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c. 1890 — 1940
West of the downtown grid, the city grew as a factory floor's housing: the Polish, Hungarian and Belgian families who staffed Oliver, Studebaker and the woolen mills built a series of named parish neighborhoods — St. Adalbert's, St. Stanislaus's, St. Casimir's, St. Hedwig's, St. Patrick's, St. Mary's of the Assumption — whose settlement history stands whole in the communities file. What stands here is the plat under the parishes, and the record at addition level is thinner for this ground than for any other in the city: the directories and the plat literature reached do not name the proprietors of the west side's working subdivisions at the strength they name Taylor's Field or Sunnymede, and the gap is printed rather than filled. What the record does carry at full strength is the course: the gridded streets named in part for the Poles' own heroes — Pulaski, Kosciuszko, Sobieski, in the communities file's account — filled between about 1890 and 1940 with small frame bungalows, two-flat workers' cottages and the parish complexes that anchored each block, and the district's two great wounds are the renewal era's: the Chapin Street clearance of the inner west side, 116 families displaced, 104 of them of color, and the LaSalle Park clearance at the neighborhood's southwest shoulder, which together stand in the government file and in the Reparatory Justice Commission's own report, which counts 606 families displaced by urban renewal across the city, about three quarters of them families of color.
Sources:
- Communities and Government, this record (the parish neighborhoods, the street names, the Chapin Street and LaSalle Park clearances, the Reparatory Justice Commission's count) — banked fragments