On a winter Sunday in Marquette Park, the Lithuanian language still drifts under the vaulted ceiling at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 69th and Washtenaw. Down the street, an elderly woman counts out kugelis at Seklycia, the last Lithuanian restaurant inside the Chicago city limits. Four blocks north, the Darius and Girenas memorial rises above the park lagoon in pale granite, naming two pilots who flew across the Atlantic in 1933 and died short of Kaunas.
There was a time when this neighborhood was the largest Lithuanian community on Earth outside Lithuania itself. The block books listed thirty thousand Lithuanians at the peak. People called it the Lithuanian Gold Coast.
Marquette Park, The Place
Marquette Park sits on Chicago’s Southwest Side, roughly bounded by Marquette Road on the north, Western Avenue on the east, 71st Street on the south, and California Avenue on the west. It takes its name from the 300-acre park at its center, a landscaped commission designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm in 1903 around a lagoon and bridle paths.
The housing is brick bungalows in long rows, the Chicago bungalow belt’s classic stock, built in the 1920s on what had been Marquette Manor prairie. The community area on city maps is technically Chicago Lawn. The Orange Line and the Kedzie bus connect it to the Loop. Lithuanians arriving from older Southwest Side enclaves found cheap, solid two-flats here and a park large enough to hold a Sunday afternoon.
How Marquette Park Became Lithuanian
Before the Lithuanians
In the 1870s, the area was partly cultivated prairie known as Marquette Manor, a sparsely populated farming community even after Chicago annexed it in 1889. The Olmsted Brothers’ 1903 park plan was the catalyst that turned the prairie into a neighborhood. By the 1920s, developers had laid out a grid of bungalow blocks around the new park, and the first Marquette Park homes filled with German, Irish, and Polish families pushing southwest from older inner-city neighborhoods.
The early Marquette Park was not yet Lithuanian. It was a respectable working-class neighborhood with a public park bigger than most of its residents had grown up near, and that was the point.
The Lithuanians Arrive
Chicago’s Lithuanian story began further north and east. The first eighteen Lithuanian men arrived in Chicago in 1870 with a railroad crew. Between 1880 and 1914, more than 47,000 Lithuanians settled in the city, most of them drawn by the slaughterhouses and steel mills. Their first stronghold was Bridgeport, on a stretch later renamed Lituanica Avenue, with Town of Lake and Back of the Yards close behind.
Those first arrivals were laborers from the Russian-ruled provinces of Lithuania, often single men sending money home. By the 1920s, the families they had brought over were earning enough to buy property, and many of them looked southwest. Marquette Park’s bungalows were new, its streets were quiet, and the park at its heart felt like a Lithuanian village square at scale.
The institutional anchor arrived in 1927. Lithuanian American emigres founded Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish on the corner of 69th Street and Washtenaw Avenue. A parish was the engine of an old-country neighborhood. Once Nativity BVM was offering Lithuanian-language Mass, baptisms, weddings, and a parish school, the chain migration south from Bridgeport accelerated.
Marquette Park at Its Peak
After 1948, the neighborhood changed shape. President Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act in June of that year, opening the United States to roughly 200,000 European refugees stuck in post-war camps. About 36,000 Lithuanians eventually came in under the act. Many arrived in Chicago, and a large share of them landed in Marquette Park.
The post-war Lithuanians were not the same people as the 1900s laborers. They included former government officials, teachers, doctors, lawyers, priests, painters, and writers, displaced when the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in 1940 and again in 1944. They arrived with the conviction that they were the keepers of a country that had been erased from the map.
By the 1950s, Chicago Lawn was being called the Lithuanian Gold Coast. By the 1960s, the Marquette Park area held about 30,000 Lithuanians inside a total population of 45,000. The community sustained Lithuanian-language Saturday schools, choirs, a youth center, dance ensembles, scouts, savings and loans that were the richest in the city, two daily Lithuanian newspapers, and on 69th Street a strip of shops where the storefront signs were in Lithuanian. In 1970 the city formally co-named that stretch Lithuanian Plaza Court.
This was not a quaint folk enclave. It was a working capital of a country in exile.
The Change
The neighborhood’s transformation began in the mid-1960s and ran through the 1970s and 1980s. On August 5, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. led 700 marchers into Marquette Park and neighboring Gage Park to demand fair housing. Several thousand white counter-protesters met them with bricks, bottles, and racial slurs. One of the bricks struck King in the head. He later said he had never seen mobs as hate-filled, even in Mississippi.
The march did not break the neighborhood. What broke it was a longer arc. Real estate practices, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the suburbanization of white Chicago, and the gradual aging out of the immigrant generation all pushed the Lithuanian community outward. Through the 1970s and 1980s, families moved to Lemont, Oak Lawn, Justice, Darien, Homer Glen, and Woodridge. By the 2000 Census, Marquette Park was 53 percent Black and 35 percent Hispanic. The bungalows changed hands. The Lithuanian script on the storefronts came down, one shop at a time.
The institutions, mostly, stayed put.
The Landmarks of Lithuanian Marquette Park
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (6812 S Washtenaw Ave). Founded in 1927, this is the parish that anchored Lithuanian Marquette Park. The current building, started in 1953 and finished in 1957, is in a distinctive Lithuanian folk Baroque style, with murals by sister Mercedes Mickeviciute and Kazimieras Zoromskis. Three of the artists whose work decorates the interior have entire museums dedicated to them back in Lithuania. Lithuanian-language Mass is still offered.
