Walk down Princeton Avenue in Armour Square on the morning of 15 August, and you will meet a procession that has not changed its route in more than a century. The faithful carry a statue of the Blessed Virgin from the church doors out into the neighbourhood and back again. This is Velika Gospa, and to understand the Croatians in Chicago you have to start here, on the South Side, where Dalmatian steelworkers built a parish and refused to let it go.
The Place
Armour Square is a slim neighbourhood on Chicago’s near South Side, hemmed between the Dan Ryan Expressway and the railway yards, just below the Loop. It is best known today for Chinatown and for Guaranteed Rate Field, home of the White Sox. But its older identity is layered and Slavic, a port of entry for Croatians, Italians and others who came for the mills.
To the south sits Bridgeport, the working district of brick two-flats and corner taverns that produced five Chicago mayors. Further down the lakefront lie South Chicago and South Deering, the old steel belt. These three pockets, Bridgeport and Armour Square in the centre, the mill neighbourhoods to the south east, are where the Croatian story in Chicago was written. The waterfront pull was the same that drew Croatians to the fishing wharves of San Pedro in Los Angeles, only here the water was the Calumet River and the catch was steel.
How It Became Croatian
Croatians began arriving in Chicago in real numbers in the last decades of the nineteenth century, drawn by the same engine that pulled in Poles, Slovaks and Lithuanians: industrial work that asked for strong backs and no English. By the turn of the century they were labouring in the steel mills, the meatpacking plants and on construction sites across the city, one of the many European groups the Encyclopedia of Chicago traces through the industrial South Side. The same engine pulled Swedish toolmakers to Rockford and built the Irish enclaves that would one day reach genteel Sauganash on the far North Side.
The mills of the south east side
The earliest concentration formed on the far South Side, in South Chicago, where the great steel works lined the Calumet River. Croatians and Slovenians settled side by side near the mills, and in 1903 the two communities built a shared church, St George, at 96th and Ewing.
It was a marriage of convenience between two peoples who spoke different languages and prayed in different tongues. The arrangement held for a decade. As the Croatian population grew and differences sharpened, the Croatians of South Chicago decided to build their own. The pattern echoed Croatian mill towns elsewhere, from the steel and lakefront wards of Cleveland to the bluff parish of Strawberry Hill in Kansas City.
Bridgeport and the founding of St Jerome
The other anchor formed in Bridgeport and Armour Square. By 1910 the Croatians here numbered close to five thousand, most of them from Dalmatia and many from the country around the town of Sinj. They worked the stockyards and the rail yards, packed into rented rooms, and from the start they organised around faith.
In 1906 the Croatians of Bridgeport and Armour Square began honouring the Assumption of the Virgin, the feast they called Velika Gospa, the eighteenth century tradition carried intact from Dalmatia. Six years later they had a parish of their own. On 5 December 1912 St Jerome Croatian Parish was blessed and opened its doors.
The work of gathering the community fell to Father Leo Medic, a Franciscan priest who arrived in May 1912 and organised roughly five thousand immigrants from Dalmatia, Banovina, Istria, Slavonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. There was even a quarrel over the name. Some wanted a Dalmatian church, but Archbishop James E. Quigley designated it Croatian, knitting several regional identities into one.
Sacred Heart and the third parish
Back on the south east side, the South Chicago Croatians completed their separation. In November 1912 they resolved to build, and in 1913 Sacred Heart Croatian Parish was formally organised, the third Croatian parish in the city. The church opened on Christmas Day 1913 and was dedicated on 17 May 1914 by Archbishop Quigley.
Its first pastor, the Reverend Ivan A. Stipanovic, opened a school staffed by the Sisters of St Francis of Christ the King from Lemont, Illinois. The original building held four classrooms for around two hundred children. The parish grew with the mills around it.
Schools, nuns and a language kept alive
Education was the second front. St Jerome opened its grammar school in 1922, and nuns of the order of the Adorers of the Precious Blood of Christ were brought from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to teach. The point was never only catechism. It was to hand the Croatian language down to children being raised in an English speaking city.
That instinct, to build the full apparatus of a community rather than simply a congregation, defined these decades. Croatians in Chicago formed social groups, mutual aid societies, fraternal lodges and Croatian language newspapers.
In 1926 the National Croatian Society merged with the Croatian League of Illinois of Chicago, one strand in the long consolidation that would produce the Croatian Fraternal Union, the oldest and largest Croatian organisation in North America. The same fraternal world built lodges from the Croatian hilltop of Millvale in Pittsburgh to the Kansas bluffs.
The buildings themselves
The physical churches tell their own migration story. St Jerome’s first home was bought from German Protestants; in 1922 the parish moved into a building acquired from Swedish Lutherans, the ethnic succession that defined Chicago’s old neighbourhoods, where one immigrant group inherited the pews of another moving up and out.
Sacred Heart followed a similar arc. At its Golden Jubilee on 10 November 1963 the parish began a new church, a brick structure at 96th and Escanaba designed by the firm Fox and Fox, dedicated on 21 June 1964. The Croatians had been in South Chicago long enough to build twice.
The Landmarks
St Jerome Croatian Catholic Church, 2823 S Princeton Avenue. The spiritual heart of Croatian Chicago, blessed in December 1912 and serving Armour Square and Bridgeport ever since. Major renovations in 1997 replaced stonework and added a new bell tower, and the church holds a statue of Our Lady of Medugorje in a grotto. Mass is offered in both Croatian and English.
