Ukrainian Village and East Village are two slices of the same pie. Both were once farmland, in the days when plank roads connected the settlements on the city’s western frontier to downtown. Both blossomed at the turn of the century as gateways for European immigrants, with soaring Catholic churches as the focal points for the long, low surrounding blocks of modest working-class homes. Both suffered through the disinvestment and blight that ravaged American cities in the 1960s and ’70s, and both are now, in a (freighted) word, revitalized. So why, when you gaze across the dividing line of Damen Avenue, is one so strikingly different from the other?
Two years later, Father Victor Kovaletsky convened a meeting of 51 followers at what’s now 939 N. Damen to found an independent Ukrainian church. The 12-member board of the new Saint Nicholas Ruthenian Catholic Parish included, as secretary, Dr. Volodymyr Simenovych, a poet, scholar, and activist who envisioned the church as the cornerstone of a strong Ukrainian community and encouraged parishioners to buy land in the area. Myron Kuropas, in his pictorial history Ukrainians of Chicagoland, calls Simenovych—who had come from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where he edited one of the country’s first Ukrainian newspapers—”the first ethno-nationally aware Ukrainian immigrant in Chicago.” Among the parish’s bylaws was a clause stipulating that “under no conditions shall said church or its priests or pastors be ever under the jurisdiction of bishop or bishops except those of the same faith and rite.”
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Downtown banks redlined West Town for much of the mid-20th century, refusing to grant loans to (among others) would-be Ukrainian Village home owners. Founded in 1951 in a second-floor apartment at 2408 W. Chicago, Selfreliance plugged the gap, providing low-interest loans to its members, who were (and more or less still are) required to be Ukrainian by birth or marriage.
Preservationist Victoria Granacki, in her recently published Chicago’s Polish Downtown, describes Saint Stanislaus’s energetic first pastor, Reverend Vincent Michael Barzynski, as “one of the greatest organizers of Polish immigrants in Chicago and America.” In his 25-year tenure he was responsible, in one way or another, for founding 23 Polish parishes in Chicago, along with six elementary schools, two high schools, a college, and orphanages, newspapers, and a hospital—not to mention the national headquarters of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, which is still going strong at the top of the Kennedy Expressway’s Augusta ramp.
In the 1960s and ’70s both villages changed radically. To the east, construction of the Kennedy, completed in late 1960, had displaced many residents and torn holes in the sustaining network of churches, settlement houses, and neighborhood groups. And throughout West Town demographics were shifting, as Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, themselves displaced by urban renewal in Old Town and Lincoln Park, moved in. In 1960 Latinos comprised less than 1 percent of West Town’s population, but by 1970 that number was up to 39 percent; in 1990 it peaked at around 60 percent. The Puerto Rican community was (and still is) concentrated west of Ukrainian Village, along Division Street’s Paseo Boriqua, between Western and Mozart, while Mexicans clustered in East Village.
By contrast, in the 70s and 80s the institutional infrastructure that held Ukrainian Village together was in short supply east of Damen. Much of the Polish population had drifted northwest, to Avondale and beyond. The Latino community organized around issues of affordable housing and other redevelopment strategies designed to stave off displacement, but came into increasing conflict with the mostly white artists and other urban-pioneer types who by the early 80s constituted a minor but significant presence. Throw in confusing zoning, aging housing stock, and cheap mortgages and you had what Preservation Chicago president Jonathan Fine describes as “a perfect storm.”
