On a Sunday morning in Park Ridge, the bells of St. Paul of the Cross carry over streets of brick bungalows and wide lawns, and the queue at a Polish deli a short drive up Milwaukee Avenue runs out the door for fresh kielbasa and rye. The Poles in Park Ridge have made this affluent Chicago suburb one of the quiet capitals of Polish America, a place where the largest names in the phone book end in -ski and the old country is never far from the dinner table.
The Place
Park Ridge sits about fifteen miles northwest of downtown Chicago, in the northwest corner of Cook County, hard against the edge of O’Hare. It began as a brickyard. George Penny opened works here in 1853, and the settlement that grew around the clay pits was first called Pennyville, then Brickton.
When residents voted to incorporate the village in 1873, they chose a gentler name: Park Ridge. The bricks fired here helped rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire, and the same ridge of high ground that held the kilns kept the new town dry and desirable.
It grew into a place of large homes on broad lots, lined with old trees, with the look of a leafy New England town set down on the prairie. By the 2020 census it counted 39,656 people, a median household income of $113,809, and only 2.4 percent of families below the poverty line.
How It Became Polish
The Polish presence in Park Ridge is not an accident of the suburbs. It is the last stop on a migration that began in the heart of the city and moved steadily northwest, family by family, parish by parish, over more than a century.
The road out of the Polish Triangle
Chicago’s Polonia took root in the 1860s at the Polish Triangle, the junction of Milwaukee, Ashland and Division on the Near Northwest Side. From that dense core of cold-water flats and towering churches, Poles pushed outward along Milwaukee Avenue, the great Polish artery of the city.
The route ran through Logan Square and Avondale, then up into Irving Park, Portage Park, Jefferson Park and Norwood Park. Each generation moved a little further from the smokestacks and a little closer to a yard of its own. Milwaukee Avenue carried them the whole way, and it did not stop at the city limits.
Past Norwood Park, the avenue crosses into Niles and brushes the eastern edge of Park Ridge. For Polish families who had spent two or three generations climbing the northwest corridor, the suburb at the end of the line was the natural reward.
The post-war wave
The push gathered force after the Second World War. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 opened the door to Poles uprooted by the war, and an estimated 450,000 of them came to Chicago, drawn to a city where the language, the churches and the food were already familiar.
Many of these newcomers landed first in the older Polish neighbourhoods, then followed the established families outward. By 1950 Park Ridge had grown to roughly 16,500 residents, a great many of them Catholic, and the parishes were straining to keep up. St. Paul of the Cross, organised in 1911 by Father Augustine Scannell, broke ground on a far larger church in 1951 to hold the swelling congregation.
The Solidarity generation
A second great wave arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, as Poles fled the martial-law years and then the upheavals of the Solidarity era and the fall of communism. These immigrants were often younger, better educated, and quicker to buy into the suburbs outright.
They reinforced the corridor that the earlier generations had built. Where their grandparents’ generation had moved up Milwaukee Avenue in steps, the Solidarity-era arrivals could aim straight for Niles, Norridge and Park Ridge, settling near the delis and Polish-language Masses that were already waiting for them.
By the time the census takers counted ancestry in detail, Polish stood among the three largest reported heritages in Park Ridge, clustered with German and Irish near the top. According to Statistical Atlas figures drawn from census data, German ancestry was reported by about 22.5 percent of residents, Irish by 20.7 percent and Polish by 18.1 percent, with Italian close behind. In a town long associated with old Yankee and German Catholic stock, Polish had quietly become one of the defining strands.
The Landmarks
St. Paul of the Cross, 320 South Washington Avenue. The spiritual anchor of Catholic Park Ridge, organised by Father Augustine Scannell in 1911 and rebuilt on a grand scale after a 1951 groundbreaking. With more than 4,700 registered families and a parish school of some 650 students, it is where many Polish Park Ridge households mark their baptisms, First Communions and funerals.
The Pickwick Theatre, 5 South Prospect Avenue. An Art Deco movie palace from 1928, its hundred-foot tower crowned with a limestone sunburst and an iron lantern, designed by Roscoe Harold Zook with William McCaughey and the sculptor Alfonso Iannelli. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, its facade was once the backdrop of Siskel and Ebert’s national television show, and it remains the front door to a downtown where Polish families have gathered for generations.
Niles Polish Deli, 8705 North Milwaukee Avenue, Niles. Just over the Park Ridge line on the old migration corridor, this counter is a Saturday institution for the suburb’s Polish households. The cases hold homemade sausage and smoked meats, the shelves run to imported staples, and the bakery turns out fresh bread and pastries.
Deli 4 You Market, Niles. A family-run grocer specialising in food imported from Poland and the rest of Europe, with freshly made pierogi, a bakery of breads, cakes and homemade paczki, and deli, produce and soup counters. For Park Ridge families it is a weekly resupply of the tastes of home.
St. John Brebeuf Catholic Church, Niles. Founded in 1953 as the first Catholic parish in neighbouring Niles, with its present church completed in 1966. It keeps Polish-language Masses on its weekend schedule, drawing worshippers from across the Park Ridge and Niles border who want to pray in the language of their grandparents.
