It’s a quarter past midnight and the dining room at Sabri Nihari is still half full. A waiter sets down a clay bowl of nihari, the surface glossy with bone marrow, ginger curled on top like a question mark.
Outside on West Devon Avenue, the green street sign overhead reads Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way, named for the founder of Pakistan. A block down, the call to prayer drifts from a storefront masjid. This is the Pakistani stretch of Devon, a sixteen-block immigrant city built by people who came chasing graduate school catalogues and stayed to feed a community.
Devon Avenue, The Place
Devon Avenue runs east-west along the far north side of Chicago, through the neighbourhoods of West Ridge and West Rogers Park. The strip sits about ten miles north of the Loop, hemmed in by Lake Michigan to the east and Lincolnwood to the west.
Western Avenue cuts the strip in two, and that crossing is the unofficial border. East of Western, the signs are mostly in Hindi script and the saris are stacked twelve feet high in the window. West of Western is the Pakistani half: halal butchers, biryani houses, the green crescents of Pakistan on bakery awnings.
The housing behind Devon is mostly brick two-flats and bungalows from the 1920s. The Red Line train at Loyola gets you down here on the 155 bus, or in by car from Lake Shore Drive. Devon itself is a working commercial corridor, not a tourist street, and that’s the point.
How Devon Avenue Became Pakistani
Before the Pakistanis
Before Devon was Pakistani it was Jewish. From the 1930s onward, Eastern European Jews moving north out of crowded Lawndale built shuls, delis and butchers along Devon. Ner Tamid, the first synagogue, opened in 1938; Congregation B’nai Jacob followed in 1942.
By the early 1960s, roughly 47,000 Jewish residents lived in West Ridge, and the stretch of Devon between California and Kedzie was honorarily co-named Golda Meir Boulevard, after the Israeli prime minister. The kosher delis stayed open well past the point at which most of their customers had decamped for Skokie.
That Jewish exodus to the suburbs is the quiet half of the Devon Avenue story. It left behind cheap storefronts, walk-up apartments and a commercial spine wired for small immigrant business. Russian Jews arriving in the 1970s took some of it. Soon after, so did the South Asians.
The Pakistanis Arrive
For two decades after Pakistan’s founding in 1947, almost no Pakistanis came to the United States. National-origin quotas, in place since the 1920s, gave the entire subcontinent a hundred slots a year. Between independence and 1965, fewer than 2,500 Pakistanis settled in the country, and most of those were students who never went home.
The dam broke with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as Hart-Celler. The new law abolished the quotas and replaced them with a preference system that prized professional qualifications and family ties. Pakistan, with English-speaking graduates trained in medicine and engineering, was made for it.
The first wave through the 1970s was overwhelmingly a professional class. Doctors from King Edward Medical College in Lahore. Engineers from the universities in Karachi and Rawalpindi. They came on H-1 visas, then green cards, and they came alone. West Ridge, with its cheap rent and old Jewish housing stock, was where many landed.
Devon at Its Peak
By the late 1980s, the western half of Devon Avenue had tipped. The doctors and engineers who’d come in the seventies were sponsoring siblings, parents, cousins. The Pakistani population in Chicago was no longer hundreds; it was tens of thousands.
The commercial strip filled in fast. A halal butcher would open, then a sweet shop next door, then a Pakistani BBQ place on the corner, then a sari shop because the women needed clothes for weddings. The full ecosystem assembled itself within a decade.
The honorary co-naming followed. In the late 1980s, on the lobbying of the Pakistani-American Federation and the consul general’s office, the city designated the stretch of Devon between Western and California as Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way. The green sign hung above the same intersections where mens’ tailors stitched shalwar kameez for Eid.
By the 1990s, Chicago had the fourth-largest Pakistani-American population in the country, and Devon was the spiritual capital of it. On a Friday evening in Ramadan, the sidewalks were so crowded that traffic on Western Avenue would back up half a mile.
The Change
September 11 changed the texture of Pakistani life in Chicago, though not the geography. In the weeks after the attacks, federal agents made door-to-door visits across the Devon Avenue corridor, and dozens of Pakistani men, mostly on visas, were detained, some for weeks, none ever charged with anything related to terrorism. A whole generation of young Pakistani-Americans got political fast.
The other shift was suburban. By the 2000s, the children of the 1970s arrivals had moved to Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Bartlett, Naperville. The doctor was a partner now; the engineer had a house with a yard. Devon was still where you came to buy gold for a wedding, to eat goat biryani, to drop off the parents for Friday prayers.
Then a third layer arrived. Pakistani Pashtun families from Peshawar and the Khyber border had been a small thread in the community since the 1990s. After the fall of Kabul in 2021, ethnic-Pashtun Afghan refugees were resettled into the same neighbourhood, often by the same Pakistani aid groups that had sponsored their cousins decades earlier. Pashto is now a common third language on the strip.
The Landmarks of Pakistani Devon Avenue
Sabri Nihari, 2502 W Devon Ave. Abdul Wahid Butt opened Sabri Nihari in 1996, named for the legendary nihari house in Karachi. The signature dish is what it sounds like: beef shank simmered overnight in a spice gravy thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. The restaurant earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2017, and at midnight on a Saturday it’s still the closest thing the Pakistani diaspora has to a town square.
Bundoo Khan, 2539 W Devon Ave. A Chicago outpost of the Karachi BBQ chain, opened on Devon in 2015. The seekh kebabs come on a sizzling iron platter. The bihari kebab, the malai boti, the paratha eaten with your hands: this is the food a Lahori grandfather would recognise.
