Drive west out of Chicago on the Eisenhower, past the spot where Greektown once spilled across Halsted Street, and keep going until the city thins into golf courses and glass office towers. You arrive in Oak Brook, a village of barely eight thousand people in DuPage County where the median household income clears 170,000 dollars. It is not the first place most people picture when they think of Greek Chicago. Yet the Greeks in Oak Brook are part of one of the great untold suburban migrations in American Hellenism: the journey of a community from the tenements of the Delta to the lawns of the western suburbs.
The Place
Oak Brook sits roughly twenty miles due west of the Loop, straddling DuPage County with a sliver in Cook. It was farmland and dairy pasture until Paul Butler, whose father had opened a dairy operation there in 1898, began assembling parcels with the dream of a planned community. The village was incorporated in 1958, with Butler owning much of the land inside its boundaries.
What followed was a transformation from polo fields to corporate headquarters. Oakbrook Center, the open-air shopping mall, opened in 1962 and grew into one of the largest retail centres in the metro area. McDonald’s planted its world headquarters here in 1971 and stayed for 47 years. By the 1980s Oak Brook was a byword for affluence, the kind of address that signalled you had arrived.
How It Became Greek
To understand why Greek families ended up in a polo village, you have to start downtown, in the neighbourhood that no longer exists.
The Delta on Halsted
Chicago’s Greek story began near the river in the years after the great fire of 1871, when immigrants from the Peloponnese and the islands settled into the triangle formed by Halsted, Harrison, and Blue Island. They called it the Delta. By 1930 it held more than 30,000 Greek residents, foreign-born and native, the largest concentrated Greek community in the United States. The full story of that lost neighbourhood is told in our account of the Greeks in Greektown, Chicago.
The Delta was a world unto itself: coffeehouses thick with cigarette smoke and argument, fruit peddlers and confectioners, the Hull House settlement teaching English a few blocks away. It was poor, dense, and entirely Greek. It was also temporary, though nobody knew it yet.
The Expressway and the Dispersal
In the 1950s and 1960s two forces emptied the Delta. The Congress (later Eisenhower) Expressway was cut straight through the Near West Side, and the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, championed by Mayor Richard J. Daley, swallowed most of what remained. Thousands of Greek families were displaced.
This was not simply a tragedy. By the 1960s many of those families were rising into the middle class, and the bulldozers accelerated a move they were already making. The Greek centre of gravity shifted first to the West Side around Assumption parish, then outward, following the new highways into the suburbs that the highways themselves had made reachable. It was a pattern repeated wherever American Greeks prospered, from the Greeks in Astoria, Queens to the sponge docks of the Greeks in Tarpon Springs, Florida.
Following the Highways West
The western suburbs were the natural landing place for Greeks leaving the West Side, because the roads ran that way. Lombard, Elmhurst, Westchester, Hinsdale, and eventually Oak Brook and Burr Ridge filled with second and third generation Greek Americans who had traded the coffeehouse for the country club. The same suburbanising impulse reshaped Greek life in other industrial cities, including the Greeks in Greektown, Detroit.
The clearest marker of this arrival is a church. In 1959, fifty Greek families gathered in an elementary school gymnasium in Westchester, just east of Oak Brook, to celebrate the Divine Liturgy under Father Bill Chiganos. Within two years the congregation had grown to 280 families and bought five acres of land. That parish, Holy Apostles, became the spiritual anchor for Greeks across the western suburbs, including the doctors, lawyers, and restaurateurs settling in Oak Brook.
Oak Brook itself never became a Greek enclave in the way the Delta had been. There was no Greektown here, no block of kafeneia. Instead the Greeks of Oak Brook arrived as individuals who had succeeded: surgeons at the nearby hospitals, partners in Loop law firms, owners of the diners and restaurant groups that had become a Greek American specialty across Chicagoland. They came for the schools, the space, and the quiet, and they kept their faith and their family ties anchored a few miles east at the altar in Westchester.
The restaurant trade was the engine of this rise. Greeks had dominated Chicago’s diner and family-restaurant business for generations, and the profits of a successful coffee shop or banquet hall paid for the medical degrees, the law school tuition, and eventually the Oak Brook mortgages. It is no accident that one of the most ambitious Greek restaurant openings in the western suburbs in recent years sits in Oak Brook itself. The community that once waited tables now owns the dining room.
The Landmarks
Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox Church, 2501 S. Wolf Road, Westchester. The mother parish of western-suburban Hellenism, founded by fifty families in 1959 and consecrated by Archbishop Iakovos in 1975. Today it serves more than 700 stewards as a largely English-speaking community, and remains the church most Oak Brook Greek families call home for baptisms, weddings, and Easter midnight.
St. Athanasios Greek Orthodox Church, 1855 E. Fifth Avenue, Aurora. Established in 1965 by Orthodox immigrants to minister to the far western suburbs, St. Athanasios recently marked its sixtieth anniversary. For Greeks who pushed past Oak Brook toward the Fox Valley, this is the parish that gathered them.
