On a corner in Park Ridge’s Uptown, beneath an Art Deco tower that has glowed since 1928, a Greek family has run the show for more than half a century. The Greeks in Park Ridge did not build a Greektown of their own here. They moved north into a polished old commuter suburb, bought into its landmarks, opened its kitchens, and made themselves part of the furniture of a town that already loved its own history.
The Place
Park Ridge sits about 15 miles north west of downtown Chicago, pressed up against the edge of O’Hare International Airport in Cook County. The area was settled in the early 1830s, prized for clay deposits so rich that George Penny opened a brickworks in 1854 and the place earned the nickname Brickton before it was incorporated in 1873.
The brick fed Chicago’s building boom, then the commuter trains brought the families. Park Ridge ballooned from 2,009 residents in 1910 to 10,417 by 1930, and the postwar decades and O’Hare’s arrival pushed it past 42,000 by 1970.
Today it is unmistakably affluent. The 2020 census counted 39,656 residents, with a median household income near 113,800 dollars and a family income closer to 146,000. It is a suburb of brick bungalows and Tudor revival homes, highly rated schools, and an Uptown built around a single famous theatre.
How It Became Greek
To understand the Greeks in Park Ridge, you have to understand that Park Ridge is one corner of something larger. In 2012 the Greek Star newspaper gave a name to the cluster of north and north west suburbs where Chicago’s Greeks had resettled: Greektown North.
From Halsted Street to the north suburbs
Greek immigration to Chicago began in the 1840s and accelerated after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. By 1882 roughly 1,000 Greeks lived in the city, most of them clustered into the original Greektown around Halsted and Harrison streets on the Near West Side.
That first Greektown was a dense world of coffee houses, groceries and Orthodox parishes. But the West Side neighbourhood was largely cleared in the 1960s for the University of Illinois at Chicago campus and the expressways. The community scattered, and it scattered overwhelmingly outward, a story told in fuller detail in our piece on the Greeks of Greektown in Chicago.
The numbers tell the story plainly. By the 2010 census, more than six times as many Greek Americans lived in the Chicago suburbs as in the city itself. An estimated 85,000 people of Greek ancestry live across greater Chicago, and the densest suburban concentration drifted north.
The naming of Greektown North
The Greek Star’s 2012 designation stitched together eight towns: Niles, Glenview, Lincolnwood, Skokie, Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Morton Grove and Mount Prospect. Some estimates put as many as 10,000 Greeks across that band of suburbs.
Park Ridge was the prosperous edge of that map. It did not have the Greek storefront density of Niles or Lincolnwood, but it had something else: good schools, leafy streets, and an Uptown commercial district where a Greek family could buy a landmark rather than rent a counter. The same suburban pull shaped Greek life across the south west of the metro, in places like Palos Hills and Oak Lawn.
The Pickwick, and a family named Vlahakis
The single most visible Greek footprint in Park Ridge is the Pickwick Theatre, the Art Deco picture palace that has anchored Uptown since 1928. It was designed by R. Harold Zook with William F. McCaughey and the sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 24 February 1975.
In 1967 the Greek American Vlahakis and Loomos families bought it. James and Georgia Vlahakis were the first generation in, among four original owners of the main theatre on Prospect Avenue. Their son Dino Vlahakis took the lead in 1981 and ran the Pickwick for decades, adding a small upstairs theatre in 2017.
For more than fifty years, in other words, the most recognisable building in town has been in Greek American hands. When residents picture Park Ridge, they picture a marquee owned by a family whose roots run back to Greece.
The diner on the same corner
The Vlahakis family’s holdings included the surrounding complex of storefronts, and one of them housed the Pickwick Restaurant at 1 South Prospect Avenue, a fixture for half a century. Its kitchen was a relay of Greek hands.
The Spentzos brothers ran it, training a young cook named George Paziotopoulos who eventually took it over. Gus Mandas’ family had a turn earlier still. When the long running diner closed in 2018, the restaurateur Dino Sarantopoulos resurrected a new Pickwick Restaurant, its menu built on traditional Greek American diner cooking for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
This is how Greek Park Ridge was made: not by a single wave arriving at once, but by Greek families buying the town’s institutions and keeping its lights on, one lease and one landmark at a time.
The Landmarks
Pickwick Theatre, 5 South Prospect Avenue. The 1928 Art Deco landmark, owned by the Greek American Vlahakis and Loomos families since 1967, is the emblem of Uptown Park Ridge. Its tower and five-aisle auditorium, seating close to 1,000, made the corner a destination and put a Greek family at the centre of the town’s civic life.
Eliá Café, 90 North Northwest Highway. A from scratch Greek and Mediterranean brunch café opened by brothers Billy and Taso Pyroulis, whose father ran Yanni’s Greek restaurant in Arlington Heights and Jasper’s in Glenview. The menu runs to spanakopita eggs benedict and fluffy loukoumades, a younger generation’s translation of Greek comfort food.
The Pickwick Restaurant site, 1 South Prospect Avenue. For fifty years a Greek American diner on the theatre’s corner, passed hand to hand from the Spentzos brothers through George Paziotopoulos. After it closed in 2018 the restaurateur Dino Sarantopoulos revived the name and the Greek diner menu in the same Uptown block.
