Stand on Cermak Road on the first Sunday of October, and the street still answers in Bohemian. The brass bands, the painted floats, the word “houby” stencilled across a banner: for one weekend the Czechs in Cicero, Illinois are not a memory but a parade, marching the same pavement their grandparents poured savings into a century ago. The faces in the crowd have changed. The street has not forgotten who built it.
The Place
Cicero sits directly west of Chicago, pressed against the city limit at Cicero Avenue, a dense grid of brick bungalows and two-flats covering roughly six square miles. It was incorporated on 28 February 1867, decades before the immigrants who would define it ever crossed the Atlantic. For most of the twentieth century it was a working town, anchored by one of the largest factories on earth.
That factory was the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company, which opened in 1905 and at its peak employed more than 40,000 people making telephone equipment. A surviving tower still stands behind the Hawthorne Works Shopping Center near Cermak Road and Cicero Avenue. The plant drew workers, and many of those workers were Czech.
Today Cicero is the most Hispanic municipality in Illinois, its population recorded at 85,268 in the 2020 census. The Bohemian town it once was now survives mostly in its street names, its parish buildings, and one mushroom festival that refuses to end.
How It Became Czech
The Czechs did not arrive in Cicero first. They arrived in Chicago, and then they moved, ward by ward, generation by generation, always a little further from the river and a little closer to a house of their own.
From Prague to Pilsen
The earliest Czech immigrants settled on Chicago’s Near West Side in the 1850s and 1860s, in a neighbourhood they called Prague, gathered around St Wenceslaus parish. As the community grew it spilled south and west into Pilsen, the district that still carries a Bohemian city’s name, and which Atlas of Home explores in its account of the Czechs in Pilsen, Chicago.
Pilsen was a port of entry, crowded and loud and cheap. It was where you started. It was not, for most families, where you intended to stay. Other Czech enclaves followed the same pattern across the country, from the Czechs in Astoria, Queens to the Bohemian farm towns of the Midwest.
Czech California
By 1880 the wealthier and more established families had pushed further west into South Lawndale, into a district nicknamed Czech California after California Avenue. By 1910 Czechs owned roughly 80 percent of the dwellings in the heart of it. This was the largest Czech settlement in Chicago, a city within a city, with its own banks, its own gymnasiums, its own newspapers.
Two institutions anchored the money. The Lawndale State Bank dated from around 1906 and the Lawndale National Bank was founded in September 1912. By 1921 their combined deposits had climbed from $1.2 million to over $9 million. Czechs were known as savers, and the figures bear it out.
Out to Cicero
The same instinct carried the community over the city line. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Czechs moved from Lawndale into Hawthorne, the eastern stretch of Cicero around 48th Avenue, and then deeper into the town. The Hawthorne Works gave them work within walking distance, and Cicero gave them what Lawndale could not: detached homes, gardens, and quiet streets.
The migration was upward, not desperate. These were families trading a flat in the city for a bungalow in the suburb, and they brought their churches, their savings habits, and their gymnastic clubs with them.
The factory town had its dark chapter too. After building his empire in Chicago, Al Capone moved his operations to Cicero in the early 1920s to escape the city police, and the 1924 municipal elections turned violent as gangs fought to fix the result. The Bohemian shopkeepers along Cermak kept their heads down and their ledgers open.
The Bohemian Wall Street
Nothing captures Czech Cicero better than its main street. Twenty-second Street was renamed Cermak Road to honour Anton J. Cermak (1873 to 1933), a Bohemian-born politician who became Chicago’s first foreign-born mayor and was fatally wounded in 1933 during the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. The renaming, documented in the historical record of Cermak’s life, made the street a permanent civic monument to the community.
Along that road the savings and loan associations stood so thick, sometimes on adjoining corners, that the strip earned a nickname: the Bohemian Wall Street. It was a monument to a culture that measured respectability in passbook balances, and it ran straight through Cicero and Berwyn like a financial spine.
The Landmarks
Sokol Slavsky and the Olympic Theater, 6134 W. Cermak Road. Completed around 1926 to designs by the Czech architects Joseph J. Novy and Joseph Bednarik, this was no ordinary gymnasium. It held a basement swimming pool, dormitories for single men, a banquet hall, a radio station broadcasting in Czech, and a ballroom later converted into the Olympic Theater. The Sokol movement married physical training to Czech national pride, and Cicero gave it a palace.
Klas Restaurant, 5734 W. Cermak Road. Founded in 1922 by Adolph Klas, an immigrant from Plzen, this was the grand temple of Bohemian dining in Cicero. Hand-carved woodwork, stained glass, a wrought-iron balcony, and dining rooms themed from Moravia to a fourteenth-century tap room. It hosted President George H. W. Bush before it closed in 2016. The building was demolished in 2022, and the loss still aches in the neighbourhood.
Vesecky’s Bakery, Cermak Road, Berwyn. Founded in Chicago more than a century ago and carried west through Cicero into Berwyn in the early 1960s, Vesecky’s sold kolache and rye to generations of Bohemian families. It finally closed its doors in December 2023 after more than 100 years, one of the last working links to the old commercial street.
