"Everyone had just come from somewhere”

"Everyone had just come from somewhere," wrote Edith Abbott in The Tenements of Chicago.

In 1890, Chicago was comprised of about 40% immigrants.  Like Loretta and her children, they made their way from ports of entry to Chicago to find work or join family members already there.  Some arrived with instructions and addresses pinned to their clothes and others found their way to ethnic churches that would provide the help they needed to get settled.  Different ethnicities would settle into certain neighborhoods where languages and customs were not a barrier, but rather provided a sense of familiarity in a strange land.

As early as 1850, Italians lived in Chicago, although their numbers were few. Between about 1876 and 1924, Chicago saw the greatest influx of Italians.  Most of these Italian immigrants were from the south of Italy and Sicily.  They were from a mostly agricultural background and now had to fit in to an urban environment. 

Our Italian relatives joined the one third of Chicago’s Italians that settled in “Little Italy,” bounded on the east by the South Branch of the Chicago River, on the north by West Harrison St., by Ashland Ave. on the west and Roosevelt Road or 12th Street on the south. (some descriptions have the east boundary at Morgan Street or the Kennedy Expressway and the north boundary at the Eisenhower Expressway, both expressways were built in the 1960s.)

There is still a “Little Italy” neighborhood, although much of the area has changed with the construction of the Eisenhower and Kennedy Expressways and the University of Chicago.

An excellent article, Chicago’s Italians: Immigrants, Ethnics, Achievers, 1850-1985 by Dominic Candeloro.