They called it Sweden Town. Not on any city map, but for the better part of a century, if you walked north on Clark Street past Foster Avenue, you walked into a small piece of Sweden transplanted onto the Chicago grid. The smell of cardamom rolls slipped out of bakery doorways. A maypole rose every June, wrapped in birch leaves and ribbon. A blue water tower with a yellow cross watched the rooftops from the corner of Clark and Foster, and a hand-painted Dala horse, half Stockholm and half Chicago, stood guard at the curb.
Andersonville is what’s left of that place. It is still on Clark Street. The water tower came down in 2014 and came back in 2017, this time in fiberglass, the colours unchanged. The Dala horse went off to be restored and came home too. The Swedes themselves have mostly moved on, scattered into the northern suburbs, but the neighbourhood they built has refused to forget them.
Andersonville, The Place
Andersonville sits on the far north side of Chicago, inside the larger Edgewater community area, about six miles north of the Loop. Its spine is North Clark Street, running between Foster Avenue at the south and Bryn Mawr at the north, with the commercial core hugging the 5200 to 5600 blocks.
The architecture is mostly two and three storey brick storefronts from the 1890s through the 1920s, built in the years when the neighbourhood was filling up with Swedish carpenters, masons and shopkeepers. The Red Line stops a few blocks east at Berwyn and Bryn Mawr. The side streets, lined with greystones and frame two-flats, run quietly toward the lake.
How Andersonville Became Swedish
Before the Swedes
Before the brick storefronts, Andersonville was farmland and cherry orchard. The first European settlers north of Foster were small farmers, many of them German and Luxembourger, working the land six miles outside what was then the Chicago city limit.
The little crossroads at present-day Clark and Foster took its name from a Norwegian Lutheran pastor, Paul Andersen, whose surname locals soon misspelled with an “o”. By the 1850s a handful of Swedes had already arrived in Chicago and quietly begun farming in the area, but the Swedish story of Andersonville really starts later, with a fire.
The Swedes Arrive
The first significant wave of Swedes in Chicago landed not in Andersonville but on the Near North Side, in a cramped working-class district known as Swede Town that ran roughly from the Chicago River up to Chicago Avenue. By 1870 it held thousands of Swedish immigrants packed into wooden frame cottages.
On October 8, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire tore through it. The wooden cottages went up first and fastest. When the city rewrote its building code to ban wood-frame construction inside the new fire limits, many displaced Swedes pushed north along Clark Street looking for cheap land where they could still build the kind of houses they could afford.
Andersonville, sitting outside the city line and outside the new code, was exactly that place. Through the 1880s and 1890s, as Sweden itself entered the most extraordinary emigration in its history, Swedes kept arriving. About 1.3 million people left Sweden for the United States between 1850 and 1930, most of them in a thirty-year window after 1880, and a thick stream of them came to Chicago. Many of those who came chose the new Swedish enclave on Clark Street.
Andersonville at Its Peak
By the early 1900s, Andersonville had stopped being a Swedish village and become the centre of Swedish Chicago. The Clark Street strip filled with Swedish bakeries, butcher shops, banks, undertakers, dry goods stores, taverns and coffee houses. Locals called the commercial stretch Swede Town, and the name stuck for most of the twentieth century.
Chicago by then held the largest Swedish population of any city in the world outside Stockholm. Swedish Lutheran congregations, splinter Covenant and Mission Friends churches, Methodist halls and singing societies all anchored the daily round. Children went to parochial schools where Swedish was still spoken. Adults read Swedish-language newspapers in coffee shops and met at Vasa Order lodges on weekends.
The trade was tightly knit. A new arrival from Smaland could land in Andersonville with a paper address in his pocket, walk into a deli on Clark Street, find a cousin behind the counter, and have a job and a boarding room by the end of the week. That was chain migration in plain daylight.