Czech Plaza, 7016 Cermak Road, Berwyn. Just over the Cicero line, Czech Plaza keeps roast duck, dumplings, and sauerkraut on the menu for a clientele that drives in from across the region. It is one of the few places left where you can still order the food the parade celebrates.
Our Lady of the Mount Church, 2400 S. 61st Avenue. A Catholic parish that served the families who filled Cicero’s bungalows, its building remains a fixture of the residential grid. The Czechs who built and filled these pews were a Roman Catholic community at heart, and their churches outlasted their shops.
J. Sterling Morton High School East, Cicero. The town’s landmark public secondary school, it educated waves of Bohemian children and later housed Morton College from 1924 until 1966. Its auditorium remains a Cicero icon, and its alumni rolls read like a census of the old community.
The Houby Festival and Parade, Cermak Road. Since 1968 the towns of Cicero and Berwyn have honoured their Czech and Slovak heritage every autumn with the Houby Festival. “Houby” is the Bohemian word for mushroom, a nod to the foraging harvest of the old country. More than 25,000 people line Cermak Road, and the parade alternates its starting point between the two towns each year. It remains one of the largest surviving public expressions of Cicero’s Bohemian past.
Where They Came From
The Czechs who filled Cicero came overwhelmingly from Bohemia and Moravia, the western and central provinces of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later Czechoslovakia. Many came from the regions around Plzen and Prague, leaving land they could not own and an empire that ruled them in German.
America offered the opposite bargain: citizenship, property, and the freedom to be loudly Bohemian. They organised in the Sokol gymnastic societies, in fraternal benefit lodges that doubled as insurance and burial funds, and in parishes that conducted business in Czech.
Immigration peaked just before the First World War, then slowed as the old country gained independence in 1918 and as American quotas tightened in the 1920s. By then Cicero’s Czech character was already set in brick. The story of these westward-moving Bohemians runs in parallel across the country, from the Czechs in Wilber, Nebraska to the Czechs in West Texas, each settlement a variation on the same drive for land and self-rule.
Cicero Today
The demographic transformation of Cicero is among the most dramatic in Illinois. In 2000 the white non-Hispanic share of the population stood at 19.61 percent. By 2010 it had fallen to 9.17 percent, and by 2020 to 6.25 percent. Over the same decades Cicero became more than 89 percent Hispanic, the most Hispanic town in the state, its newcomers mainly Mexican and Central American families who arrived in force through the 1980s and 1990s.
The Bohemian shops are mostly gone. Klas was demolished, Vesecky’s closed, and the bakeries along Cermak now sell pan dulce and conchas where they once sold kolache. The savings and loan corners that gave the street its nickname have largely faded. A new working community has inherited the bungalows, and is writing its own chapter into the same brick.
Yet the Czech ghost will not quite leave. The street is still named Cermak. The Houby parade still rolls down it every October, drawing tens of thousands. The Sokol building still stands, the parish bells still ring, and somewhere a Bohemian family that long ago moved out to the wider Illinois suburbs or further still drives back in for roast duck and a glimpse of the town their grandparents made. The faces have changed. The address remembers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did so many Czechs settle in Cicero, Illinois?
The Czechs in Cicero, Illinois arrived by moving steadily west from Chicago, first from the Prague and Pilsen districts, then from Lawndale’s Czech California, in search of affordable homes and steady factory work. The Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, which employed more than 40,000 people, sat right in the town and drew Bohemian families across the city line.
What is the Houby Festival in Cicero?
The Houby Festival is an autumn parade and street celebration held in Cicero and Berwyn since 1968 to honour their Czech and Slovak heritage. “Houby” is the Bohemian word for mushroom, and the festival draws more than 25,000 people to Cermak Road each October, alternating its starting point between the two towns.
Why is Cermak Road called the Bohemian Wall Street?
Cermak Road earned the nickname because Czech savings and loan associations once lined it so densely, sometimes on adjoining corners, that it resembled a financial district. The Czechs in Cicero, Illinois were famous savers, and their banks anchored the town’s main commercial street.
Who was Anton Cermak, and why is the road named after him?
Anton J. Cermak (1873 to 1933) was a Bohemian-born politician who became Chicago’s first foreign-born mayor. He was fatally wounded in 1933 during an assassination attempt aimed at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, and Twenty-second Street was renamed Cermak Road in his honour.
What happened to the Klas Restaurant in Cicero?
Klas was a landmark Bohemian restaurant at 5734 W. Cermak Road, founded in 1922 by Adolph Klas, an immigrant from Plzen. Famous for its carved woodwork and themed dining rooms, it hosted President George H. W. Bush, closed in 2016, and was demolished in 2022.
Are there still Czechs in Cicero today?
The Czech community in Cicero has largely dispersed, and the town is now more than 89 percent Hispanic as of the 2020 census. The heritage survives in landmarks like the Sokol Slavsky building, in the street name Cermak Road, and in the Houby Festival that still draws Czech families back each autumn.
If your family’s story passed through Cicero, or any of the places Czechs have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village near Plzen to a bungalow off Cermak Road, to wherever you are now.