Sicilian and Neapolitan Settlement · Hull House · Demolished 1963 · A Neighbourhood in Exile
One of America's great Italian communities — erased by urban renewal, preserved in memory
| Period of Settlement | 1880s–1963 (community dispersed after demolition) |
| Primary Origins | Sicily (especially Palermo and the western provinces), Naples, Calabria |
| Key Streets | Halsted Street, Blue Island Avenue, South Loomis — now largely UIC campus |
| Anchor Institution | Hull House (Jane Addams, est. 1889) — documented the neighbourhood's immigrant life |
| Destruction | University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) campus construction, 1963 — cleared 55 city blocks |
| Displacement | Families moved to Elmwood Park, Melrose Park, Addison, Cicero, Oak Park |
In the decades before the University of Illinois demolished it, Chicago's Near West Side was one of the largest and most densely settled Italian-American communities in the United States. From roughly Harrison Street south to Roosevelt Road, and from the Chicago River west toward Ashland Avenue, a landscape of two-flats and storefront businesses housed what the 1930 census estimated at more than 50,000 Italian-American residents — the concentrated product of four decades of chain migration from Sicily, Naples, Calabria, and Abruzzo.
The neighbourhood's commercial spine ran along Blue Island Avenue and the streets surrounding Taylor Street — already then the commercial heart of Italian Chicago. Italians from specific villages had clustered together with the precision that chain migration imposed: Sicilians from Palermo on certain blocks, Neapolitans and Campanians on others, Calabrians and Abruzzese on others still. The boundaries were not absolute, but they were understood. A researcher reading the naturalization records of families from one block of South Halsted Street in 1920 will often find that they came from the same three or four villages in the province of Palermo.
By the 1920s, the Near West Side had produced a self-sufficient Italian-American world: Italian-language newspapers, Italian mutual aid societies, Italian Catholic parishes, Italian restaurants and food producers (the Italian beef sandwich, which became one of Chicago's defining culinary exports, was invented here, in the delicatessens and lunch counters that served the neighbourhood's factory workers). The neighbourhood was not wealthy, but it was functional — a place where an Italian immigrant family could live, work, worship, and die without speaking much English, if they chose.
The Near West Side's most enduring legacy, paradoxically, is the documentation produced by people who were not Italian. Hull House, the settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, was located at the heart of the neighbourhood, and its residents spent three decades studying and recording the immigrant community around them.
The Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) produced the first systematic neighbourhood map of ethnicity and income in an American city — a block-by-block record of who lived where in the Near West Side in the mid-1890s. For genealogists, it provides a reference point for locating families in the years before the 1900 census. The Hull House collection, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (one of the successors of the neighbourhood it destroyed), includes oral history interviews, photographs, and case records that document individual families with a specificity that official records rarely achieve.
Jane Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Her documentation of the neighbourhood's immigrant life — the women's labour, the mutual aid networks, the Catholic parish structure, the specific languages spoken on specific blocks — is one of the most detailed records of early Italian-American urban life that exists.
The decision to site the new University of Illinois campus on the Near West Side was not inevitable. Several locations were considered, including a suburban site and a location in a less inhabited area of the city. The Near West Side was chosen, according to Mayor Richard J. Daley's administration, because the land was "blighted." Its residents, who had lived there for three generations and built a functioning community, were not consulted.
Between 1961 and 1963, 55 city blocks were cleared. Approximately 14,000 residents were displaced — the largest urban renewal project in Chicago's history at that point, and one of the most controversial in American urban history. The demolition removed not just housing but the entire physical infrastructure of community life: the churches (several Italian parishes were demolished), the social clubs, the businesses, the school buildings, the streets themselves.
The families displaced from the Near West Side scattered across Chicago's western suburbs. Elmwood Park, Melrose Park, Addison, Cicero, and Oak Park absorbed large numbers of Near West Side Italian families in the 1960s and 1970s. This diaspora-within-a-diaspora created a generation of Italian-Americans who had left Italy for Chicago, built a community in the Near West Side, and then been forced by government action to move again — carrying their institutions (the feast societies, the parish loyalties, the food traditions) with them into the suburbs.
The Taylor Street corridor — the section of the Near West Side that was not demolished, and which borders what is now the UIC campus — retained its Italian character and maintains it today. Taylor Street from Halsted west to Western Avenue is still recognisably Italian in its restaurants, its pastry shops (Ferrara Bakery, est. 1908, is one of the oldest Italian bakeries in the United States), and its feast calendar. The Our Lady of Pompeii church, the Near West Side's primary Italian Catholic parish, survived the demolition and still serves the community.
The Near West Side Italian community's survival as a living culture in Taylor Street, and its dispersal as a demographic community into the western suburbs, is the defining paradox of its history. The physical neighbourhood was destroyed. The cultural community was not.
The parish records for the demolished Italian churches — including Santa Maria Addolorata and Saint Francis of Assisi — were transferred to the Archdiocese of Chicago's records office. The Chicago History Museum holds the Hull House Papers and many Near West Side community organisation records. The Special Collections at the University of Illinois at Chicago Library holds urban renewal documentation including oral histories collected from displaced residents.
Chicago naturalization records (1906 onward, held at the National Archives in Chicago) typically include country and province of birth; the "first papers" (declaration of intent) filed after 1906 often give the specific comune. World War I draft cards (1917–18, available at Ancestry) record birthplace and are frequently more specific than census entries. Once you have the comune, the Italian Stato Civile records — freely accessible at Antenati.san.beniculturali.it — provide multi-generational family data.
The primary destination suburbs were Elmwood Park, Melrose Park, Addison, Cicero, and Oak Park. Many families maintained connections to the Taylor Street area through the feast calendar and family businesses that survived the demolition. The 1970 census for these suburbs contains a high concentration of Near West Side surnames and household structures consistent with the displaced community.
Love Italy connects Italian-Americans and the Italian diaspora worldwide to the culture, history, and regions that shaped their families — wherever they settled.
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