Violí, 260 Oakbrook Center, Oak Brook. When DineAmic Hospitality opened this Greek taverna in late 2024 in the old Mon Ami Gabi space at the mall, it was a sign of how far the community had travelled. Chef Athinagoras Kostakos brings roasted, baked, and braised taverna fare to the most prestigious retail address in the western suburbs, a stone’s throw from where McDonald’s once kept its headquarters.
Oakbrook Center, 100 Oakbrook Center, Oak Brook. Opened in 1962, the open-air mall is the commercial heart of the village and, increasingly, a stage for Greek Chicago’s confident return to public life. That a restaurant like Violí could anchor a corner here speaks to a community that no longer needs an enclave to be seen.
National Hellenic Museum, 333 South Halsted Street, Chicago. Founded in 1983 and housed in the old Greektown on Halsted, the museum holds some 18,000 artifacts telling the Greek American story. For Oak Brook families it is the keeper of the memory of the Delta, the neighbourhood their grandparents left, an hour and a generation away.
Hinsdale Central High School, 5500 South Grant Street, Hinsdale. Oak Brook’s older teenagers attend Hinsdale Central, consistently ranked among the very best public high schools in Illinois. For a community that has always treated education as the surest inheritance, the school is a large part of why Greek professionals chose these particular streets.
Where They Came From
The Greeks who built Chicago came overwhelmingly from the southern mainland and the islands. The Peloponnese, especially the rugged provinces of Laconia, Arcadia, and Messenia, sent the largest share, joined by villagers from Roumeli, Epirus, and the islands of the Aegean. They left a Greece of poverty, phylloxera-blighted vineyards, and political upheaval, arriving in the great wave between 1890 and 1924.
The first generation worked as peddlers, busboys, and shoeshine boys in the Delta. The second opened restaurants and ran them with a discipline that became proverbial. By the third generation, the children who had grown up speaking Greek at home and English at Hull House were earning the degrees that carried them to Oak Brook. The village is, in a sense, the last stop on a road that began in a Laconian olive grove.
Oak Brook Today
You will not find Greek lettering on the storefronts of Oak Brook, nor will census data flag the village as a Greek place. The Greeks here are woven invisibly into a wealthy, diverse suburb of corporate executives and professionals. Their Hellenism is a matter of Sunday liturgy in Westchester, of the koliva and the lamb at Easter, of grandchildren in Greek school programs and dance troupes rather than of a visible neighbourhood.
That invisibility is itself the achievement. The Delta was a place Greeks lived because they had nowhere else to go. Oak Brook is a place they live because they chose it, and could afford it. The arrival of a restaurant like Violí at Oakbrook Center suggests the community is comfortable enough now to put its cuisine, and its name, on display in the village’s most public square.
The connective tissue still runs east. Families drive to Holy Apostles in Westchester, to the festivals and the Greek Independence Day parade downtown, to the National Hellenic Museum on Halsted where the old neighbourhood is preserved behind glass. Oak Brook is where they sleep and raise their children. Greek Chicago is still, in the deepest sense, where they belong.
What the Greeks of Oak Brook represent is the final chapter of an immigrant arc that ran from steerage to suburb in three generations. The grandparents arrived with little, the parents built businesses, and the children claimed the addresses. There is something quietly Greek in that ambition, in the conviction that the family name should rise. In Oak Brook the rise is complete, even if it leaves no Greek storefront to prove it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there many Greeks in Oak Brook, Illinois?
Oak Brook is a small, affluent village of around 8,000 people, and the Greeks in Oak Brook are a professional and business community rather than a dense enclave. They are part of the broader western-suburban Greek population that dispersed from Chicago’s old Greektown, worshipping primarily at Holy Apostles in nearby Westchester.
Why did Greeks move from Chicago’s Greektown to the western suburbs?
The original Greektown, known as the Delta, was largely destroyed in the 1950s and 1960s by the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway and the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Rising into the middle class, displaced families followed the new highways west into suburbs like Westchester, Hinsdale, and Oak Brook.
Where do Greek families in Oak Brook go to church?
Most attend Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox Church at 2501 S. Wolf Road in Westchester, the mother parish of the western suburbs, founded in 1959. Families further west may attend St. Athanasios in Aurora, established in 1965.
Is there a Greek restaurant in Oak Brook?
Yes. Violí, a Greek taverna by DineAmic Hospitality, opened at 260 Oakbrook Center in late 2024. It brings classic roasted and braised taverna dishes to the village’s flagship shopping centre.
What is the connection between Oak Brook and the National Hellenic Museum?
The National Hellenic Museum, at 333 South Halsted Street in the historic Greektown, preserves the story of the very neighbourhood that many Oak Brook Greek families left. Founded in 1983, it holds roughly 18,000 artifacts documenting the Greek American experience in Chicago and beyond.
Why did Greek professionals choose Oak Brook specifically?
Oak Brook offered space, prestige, and access to top schools such as Hinsdale Central High School, one of the highest-ranked public high schools in Illinois. For a community that has long prized education and upward mobility, those schools were a decisive draw for the Greeks in Oak Brook.
If your family’s story passed through Oak Brook, or any of the places Greeks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Laconian village to the Delta on Halsted, to the lawns of Oak Brook, to wherever you are now.