Taylor Street, Chicago — Little Italy and the Italian Heritage of the Near West Side

At a Glance

Location	Near West Side Chicago, centred on Taylor Street between Halsted and Western Avenue
Italian presence	1880s to present — the longest-running Italian neighbourhood in Chicago
Peak period	1900s–1950s — the era of maximum Italian population density
Regional origins	Predominantly Sicily (Palermo, Agrigento, Trapani), Calabria, and Campania; also Basilicata and Abruzzo
Known for	Italian restaurants (Al's Italian Beef, Rosebud, Vivere), the feast of Our Lady of Pompeii, the Italian immigrant neighbourhood that Hull House documented, and the greatest concentration of Italian-American food culture in Chicago
Today	Significantly gentrified but retaining Italian cultural institutions; UIC campus occupies the former southern section; the restaurant strip on Taylor Street remains active

The Great Wave — Sicilian and Southern Italian Immigration

Chicago's Little Italy was built between 1880 and 1920 by immigrants from the mezzogiorno — the Italian south — arriving in one of the largest mass migrations in American history. The Near West Side, immediately southwest of the Loop, was where many of them landed. The area already housed a mixed immigrant population; the Italians concentrated on Taylor Street and the streets surrounding it, recreating within the neighbourhood's grid the regional and even village-level identities they had brought from Italy.

The regional geography of the immigration was precise. Immigrants from Palermo settled on one block; those from Agrigento on another; Calabrians formed their own cluster. The streets of Little Italy in 1900 contained what were effectively transplanted village communities — networks of paesani, people from the same Italian town or province who had followed each other across the Atlantic and recreated the patterns of kinship and mutual obligation that had sustained them in Italy. To know which street your family lived on in Taylor Street in 1905 often tells you which province in Sicily or Calabria they came from.

The work these immigrants found was labouring work: the railroads, the construction industry, the stockyards (though Irish workers dominated the best stockyard jobs), the garment factories, and the street trades. Women worked in the garment industry or took in piecework at home. The economy of the household was collective — every working-age family member contributed. The savings from this collective effort were the capital that funded the restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, and small businesses that came in the second generation.

Hull House and the Documentation of Little Italy

Jane Addams' Hull House settlement, founded in 1889 at the edge of what would become Little Italy, produced the most extensive documentation of any immigrant neighbourhood in American history. The Hull House Maps and Papers (1895), the work of Florence Kelley and other Hull House residents, mapped the Near West Side block by block by nationality, income, and employment — and the Italian blocks around Taylor Street were recorded in granular detail.

What the Hull House documentation reveals is a neighbourhood of extraordinary density, poverty, and vitality. Tenements that housed three or four families were common. Child labour in the garment industry was near-universal. The infant mortality rate was among the highest in Chicago. And yet the neighbourhood was also a place of intense social activity — the feast days, the mutual aid societies, the church organisations, the street markets — that Hull House residents recorded with varying degrees of admiration and condescension.

The Hull House records are now a resource for Italian-American genealogists: they contain names, addresses, and employment records that can anchor a family's Chicago history. The original Hull House building at 800 South Halsted — now part of the University of Illinois at Chicago — is a museum open to the public and contains permanent exhibitions on the immigrant communities of the Near West Side.

The Feast of Our Lady of Pompeii and the Parish Life

The parish of Our Lady of Pompeii at Lytle and Lexington Streets was the spiritual centre of Sicilian Chicago. Founded in 1911 specifically to serve the Sicilian community of the Near West Side, the parish offered masses in Sicilian dialect, maintained the feste calendar of saints' days that had structured life in the towns of origin, and provided the institutional infrastructure through which the immigrant community organised its social welfare. The parish school educated the children of immigrants who spoke no English at home.

The feast of Our Lady of Pompeii — held each summer — was the most visible expression of the neighbourhood's collective religious and cultural identity. The statue of the Madonna was carried through the streets in procession, bands played, vendors sold food and religious objects, and the neighbourhood temporarily became something closer to a Sicilian town than an American city block. The feast continues today, maintained by the remaining Italian-American community of the Near West Side and attended by descendants who have long since moved to the suburbs.

The other major parish of the area, Holy Guardian Angel at Arthington and Forquer Streets, served the Calabrian and Neapolitan communities and had its own feast traditions. The competition and cooperation between the parishes — each serving a different regional community — structured the internal social organisation of Little Italy in ways that persisted for generations.

Q: Where did Chicago's Italian immigrants come from specifically? The Near West Side's Italian population was predominantly Sicilian, with the largest contingents from the provinces of Palermo, Agrigento, and Trapani. The southern blocks around Taylor Street had significant Calabrian settlement. Smaller groups came from Campania, Basilicata, and Abruzzo. This regional diversity was reflected in the distinct social organisations, mutual aid societies, and even the parish boundaries of the neighbourhood. Your family's specific street address in 1910 often indicates their Italian province of origin.

Q: What happened to Taylor Street's Italian community? The Italian community of Taylor Street experienced a series of disruptions across the 20th century. Urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s demolished large sections of the neighbourhood. The construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus in the 1960s — over significant community opposition — removed thousands of Italian-American families. The displacement accelerated the departure of Italian-American families to the western suburbs (Melrose Park, Cicero, Elmwood Park). The remaining Italian cultural presence — primarily the restaurants and Our Lady of Pompeii parish — has been maintained by descendants who return to Taylor Street as a heritage destination.

Q: Which Taylor Street restaurants have historical significance? Al's Beef at 1079 West Taylor Street — founded by Al Ferrari in 1938 — is the originator of the Italian beef sandwich, a Chicago food tradition with direct roots in the immigrant community's practice of extending expensive beef by slicing it thin and serving it in juice. The Rosebud restaurant (established 1976) on Taylor Street built its reputation on the red-sauce Italian-American cooking that was the community's own cuisine before it became a nationwide restaurant category. These establishments are not merely restaurants — they are evidence of a specific immigrant food culture.

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