The Change
The first cracks came with the 1924 Immigration Act, which slammed quotas on northern European arrivals and slowed the stream of new Swedes to a trickle. The Great Depression scattered families and shut shops. Then, after the Second World War, the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants did what every successful American immigrant generation does. They left.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Andersonville’s Swedes moved north and west to Park Ridge, Glenview, Skokie and points further out. The Clark Street shops kept the names and the menus, but the customers thinned. By the 1960s the local business association was already worried enough to fight for a public rededication of the neighbourhood as Andersonville, hosted in 1964 by Mayor Richard J. Daley and Governor Otto Kerner, with King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden eventually visiting in person.
What saved Clark Street was, in part, that rebranding. The Swedish heritage became a deliberate identity, not an accident. A new festival, Midsommarfest, was launched in the mid-1960s. A museum was founded in 1976. Younger generations who had moved out to the suburbs kept coming back for cinnamon rolls and herring and meatballs. By the 1980s and 1990s the neighbourhood had also become one of Chicago’s largest lesbian and gay districts, an Asian American business corridor edged in at the south end, and an arts-and-shopping economy started to layer in on top of the Swedish bones.
The Landmarks of Swedish Andersonville
Swedish American Museum, 5211 North Clark Street. Founded in 1976 by Kurt Mathisson, the museum is the cultural anchor of the neighbourhood. King Carl XVI Gustaf was there at the opening, and again in 1987 when the museum moved into its current three-storey building on Clark. Its 12,000-object collection traces the journey from the Swedish countryside to the American Midwest.
Ann Sather, 5207 North Clark Street. Ann Sather, of Norwegian heritage, bought a small Swedish diner on Belmont Avenue in 1945 with $4,000 saved from a meat-packing plant. She kept the Swedish menu because the customers were Swedish, and her cinnamon rolls became the most famous in Chicago. Tom Tunney bought the business from her in 1981 and opened the Andersonville location, which has anchored the corner of Clark and Foster ever since.
Simon’s Tavern, 5210 North Clark Street. Simon Lundberg, a Swedish immigrant, ran a grocery on the site through Prohibition and quietly sold whiskey from behind the coffee counter. When Prohibition ended in 1934, he turned the storefront into a bar. Three owners later, Simon’s still serves the family glogg recipe every winter, dark port wine warmed with brandy, raisins, cardamom and clove.
Svea, 5236 North Clark Street. A small Swedish kitchen squeezed into a storefront, Svea has been serving meatballs with lingonberries, limpa rye sandwiches and thin Swedish pancakes since the early 1970s. In 2025 the restaurant received a $50,000 historic preservation grant from American Express and the National Trust to keep the doors open.
Swedish Bakery, 5348 North Clark Street. A ghost landmark now. The Swedish Bakery opened in 1929 and closed in February 2017 after 88 years, taking with it the cardamom buns, princess cake and Mazariners that several generations of Chicagoans associated with childhood. The space is now Lost Larson, a Scandinavian inspired bakery that keeps some of the same traditions on the shelf.
The Water Tower and Dala Horse, Clark Street and Farragut Avenue. The Swedish flag water tower, blue with a yellow cross, first went up over the corner in 1927. After heavy snow damaged it in 2014, the neighbourhood raised more than $165,000 to install a fiberglass replica in 2017. The Dala horse on the corner below it, donated by the Swedish Women’s Educational Association in 2005 and repainted by the artist Lars Gillis, shows Stockholm on one side and Chicago on the other.
Andersonville Midsommarfest. Held the second weekend of June since the mid-1960s, the festival opens with the raising of the maypole on Saturday morning. It now draws over 80,000 people across the Clark Street strip, with stages, vendors and folk dancers. The 60th edition runs in June 2026.
Where the Andersonville Swedes Came From
The Swedes who built Andersonville did not come from one place. They came from across the country, but a few regions sent more than their share.
Smaland, the stony southern province where small farms could barely feed a family, was the heartland of Swedish emigration. A full quarter of its population left for America between 1850 and 1920. So many people boarded boats at Gothenburg with Smaland accents that the province became a kind of folk shorthand for the whole exodus.
