Come down Taylor Street on a July afternoon and the line outside Mario’s runs twenty deep, paper cups of lemon ice sweating in the heat while the El rumbles somewhere past Halsted. A block east, the smell of slow-simmered beef and sweet peppers drifts out of a counter that has not changed its recipe since 1938. The street is shorter than it used to be, hemmed in now by a university that swallowed half its blocks, but the Italians on Taylor Street left enough behind that you can still taste the colony they built, one sandwich and one storefront at a time.
Taylor Street: The Place
Taylor Street runs east to west through Chicago’s Near West Side, the historic core of what Chicagoans call Little Italy. The neighborhood is boxed in by Ashland Avenue to the west, the expressways to the east, the Eisenhower (Congress) Expressway to the north, and Roosevelt Road to the south. The sprawling University of Illinois Chicago campus presses against it on nearly every side, and the Blue Line and a tangle of bus routes still feed the street that once held the densest Italian settlement in the city.
How Taylor Street Became Little Italy
Before the Italians
The land was settled long before any feast-day procession crossed it. When the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848, Irish, German, and Bohemian laborers took the newly built frame cottages on the old canal lands, and German immigrants clustered near Maxwell Street to work the railroads. In the 1850s this stretch of the West Side became a port of entry, a soot-stained district of wood cottages and clapboard tenements where each arriving wave handed the streets to the next.
By the time Italians began trickling in during the 1850s, the Near West Side was already a working immigrant quarter. In 1880 the entire city counted only 1,357 Italians. That number was about to change completely.
The Italians Arrive
The great migration came between the 1880s and the 1920s, and it came by chain. One man crossed first, found work breaking rock or laying track, then sent for a brother, a cousin, the family next door from the same hillside town. They did not arrive as “Italians” so much as as paesani, people of a single paese, and they reassembled their villages block by block. Observers noticed that a given street in the colony might be filled almost entirely with families from one town in the old country.
The work was the kind that built Chicago: construction gangs, the railroads, the factories, food peddling from carts and basements. Many came intending to earn, remit, and go home. Enough of them stayed that by 1930 roughly ten thousand foreign-born residents were packed into the blocks of the colony, and the city’s Italian-born population had climbed to nearly 74,000.
Taylor Street at Its Peak
At its height the colony was a self-contained world. By 1927, Italians across Chicago owned some 500 grocery stores, 257 restaurants, and 240 pastry shops, and the heaviest concentration of all of it sat on and around Taylor Street. There were meat markets, bread ovens, lemon-ice carts, and mutual-aid societies named for the saints of home.
Religion anchored the calendar. The summer feasts brought saints’ statues into the street behind brass bands, with dollar bills pinned to ribbons and the smell of fried dough hanging over the procession. Two churches held the community: Holy Guardian Angel, the first Italian congregation in Chicago, established in 1898 with its church raised on Arthington Street the following year under the influence of Mother Frances Cabrini, and Our Lady of Pompeii, organized as an Italian national parish in 1911. The Pompeii church building went up in 1923 at 1224 West Lexington Street, dedicated the next year and tended by the Scalabrini Fathers, the order founded to follow Italian emigrants wherever they landed.
And then there was Hull House. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened the settlement on September 18, 1889, in an old Italianate mansion at 800 South Halsted Street, in the middle of a quarter that Addams herself reckoned held ten thousand Italians between the river and Halsted alone. Hull House grew to thirteen buildings offering English classes, day care for working mothers, an employment bureau, a labor museum, and clubs of every kind. For a generation of Taylor Street children it was the bridge between the village their parents had left and the city they would inherit.
The Change
The neighborhood did not fade. It was demolished. The expressways came first in the 1950s, cutting through homes and parish blocks. Then, on February 10, 1961, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced that the Harrison-Halsted area had been chosen for a new University of Illinois campus. Many families learned the news from their televisions.
The plan called for bulldozing roughly 800 homes and 200 businesses and clearing out some 5,000 people, Hull House included. One resident refused to go quietly. Florence Scala, a tailor’s daughter raised on the street, became co-chair of the Harrison-Halsted Community Group and led the fight: marches with bands, sit-ins at City Hall, a run for alderman in 1963. Her home was bombed, twice. When the Hull House trustees accepted an $875,000 settlement, Scala joined the longtime resident Jessie Binford in suing the board. They lost. Hull House closed on March 28, 1963, and the wrecking crews moved in.
The Landmarks of Taylor Street
Al’s #1 Italian Beef (1079 West Taylor Street) is the keeper of one of Chicago’s great food arguments. In 1938 Al Ferreri opened a small beef-and-sausage stand with his sister Frances and her husband Chris Pacelli at Harrison and Laflin Streets, simmering thin-sliced beef and selling it cheap. Urban renewal bought out that corner, so the family reopened on Taylor in the early 1960s, where the Pacelli nephews still run the original counter and still claim the sandwich as their own.