Tahoora Sweets & Bakery, 2345 W Devon Ave. The mithai counter at Tahoora runs the length of the shop, trays of barfi and gulab jamun glowing under fluorescent light. For the families who can’t get back to Pakistan for Eid, the boxes of Tahoora sweets travel by the case to relatives in Detroit and Minneapolis.
Ghareeb Nawaz, 2032 W Devon Ave. The cult cheap-eat of Devon. Ghareeb Nawaz means “friend of the poor” in Urdu, and the menu lives up to the name: enormous plates of goat biryani for under ten dollars, served around the clock. Cab drivers, students and night-shift nurses eat side by side.
Devon Bank, 6445 N Western Ave. Founded as a regional bank in 1945, Devon Bank became, in 2003, one of the first US banks to offer fully Shariah-compliant home financing. Its Murabaha mortgages, structured to avoid riba, let observant Muslim families buy houses without contradicting their faith. The bank now serves customers across 34 states.
ICNA Rogers Park Resource Center, 2809 W Devon Ave. The Islamic Circle of North America’s Devon Avenue centre is the Pakistani community’s everyday institution: Friday prayers, after-school Quran classes, food drives, citizenship clinics. It sits in what used to be a Jewish kosher market.
The Pakistan Independence Day Parade. Held every August on the weekend nearest the 14th, the parade marches down Devon from Damen to Western. Children dressed in the green and white of the flag lead, followed by floats from the Pakistani-American Federation, the consul general’s car and a long line of decorated jeeps. The road closes for the morning. The food trucks stay all day.
Where the Devon Avenue Pakistanis Came From
The Devon Avenue Pakistani community is heavily Punjabi. The largest origin cluster is Lahore, with strong contingents from Rawalpindi and Faisalabad. Punjab sent the doctors, the engineers and the small-business families, and the food of Devon reflects it: butter chicken, paya, charcoal-grilled chicken tikka, the heavy Mughal cooking of Lahore’s old city.
The second-biggest origin city is Karachi, in Sindh. Karachi Pakistanis tend to be Mohajirs, the descendants of Muslims who migrated from northern India at Partition. Sabri Nihari’s recipe comes from that lineage. Smaller but visible communities trace to Peshawar and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, to Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and a smaller still group to the Baloch heartland around Quetta. Most are Sunni Muslim, with smaller Shia, Ismaili and Pakistani Christian communities knit into the same blocks.
Devon Avenue Today
Devon in 2026 is not what it was in 1996. The young Pakistani-American doctor lives in Naperville, drives to Devon once a month for the parents’ groceries, and eats biryani when she misses what her father’s house tasted like. The commercial strip is still busy, but more of the foot traffic is suburban day-trippers than residents.
What hasn’t moved is the function. Devon is still the place a Pakistani family in Indianapolis drives six hours to for a wedding outfit. It’s still where you go for goat that was slaughtered this morning. It’s still where the Pakistan Independence Day parade winds down past Sabri Nihari’s neon sign on a Sunday in August.
Layered on top is the new arrival pattern. Afghan Pashtun families, resettled since 2021, have taken over storefronts that used to be Pakistani-only. Some signs are now bilingual in Urdu and Pashto. A few are trilingual, with the third line in Dari. The strip is older than its newest residents, and that has always been the deal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Pakistanis settle on Devon Avenue?
Pakistanis settled on Devon Avenue starting in the late 1960s because the 1965 Hart-Celler Act opened US immigration to skilled professionals from Pakistan, and West Ridge offered cheap rent, old Jewish housing stock and an established commercial corridor that was easy for new immigrants to open small businesses on. Chain migration through the 1980s and 1990s then thickened the community around its first arrivals.
Is Devon Avenue still Pakistani today?
Yes, the western stretch of Devon Avenue is still the Pakistani commercial heart of Chicago, even as many families have moved to suburbs like Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates and Naperville. The restaurants, halal butchers, sweet shops and the Pakistan Independence Day parade keep Devon functionally Pakistani, with a more recent layer of Afghan Pashtun arrivals since 2021.
What are the most famous Pakistani landmarks on Devon Avenue?
The anchor Pakistani landmarks on Devon Avenue include Sabri Nihari at 2502 W Devon, Bundoo Khan at 2539 W Devon, Tahoora Sweets & Bakery at 2345 W Devon, Ghareeb Nawaz at 2032 W Devon, Devon Bank at 6445 N Western and the ICNA Rogers Park Resource Center at 2809 W Devon. The annual Pakistan Independence Day Parade in August is the community’s most visible cultural event.
Where in Pakistan did the Devon Avenue Pakistanis come from?
The Devon Avenue Pakistani community is heavily Punjabi, with the largest contingents from Lahore, Rawalpindi and Faisalabad. Smaller but significant groups trace to Karachi in Sindh, Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the Baloch region around Quetta.
When did Pakistanis first arrive on Devon Avenue?
Pakistanis began settling on Devon Avenue in significant numbers after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, with the first professional-class arrivals in the early 1970s. The community reached its commercial peak in the 1980s and 1990s, and the honorary co-naming of part of Devon as Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way followed in the late 1980s.
If your family’s story passed through Devon Avenue, or any of the places Pakistan’s diaspora made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Lahore neighbourhood, to a brick storefront on West Devon, to wherever you are now.