Värmland, in the west on the Norwegian border, sent more emigrants in raw numbers than any other län, 89,000 over the long emigration period and 28,000 in the 1880s alone. Dalarna, the central province from which the wooden horse takes its name, sent many of the carpenters and craftsmen. Östergötland and Skåne in the south, Blekinge and the small län around Kristianstad, also sent significant streams. A smaller number came from the cities, from Gothenburg and Stockholm and Malmö.
What pulled them was the same combination of forces, repeated village by village. Population growth pressing on tiny plots of land. Repeated crop failures in the 1860s. A series of dry summers and hard winters. The Homestead Act of 1862 offering free American land in the Midwest. And once a few people had left and written home, the steady gravity of relatives already settled, sending tickets and addresses back across the Atlantic.
Andersonville Today
The Swedes of Andersonville are mostly elsewhere now. The neighbourhood that holds their name is, by most measures, no longer a Swedish community. It is a small, affluent, walkable shopping district, a centre of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ life, home to a substantial Vietnamese and Cambodian business presence at the south end, and a popular weekend destination for people coming up from the rest of the city.
Yet the Swedish frame has held. The water tower is back. The Dala horse is back. The Swedish American Museum is still on Clark Street. Svea is still serving meatballs and lingonberries. Simon’s Tavern still ladles glogg through the cold months. The Midsommarfest maypole still goes up the second Saturday of June.
What you see now is what happens when a community moves out but refuses to let the place forget. The grandchildren of Smaland farmers drive in from Park Ridge for cardamom rolls. The names over the doors are Swedish. The flag flies over the tower. The story of how a few thousand carpenters and shopkeepers from one corner of Europe built a piece of Chicago is still legible on the street, and not, as it might have been, only in a museum vitrine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Swedes settle in Andersonville?
Andersonville sat outside the Chicago city limit and outside the post-1871 fire code that banned wood-frame housing, which made it cheap and possible for Swedish immigrants to build the kind of homes they could afford. As earlier Swedish families settled along Clark Street, chain migration pulled relatives north from the older Swede Town near the Chicago River, and Andersonville quickly became the centre of Swedish Chicago.
Is Andersonville still Swedish today?
Not really, in population terms. Most descendants of the original Swedish residents moved to the northern suburbs after the Second World War, and the neighbourhood is now better known for its LGBTQ+ community, independent retail and Vietnamese and Cambodian businesses. But the Swedish identity is actively preserved through institutions like the Swedish American Museum, Midsommarfest, Svea, Simon’s Tavern and the Dala horse on Clark Street.
What are the most famous Swedish landmarks in Andersonville?
The Swedish American Museum at 5211 North Clark Street, Simon’s Tavern at 5210 North Clark Street, Svea at 5236 North Clark Street, the painted Dala horse and Swedish flag water tower at Clark and Farragut, and the site of the original Swedish Bakery at 5348 North Clark Street, which closed in 2017 after 88 years. The Andersonville Midsommarfest each June is the annual centrepiece.
Where in Sweden did the Andersonville Swedes come from?
They came from across Sweden, but the biggest streams came from Smaland in the rural south, Värmland on the Norwegian border, Dalarna in the central highlands, and Östergötland and Skåne in the south. Smaland sent the largest share, with about a quarter of its population emigrating to America between 1850 and 1920. A smaller number came from the cities of Gothenburg, Stockholm and Malmö.
When did Swedes first arrive in Andersonville?
A handful of Swedish farmers were already in the area in the 1850s, but the real Swedish settlement of Andersonville began after the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, when displaced Swedes pushed north from the destroyed Swede Town near the Chicago River. The community grew rapidly through the 1880s and reached its peak between 1900 and 1930, the period when locals knew the Clark Street strip simply as Swede Town.
If your family’s story passed through Andersonville, or any of the Swedish neighbourhoods that took shape in American cities between the 1870s and the 1920s, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From a stony farm in Smaland to a brick storefront on Clark Street, to wherever you are now.