Hodges Park, Uptown. The small downtown green that gives Uptown its civic heart, ringed by the commercial district the Greek families helped run. The historic Ridge Theatre once stood across it at 203 Vine Avenue, a reminder that this corner has been Park Ridge’s gathering place for a century.
Holy Taxiarhai and St. Haralambos Greek Orthodox Church, 7373 North Caldwell Avenue, Niles. The nearest large Greek Orthodox parish, just over the Park Ridge line, became a Greek Orthodox church in 1951 after its founders outgrew rented rooms on the city’s North West Side. Its summer Greek Festival, usually the second or third weekend in July, draws Park Ridge families across the border.
The Shops of Uptown, Northwest Highway, Prospect and Touhy Avenues. The three way intersection at the centre of Park Ridge’s retail district, the everyday backdrop to the town’s Greek restaurants and the theatre marquee, where the suburb does its shopping under the Pickwick’s tower.
Where They Came From
The Greeks of Park Ridge are, for the most part, a second move. The families did not arrive directly from a Greek village to this brick suburb. They came from Chicago’s original Greektown on the Near West Side, the Halsted Street world that immigrants built after the 1871 fire.
Behind that lay Greece itself. The great waves of Greek immigration to Chicago drew heavily from the Peloponnese and the mainland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then again from across Greece and the islands after the Second World War and into the 1960s and 1970s, the same origin story that shaped Greek communities from Flushing in Queens to the Greektowns of the Midwest.
What pulled them north into Park Ridge and its neighbours was the same thing that pulled everyone: schools, space and safety. As Athena Merageas of the area’s Mykonos Restaurant put it, the growth came down in part to the local school and park districts. Affluent, well schooled Park Ridge was simply the polished end of the Greektown North arc.
Park Ridge Today
Park Ridge is not a Greek enclave, and it never claimed to be. Its 2020 population was about 84 percent white, with no large single immigrant block. The Greek presence here is a thread, not the whole cloth.
But it is a thread that runs through the most visible parts of town. The theatre on the corner, the new Greek brunch room on Northwest Highway, the diner that kept reopening under Greek owners: these are the places Park Ridge thinks of as its own, and Greek families have shaped or run all of them.
The wider Greektown North story is still being written by people like Niles mayor George Alpogianis, a third generation Greek American whose grandparents arrived in 1912, 1921 and 1931, governing a neighbouring town built on the same migration. Park Ridge sits among other affluent Chicago suburbs that drew immigrant families north and west, from Indians in South Barrington to Pakistanis in Schaumburg. It is the wealthy corner of the Greek map, where heritage shows up less in shopfront signage and more in who owns the landmarks. It is a quieter kind of belonging, and a durable one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there many Greeks in Park Ridge, Illinois?
Park Ridge is not a dense Greek enclave, but the Greeks in Park Ridge are part of a larger band of north west suburbs the Greek Star newspaper named Greektown North in 2012. That cluster, which includes Niles, Glenview, Lincolnwood, Skokie, Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Morton Grove and Mount Prospect, is estimated to hold as many as 10,000 Greeks.
Why did Greeks settle in Park Ridge and the north suburbs?
Most Greek families in Park Ridge came not directly from Greece but from Chicago’s original Greektown on the Near West Side, which was largely cleared in the 1960s for the UIC campus and expressways. They moved north for the schools, space and safety, and by 2010 more than six times as many Greek Americans lived in the Chicago suburbs as in the city.
Who owns the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge?
The 1928 Art Deco Pickwick Theatre has been owned by the Greek American Vlahakis and Loomos families since 1967. James and Georgia Vlahakis were the first generation involved, and their son Dino Vlahakis ran the landmark from 1981 for decades, making it the most visible Greek footprint in Park Ridge.
Where can you eat Greek food in Park Ridge?
Eliá Café at 90 North Northwest Highway, opened by brothers Billy and Taso Pyroulis, serves Greek and Mediterranean brunch including spanakopita eggs benedict and loukoumades. The long running Pickwick Restaurant on Prospect Avenue was a Greek American diner for half a century before closing in 2018 and being revived by restaurateur Dino Sarantopoulos.
Where is the nearest Greek Orthodox church to Park Ridge?
The nearest large parish is Holy Taxiarhai and St. Haralambos Greek Orthodox Church at 7373 North Caldwell Avenue in neighbouring Niles, which became a Greek Orthodox church in 1951. Its summer Greek Festival, usually held the second or third weekend in July, draws families from across the Park Ridge area.
What is Greektown North?
Greektown North is the name the Greek Star newspaper gave in 2012 to the band of north and north west Chicago suburbs where the city’s Greeks resettled after leaving the West Side Greektown. Park Ridge is its affluent corner, where Greek heritage shows up most clearly in landmarks like the Pickwick Theatre rather than in a concentrated commercial strip.
If your family’s story passed through Park Ridge, or any of the places Greeks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the coffee houses of Halsted Street to a marquee on Prospect Avenue, to wherever you are now.