The Copernicus Center, 5216 West Lawrence Avenue, Jefferson Park. A short drive south into the city, this Polish cultural hub hosts the Taste of Polonia, one of the largest Polish festivals in the United States, held every Labor Day weekend since 1980. Each year tens of thousands stream in for the music, the beer garden and the pierogi, and a good share of them drive home afterward to Park Ridge.
Maine South High School, 1111 South Dee Road. Opened in 1964, the public high school that has educated generations of Park Ridge children, including many from Polish families climbing into the professional classes. Its most famous graduate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, walked these halls with the class of 1965, in a town then filling with the Catholic families who would reshape it.
Where They Came From
The Poles who built Chicago’s Polonia, and eventually filled the streets of Park Ridge, came in distinct waves from distinct Polands. The earliest arrivals, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, came largely from the partitioned countryside, from the Prussian, Austrian and Russian zones, peasants and labourers seeking work in the city’s stockyards, steel mills and factories.
They were drawn to Chicago by the promise of wages and the gravity of the community already there. A Polish parish, a Polish newspaper and a Polish butcher made the strange city navigable, and so each new family settled near the last.
The displaced persons of the late 1940s came from a Poland shattered by war and redrawn by the victors, refugees who could not or would not return to a country under Soviet control. The Solidarity-era immigrants of the 1980s and 1990s came from communist and then post-communist Poland, fleeing political repression and economic collapse, often arriving with skills and an eye on the suburbs.
What united them was the corridor. Whatever Poland they left, they tended to arrive into the same northwest-side neighbourhoods and follow the same avenue out toward Park Ridge, threading themselves into a chain that had been forming since the 1860s.
Park Ridge Today
Park Ridge today is a comfortable, settled suburb that wears its heritage lightly. There is no Polish quarter with banners and a parade route, no single block you could point to and call the old neighbourhood. The Polish presence is woven into the ordinary texture of the place instead.
It shows in the names on the church rolls and the school rosters, in the Polish Masses held just over the line in Niles, and in the steady Saturday traffic to the delis and markets along Milwaukee Avenue. It shows in the paczki that appear in local bakeries before Lent and the kielbasa that turns up at backyard graduations. The community has assimilated into the affluent professional life of the suburb without surrendering the small rituals that mark it as Polish.
Around them, the wider institutions of Chicago Polonia still hold. The Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, the oldest Polish American organisation in the country, traces its founding to 1873, the same year Park Ridge incorporated, and still keeps its headquarters at 984 North Milwaukee Avenue. The Taste of Polonia still fills the Copernicus Center every Labor Day. For Park Ridge’s Polish families, the old country survives not as a museum piece but as a living habit: a deli run, a Mass in Polish, a festival in late summer, and a name that has not lost its accent.
You can trace the same northwest pull in the suburbs that grew up beside Park Ridge. The story of Pakistanis in Schaumburg, Illinois follows a later generation of immigrants settling the affluent northwest, while the Greeks in Palos Hills, Illinois and the Greeks in Oak Lawn, Illinois show how another European Orthodox and Catholic community wrote its own version of the suburban climb on Chicago’s southwest side.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Polish community in Park Ridge?
Polish ancestry is among the three largest reported heritages in Park Ridge. According to Statistical Atlas figures drawn from census data, German ancestry was reported by about 22.5 percent of residents, Irish by 20.7 percent and Polish by 18.1 percent, putting the Poles in Park Ridge near the very top of the suburb’s ancestry list.
Why did Poles settle in Park Ridge specifically?
The Poles in Park Ridge are the end of a long northwest migration up Milwaukee Avenue from Chicago’s Polish Triangle, through Logan Square, Avondale and Jefferson Park, and out into Niles and Park Ridge. The affluent suburb offered the yards, schools and parishes that earlier generations had been working toward for decades.
Where can I find Polish food near Park Ridge?
The Polish delis and markets cluster just over the line on Milwaukee Avenue in Niles. Niles Polish Deli at 8705 North Milwaukee Avenue offers homemade sausage and smoked meats, while Deli 4 You Market specialises in imported Polish food, fresh pierogi and a bakery of breads, cakes and paczki.
Are there Polish-language church services near Park Ridge?
Yes. St. John Brebeuf Catholic Church in neighbouring Niles, founded in 1953, keeps Polish-language Masses on its weekend schedule, drawing worshippers from across the Park Ridge and Niles border. St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge itself remains the suburb’s largest Catholic parish.
What is the biggest Polish event near Park Ridge?
The Taste of Polonia, held at the Copernicus Center at 5216 West Lawrence Avenue in Jefferson Park, is one of the largest Polish festivals in the United States. Running every Labor Day weekend since 1980, it draws tens of thousands of people, many of them Polish families from Park Ridge and the surrounding northwest suburbs.
When did Park Ridge become an affluent suburb?
Park Ridge grew from a brickmaking village, incorporated in 1873, into a leafy commuter suburb of large homes through the early and mid twentieth century. By the time the Poles in Park Ridge arrived in force after the Second World War, it was already an established, prosperous town, with a 2020 median household income of $113,809.
If your family’s story passed through Park Ridge, or any of the places Poles have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in partitioned Poland to a deli counter on Milwaukee Avenue, to a brick bungalow under the Park Ridge oaks, to wherever you are now.