They called it Pilsen, and they meant it literally. The name was not a slogan or a marketing flourish. It was the name of a city in Bohemia, carried across an ocean and pinned to a stretch of Chicago’s Lower West Side by people who wanted home to follow them. From the 1870s through the 1930s, if you walked down 18th Street, you heard Czech in the bakeries, the taverns, and the gymnasium halls. By 1910, more people of Czech descent lived in Chicago than in any city on earth except Prague and Vienna.
This is the story of the Czechs in Pilsen, Chicago, and the Bohemian world they built before the neighbourhood changed hands. It is also a story you can still read in the brickwork.
Pilsen: The Place
Pilsen sits on Chicago’s Lower West Side, southwest of the Loop, south of the South Branch of the Chicago River and west of Halsted Street. Its spine is 18th Street, once called Evans Street, lined with two and three storey brick buildings raised in the 1880s and 1890s.
The housing is tight and vertical: corniced flats, storefronts with living quarters above, parapets that step and curl in shapes you will not find in most American neighbourhoods. Preservationists call the style “Bohemian Baroque.” It was a working district from the start, hemmed in by lumber yards, foundries, and the brewery smokestacks along the river.
How Pilsen Became Czech
Before the Czechs
The land that became Pilsen was farmland and scattered industry on the edge of a fast-growing city. Irish and German labourers worked the canal and the rail lines that cut through the district, and the South Branch of the river drew sawmills and brickyards to its banks.
It was not yet a neighbourhood with a name. That would come with the people who arrived after one of the worst nights in the city’s history.
The Czechs Arrive
Czechs had been coming to Chicago since the 1850s, settling first on the near West Side closer to the river. The turning point was the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871. The blaze destroyed swathes of the city and pushed displaced families southwest, across the river and out along 18th Street, into the district that would become Pilsen.
The timing met a wave of fresh arrivals from Bohemia and Moravia. Work was the magnet. Displaced Bohemians found jobs at the Schoenhofen Brewery, in the lumber yards along the river, at the Chicago Stove Works foundry, and at the McCormick Reaper Works. Thousands of unskilled jobs opened in the 1870s, and they pulled the next boat-load of relatives in behind them.
The name arrived almost by accident. A Bohemian shopkeeper opened a restaurant called “At the City of Plzen,” after the second city of West Bohemia. Locals began calling the whole district Pilsen, and when the post office christened a stop Pilsen Station, the name became official.
Pilsen at Its Peak
By the turn of the twentieth century, Chicago was the capital of Czech America, and Pilsen was its heart. Roughly a quarter of all Czechs in the United States lived in or around the neighbourhood. The streets carried a full immigrant economy: Czech butchers, Czech bakers, Czech undertakers, Czech savings and loan societies.
Two great institutions split the community’s soul. On one side stood the Catholic parishes, anchored by St. Procopius. On the other stood the freethinkers, the svobodomyslni, secular and fiercely intellectual, who built their own halls and schools rather than churches.
The freethinkers gathered in sokol halls, gymnastic societies that fused physical training with Czech nationalism and lecture-hall debate. Pilsen literacy was high, and that hunger for ideas fed a dense Czech-language press. The daily Denni Hlasatel, founded in 1891, and the older Svornost argued politics and religion in print every morning.
This was chain migration at full tilt. A cousin in Plzen heard there was work and a Czech-speaking parish, sent a letter, then a boat ticket, then arrived to a room already arranged. Each arrival made the next one easier, and the neighbourhood thickened with the same villages and the same surnames. The same engine built Czech enclaves far beyond Chicago, from the Czech community in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to the small-town stronghold of the Czechs of Wilber, Nebraska.
The Change
Success carried the community out of Pilsen. As Czech families prospered, they moved continually westward, first to South Lawndale, the district they called Czech California after California Avenue, where by 1910 Czechs owned roughly 80 percent of the homes.
After the First World War the movement accelerated. The next stop was Cicero and Berwyn, where thousands of new homes went up in the 1920s and many Czech Americans took jobs at the sprawling Hawthorne Works of Western Electric. The great east-west artery that carried them, 22nd Street, was renamed Cermak Road after the Czech-born mayor who is the neighbourhood’s most famous son.
By mid-century, the Bohemian Pilsen of bakeries and sokol dances had largely emptied out. A new community was arriving from Mexico, and from the 1950s and 1960s onward Pilsen became the centre of Mexican Chicago, the chapter told in our piece on the Mexican community in Pilsen, Chicago.
The Landmarks of Czech Pilsen
Thalia Hall, 1807 South Allport Street (1892). The grandest survivor. Tavern owner John Dusek commissioned architects Faber and Pagel to model the hall on a Prague opera house, complete with four opera boxes overlooking the stage. In 1915 organisers met here to draft work toward Bohemian statehood, two years before Czechoslovakia was born. Granted city landmark status in 1985, it reopened in 2014 as a live music venue and still operates today.