Mario’s Italian Lemonade (1068 West Taylor Street) opens only for the warm months and has done so since 1954. Mario DiPaolo Sr., an immigrant from Abruzzo, set his restless young son “Skip” up with a hand-crank ice machine outside the family’s store, two cents a cup. The shaved Italian lemonade outlasted the general store, and the DiPaolo family still works the little stand every summer.
Pompei (1531 West Taylor Street) began in 1909 when Luigi Davino opened a bakery and named it for the nearby church. He and his wife Carmella lived above the shop and made little but bread and cheese pizza for decades, his sons taking over after the war. In the 1980s the third generation of Davinos turned the bakery into a full-service restaurant that still feeds the street.
Conte Di Savoia (1438 West Taylor Street) has carried imported Italian groceries since 1948. The DiCosola family took it over in the early 1980s after Michael DiCosola’s father had worked for the previous owner, and they widened it into a deli of homemade sandwiches and pasta. Having survived both the expressway and the campus clearances, it stands as one of the last true Italian grocers left on the street.
The Rosebud (1500 West Taylor Street) opened in 1976 under Alex Dana, first called Bocciola della Rose. It became the celebrity table of Little Italy, drawing names from Frank Sinatra to Robert De Niro to Oprah Winfrey across its decades, and it remains a flagship of Taylor Street dining.
Piazza DiMaggio sits on Taylor Street as the neighborhood’s open-air parlor, anchored by a statue of Joe DiMaggio. For nearly two decades it faced the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame, founded in 1977 by George Randazzo to honor Italian American athletes, which kept its museum on Taylor Street from 2000 until 2019. The plaza is the gathering point each August for the Taylor Street Italian festival.
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum survives too, the original mansion preserved at the edge of the UIC campus after the rest of the settlement was torn down. It is the one building the wreckers were not allowed to take.
Where the Taylor Street Italians Came From
The colony was overwhelmingly a southern Italian one. The families traced back to Campania and Naples, to Sicily and Palermo, to Puglia and Bari, to Calabria and Reggio, and to the harder inland country of Basilicata, Molise, and Abruzzo. These were the regions of the Mezzogiorno emptied by poverty, failed harvests, and a land system that left the poor with nothing.
What made Taylor Street distinct was how tightly that origin map survived the crossing. Migration ran village to village rather than nation to nation, so a single tenement block might gather everyone from one mountain town, their dialect and their patron saint intact. People who had thought of themselves only as belonging to one small paese became, on Taylor Street, Italians for the first time.
Taylor Street Today
Taylor Street is a university district now, and there is no pretending otherwise. UIC defines the eastern and northern edges, the housing skews toward students and young professionals, and the population is mixed across every background. Much of the old colony exists only in photographs and in the names carved into the surviving storefronts.
But the anchors held better than almost anyone expected. Al’s still simmers beef at the same address, Mario’s still draws its summer lines, Conte Di Savoia still slices prosciutto behind the same counter, and Pompei and the Rosebud still set Italian tables. The National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame left the street in 2019 when its building sold, a real loss, yet Piazza DiMaggio still fills for the August festa and the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii still holds its mass and procession.
For other Chicago neighborhoods the story ran differently, and you can trace those too, from the Greeks who built Greektown just to the north to the Mexican community that made Pilsen its own nearby. The same southern-Italian wave that filled these blocks also built colonies in other cities, like the Italians of Mulberry Street in Manhattan. What Taylor Street proves is that a neighborhood can be cut in half and still refuse to forget its name.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle on Taylor Street in Chicago?
Italians settled on the Near West Side because it was already a cheap, dense port-of-entry district near the railroad and factory work that drew them to Chicago. Chain migration did the rest: arrivals sent for relatives and neighbors from the same southern Italian towns, and the colony grew block by block until the Italians on Taylor Street formed the largest such community in the city.
Is Taylor Street still an Italian neighborhood today?
Not in the way it once was. The 1960s construction of the UIC campus and the earlier expressways displaced thousands of families, and the area is now a mixed university district. Even so, a core of Italian institutions endures, from Al’s and Mario’s to Conte Di Savoia, Pompei, and the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii.
What are the most famous landmarks of Little Italy on Taylor Street?
The best known are Al’s #1 Italian Beef (1938), Mario’s Italian Lemonade (1954), the Pompei bakery and restaurant (1909), Conte Di Savoia grocery (1948), and the Rosebud restaurant (1976). The neighborhood also holds Piazza DiMaggio with its Joe DiMaggio statue and the preserved Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Where did the Taylor Street Italians come from in Italy?
They came overwhelmingly from southern Italy: Campania and Naples, Sicily, Puglia and Bari, Calabria, and the inland regions of Basilicata, Molise, and Abruzzo. Migration followed specific villages, so individual blocks often gathered families from a single hometown.
When did Italians first arrive on Taylor Street?
A handful of Italians reached Chicago’s Near West Side as early as the 1850s, but the major wave ran from the 1880s through the 1920s. The Italians on Taylor Street reached their peak around 1930, when roughly ten thousand foreign-born residents filled the colony.
If your family’s story passed through Taylor Street, a feast-day procession or a beef stand or a cold-water flat above a bakery, that history is worth holding onto before the last of it slips into legend.