Sacred Heart Croatian Church, 2864 East 96th Street. The third Croatian parish, organised in 1913 in the old steel district of South Deering. Today it counts more than six hundred families, including Croatian, Polish and Hispanic households who have shared the south east side for generations. Services are in Croatian and English.
The Velika Gospa procession, Armour Square. Held every 15 August, it is the oldest procession in the City of Chicago still celebrated on the same day and along the same route since it first set out in 1913. The first procession began at 9am from Germania Hall to St Jerome for a Solemn High Mass; the cookout, music and games that follow have become a neighbourhood institution.
Croatian Cultural Center of Chicago, 2845 W Devon Avenue. Founded in 1974 and opened in 1977 in a converted grocery store in West Rogers Park, the centre marks the community’s twentieth century shift northward. For five decades it has hosted banquets, concerts, language classes and folk events, preserving Croatian heritage well away from the old South Side core.
St Jerome Catholic School, Armour Square. Opened in 1922 with teaching sisters brought from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the school paired an eight grade grammar curriculum with a Croatian language school. It was the engine for passing the mother tongue to a generation of Chicago born children.
Rose Mary, 932 W Fulton Market. Chef Joe Flamm, winner of Top Chef and a veteran of the Michelin starred Spiaggia, opened this West Loop restaurant in April 2021. Its menu draws on the bright flavours of the Croatian coast, and it is named in part for the rosemary that grows wild along the Adriatic. It represents a newer, polished face of Croatian Chicago far from the mill gates.
St George’s old site, 96th and Ewing. The 1903 church that Croatians and Slovenians built together before going their separate ways. It marks the literal starting point of organised Croatian religious life on the south east side, the seed from which Sacred Heart grew.
Where They Came From
The Croatians who built Chicago’s parishes came overwhelmingly from Dalmatia, the long Adriatic coast and its hinterland, with the country around Sinj especially well represented. Sinj matters here for more than geography. The Velika Gospa devotion traces to a 1715 deliverance of that town, when its people credited a painting of Our Lady with their survival, and the immigrants carried that exact memory across the ocean.
Beyond Dalmatia, the early arrivals came from Banovina, Istria, Slavonia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina, then subjects of the Austro Hungarian Empire leaving stony farmland for the wages of American industry. Chain migration did the rest, as one village sent word back and the next boatload followed a brother or a cousin to the same Chicago street.
What pulled them was unambiguous: the mills. South Chicago’s steel works and Bridgeport’s stockyards and rail yards offered steady, brutal, well paid labour to men with no English and no trade. The Croatians took it, and around the pay packet they assembled everything else.
Chicago Today
The numbers are still substantial. Chicago itself counts roughly 7,269 residents of Croatian ancestry, the second largest Croatian population of any American city after New York, and the wider metropolitan area holds more than 37,000, the largest Croatian American population of any metro region in the country.
But the geography has loosened. The tight South Side enclaves have thinned as descendants moved to the suburbs and the mills that anchored them closed. The Croatian Cultural Center’s move to Devon Avenue in the 1970s already signalled the drift, and Chicago’s handful of explicitly Croatian institutions are now scattered rather than clustered.
Yet the old core has not gone silent. St Jerome still offers Mass in Croatian, Sacred Heart still gathers its six hundred families, and every August the Velika Gospa procession still steps off through Armour Square exactly as it did in 1913. For a community that arrived with little more than a feast day and a willingness to work, that continuity is the real monument.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where did the Croatians in Chicago first settle?
The Croatians in Chicago first concentrated in two areas: South Chicago and South Deering on the far South Side, near the steel mills, and Bridgeport and Armour Square nearer the centre. Both were industrial neighbourhoods offering the mill, stockyard and rail work that drew the immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
What is the oldest Croatian church in Chicago?
St Jerome Croatian Catholic Church in Armour Square, at 2823 S Princeton Avenue, was blessed and opened on 5 December 1912. Croatians and Slovenians had earlier shared St George at 96th and Ewing from 1903, but St Jerome is the enduring Croatian parish, followed by Sacred Heart in 1913.
What is Velika Gospa and why does it matter to the Croatians in Chicago?
Velika Gospa is the Croatian feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, marked on 15 August. The devotion traces to the town of Sinj in Dalmatia and a deliverance there in 1715. In Chicago it has been celebrated with a procession through Armour Square every year since 1913, the oldest such procession in the city still on its original route.
How many Croatians live in Chicago?
Chicago has roughly 7,269 residents of Croatian ancestry, making it the second largest Croatian community in any US city after New York. The greater Chicago metropolitan area holds more than 37,000 people of Croatian descent, the largest Croatian American population of any metro region in the country.
Where in Croatia did Chicago’s Croatians come from?
Most came from Dalmatia, the Adriatic coast and its interior, with many from the area around Sinj. Others arrived from Banovina, Istria, Slavonia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina, all then part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, leaving poor farmland for industrial wages in Chicago.
Is there still a Croatian community in Chicago today?
Yes. Although descendants have largely dispersed to the suburbs and the old enclaves have thinned, active institutions remain. St Jerome and Sacred Heart still hold Croatian language Masses, the Croatian Cultural Center on Devon Avenue has run since the 1970s, and the Velika Gospa procession continues every August.
If your family’s story passed through Chicago, or any of the places Croatians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a stony farm near Sinj to a two-flat in Bridgeport and a Solemn High Mass on the feast of the Assumption, to wherever you are now.