitan area had more Greeks than anywhere else on earth except for Athens and Salonika. At that point there were too many Greek businesses for all of them to expect to survive.
The tendency continued for Greeks to view Lincoln Square as a temporary place to live until they could buy homes with big lawns, but the migration into the community slowed down. The 1980 census showed that 24,000 Greeks lived in the Lincoln Square area, out of 56,000 Greeks in the city. The Lincoln Square census tract was 22 percent German in 1980, 12.8 percent Irish, and 10 percent Greek. By the next census, however, most of the young Greeks in the area had moved to the suburbs, leaving behind a handful of Greek restaurants, men’s clubs, and shops, largely run by Greeks middle-aged or older.
St. Demetrios shrank from a height of 1500 families in the mid 1970s, when it was the largest Greek Orthodox Church in the country, to about 600 families in 1991. John Schwenk observed that the Greek transition was swift. “It seems just as fast as they came, they left.”
A Greek presence survives in Chicago, and in Lincoln Square. In 1996 an estimated 60,000 Greeks lived in the city (twice as many lived in the suburbs), and St. Demetrios had grown back to about 900 families. But Greek Town at Western and Lawrence avenues appears to be gone forever, perhaps mostly because Greek citizens are no longer moving to the United States in significant numbers. Still, the broader Greek community continues to work hard, save their money, and prosper in their adopted homeland.
This article by Mark Dawson originally appeared in The Greek Star Oct. 23, 2002, and was updated Dec. 17, 2002, for Inside.
Sources include an article in the Chicago Tribune Magazine from Aug. 4, 1974, and “The Ethnic Handbook,” published by the Illinois Ethnic Coalition in 1996, Cynthia Linton, editor.
Material was also gathered from interviews of local senior citizens, including Dean Adinamis and John Schwenk in 1996, now both deceased. |
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