St. Procopius Church, 18th and Allport Streets (1883). The first Bohemian Catholic church in Pilsen and the mother parish of Czech Catholic life across the West Side. Archbishop Patrick Feehan blessed the Romanesque building in September 1883, and a Benedictine community soon took it over, running the Bohemian Benedictine Press from the parish. It still holds Mass.
Plzensky Sokol, 1812 South Ashland Avenue (1892). Built by the Bohemian Freethought organisation and designed by immigrant architect Frank Randak. It hosted gymnastic exhibitions, lectures, and dances, the secular heart of freethinking Pilsen. It survives as one of the neighbourhood’s endangered Czech landmarks.
Cesko-Slovansky Podporujici Spolek hall, 1436 West 18th Street (1893). Another Randak design for a Czech-Slavic benevolent society, enlarged in 1902 into a monumental four-storey building. The benevolent societies behind halls like this one functioned as immigrant insurance, paying out when a member fell sick or died.
Schoenhofen Brewery, 18th Street and Canalport Avenue (founded 1861). The brewery whose jobs anchored early Bohemian Pilsen. By 1910 it was producing more than a million barrels a year of its Edelweiss beer, and its surviving buildings were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
Cermak Road. Not a building but a street, and arguably the most enduring monument of all. Renamed after Anton Cermak, it traces the exact path the community took out of Pilsen and into the western suburbs.
Where the Pilsen Czechs Came From
The people who built Pilsen came overwhelmingly from Bohemia and Moravia, the two western lands of what was then Austria-Hungary and is now the Czech Republic. The city of Plzen, in West Bohemia, gave the neighbourhood its name and sent many of its people. Others came from the countryside, from villages where land was scarce and Habsburg rule chafed against a rising Czech national feeling.
Some left for economic reasons, others to escape conscription or to breathe in a place where being Czech was not a political problem. The most famous of them, Anton Cermak, was born in 1873 in Kladno, a mining town near Prague, and came to America with his parents as an infant in 1874. He rose from coal hauler to the 44th mayor of Chicago, and in 1933 he was shot in Miami by an assassin aiming at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. He died weeks later, the first foreign-born mayor of Chicago, and his name now marks the road his people travelled. The same Bohemian and Moravian villages that emptied toward Chicago also fed Czech neighbourhoods on the East Coast, including the Czech enclave in Astoria, Queens.
Pilsen Today
Walk Pilsen now and the dominant culture is Mexican, layered vividly over the old Bohemian bones. Murals cover walls that once advertised Czech savings societies, and the National Museum of Mexican Art sits a few blocks from St. Procopius. The Czech families are long gone, scattered into Cicero, Berwyn, Riverside, and beyond.
But the architecture never moved. The “Bohemian Baroque” facades, the stepped parapets and carved stone lintels, still define the streetscape, and the 2006 Pilsen Historic District listing protects much of it. Thalia Hall hums with sold-out shows, in 2024 announcing a two-storey expansion. St. Procopius still rings its bells. Two endangered sokol halls still stand, fought over by preservationists who understand what they are.
The Czech era of Pilsen is over, but it was never erased. It was built on by the next arrivals, the way one immigrant story is always laid over another. The brick remembers what the street signs only hint at.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Czechs settle in Pilsen, Chicago?
Czechs moved into Pilsen after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 pushed displaced families southwest along 18th Street. They settled there for the work: jobs at the Schoenhofen Brewery, the riverside lumber yards, and nearby foundries. Chain migration from Bohemia and Moravia then drew relatives and neighbours to the same streets.
Why is the Chicago neighbourhood called Pilsen?
The neighbourhood is named after Plzen, the second city of West Bohemia in today’s Czech Republic. A Bohemian shopkeeper opened a restaurant called “At the City of Plzen,” and locals began calling the whole district Pilsen. The name stuck when the local post office stop was christened Pilsen Station.
Is Pilsen still Czech today?
No. The Czechs in Pilsen, Chicago, largely moved out to Cicero, Berwyn, and other western suburbs by the mid-twentieth century, and from the 1950s the neighbourhood became the centre of Mexican Chicago. What remains of the Czech era is the architecture, including Thalia Hall, St. Procopius Church, and the “Bohemian Baroque” building facades along 18th Street.
What are the most famous Czech landmarks in Pilsen?
The most famous is Thalia Hall at 1807 South Allport Street, an 1892 hall modelled on a Prague opera house and still operating as a music venue. Other key Czech landmarks include St. Procopius Church (1883), the Plzensky Sokol on South Ashland Avenue, and the Schoenhofen Brewery buildings. Cermak Road, named for the Czech-born mayor Anton Cermak, is the community’s most enduring monument.
Where in the Czech lands did the Pilsen Czechs come from?
Most came from Bohemia and Moravia, the western regions of what was then Austria-Hungary and is now the Czech Republic. The city of Plzen gave the neighbourhood its name and many of its people, while others came from rural villages. Mayor Anton Cermak, the community’s most famous figure, was born in the mining town of Kladno near Prague.
If your family’s story passed through Pilsen, or any of the places the Czechs made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Bohemia to a flat above an 18th Street storefront, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Source notes: see the Pilsen neighbourhood history on Wikipedia and the biography of Anton Cermak.