Darius and Girenas Memorial (Marquette Park, near 67th and California). An Art Deco monument in pale granite with a bronze relief globe outlining a flight path. It honors Captain Steponas Darius and Lieutenant Stasys Girenas, Lithuanian-American pilots who flew non-stop from New York toward Kaunas in July 1933 and crashed in a forest in Northern Germany, 400 miles short of home. Sixty thousand Chicagoans came out for the monument’s dedication on July 28, 1935.
The Lithuanian Youth Center, Jaunimo Centras (5620 S Claremont Ave). Built in 1957 and just north of Marquette Park proper, this was the cultural living room of Lithuanian Chicago. It houses a Jesuit residence, a chapel, the Ciurlionis Gallery, the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center with a 75,000-volume library, a museum, and rooms that have hosted every kind of Lithuanian wedding, concert, and political meeting for nearly seventy years.
Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture (6500 S Pulaski Rd). Stanley Balzekas Jr., a Chicago car dealer with a Lithuanian father, founded the museum in 1966 in a two-flat next to his Archer Avenue dealership. He built it during the Cold War, when Lithuania was inside the Soviet Union and effectively sealed off from the world. In 1986 the museum moved to its current home in a former hospital on Pulaski Road. It is now the largest Lithuanian museum in the diaspora, with archives, a children’s museum, a folk art collection, and an amber room.
Lithuanian Plaza Court (West 69th Street). The city co-named this stretch of 69th Street in 1970. At its peak the strip had Lithuanian bakeries, butchers, travel agents, jewelers, and bookshops. Today the storefronts are mostly Mexican and African-American businesses, but the street sign with the Lithuanian name remains, and a small handful of Lithuanian businesses still operate.
Seklycia Restaurant (2711 W 71st St). Opened in the late 1980s as the Lithuanian exodus to the suburbs was already underway. It is widely considered the last Lithuanian restaurant inside Chicago’s city limits. The menu is the old country in plate form, kugelis, cepelinai, cold beet soup, kibinai. The dining room is mostly older Lithuanians on Sundays after Mass at Nativity BVM.
St. Casimir Catholic Cemetery (4401 W 111th St). Consecrated in 1903 at the suggestion of Reverend Matthew Kriauciunas, this 275-acre cemetery on the far Southwest Side was the burial ground of Lithuanian Catholic Chicago for most of the twentieth century. More than 75,000 people are buried here. In 1997 the cemetery formally dropped “Lithuanian” from its name, but the headstones still read in Lithuanian, with Vilnius and Suvalki and Telsiai chiseled into stone next to the dates.
Where the Marquette Park Lithuanians Came From
Lithuanians divide their country into five ethnographic regions, and Marquette Park drew from all of them. Suvalkija in the southwest, with Marijampole as its capital, sent the largest share of the pre-WWII economic migrants, in part because the abolition of serfdom came earlier there and small farms were already breaking up.
Aukstaitija in the northeast, around Panevezys and Utena, was another major source. Zemaitija, also called Samogitia, the western lowlands toward the Baltic, contributed both Catholic peasant migrants and Lutheran Lithuanians from the borderlands of old East Prussia. Dzukija in the southeast and the Vilnius region rounded out the map.
The 1948 wave was different. The displaced persons who arrived after the Soviet annexation came from across all five regions, but they were disproportionately urban: lawyers from Kaunas, students from Vilnius, professors from Klaipeda. They had spent four to seven years in DP camps in Germany and Austria, and they arrived in Chicago with a strong sense that their job was to preserve a Lithuania that no longer existed on a map.
The post-1990 wave, after Lithuania’s independence, has been smaller and more dispersed. They came from independent Lithuania, with passports and English and university degrees, and most of them never lived in Marquette Park at all. They settled directly in Lemont, Oak Lawn, Naperville, and the further suburbs.
Marquette Park Today
Marquette Park in 2026 is a layered neighborhood. The 2020 Census shows roughly 30 percent Mexican ancestry, about 21 percent African ancestry, 7 percent South American, and a small but visible Polish residue. Lithuanian ancestry no longer registers in the top five. Walk down 71st Street and the storefronts read in Spanish, with Mexican panaderias, taqueria carts, and African-American barbershops.
And yet the Lithuanian institutional spine is still there. Nativity BVM still holds Lithuanian-language Mass. Seklycia still serves kugelis. The Darius and Girenas Memorial still rises above the lagoon in the park, and every July a small ceremony marks the anniversary of the flight. The Balzekas Museum on Pulaski Road still organizes exhibitions, language classes, and a children’s choir.
The Lithuanian residential community itself has mostly moved twelve miles southwest to Lemont, where the Lithuanian World Center opened in 1987 in a former Catholic seminary on 127th Street. It is now the largest Lithuanian community center outside Lithuania, with more than fifty Lithuanian organizations under one roof, a Lithuanian Catholic Mass, a Saturday school, and an annual fair. The capital moved. The embassies stayed.
For someone whose grandparents lived on 71st or Washtenaw, Marquette Park is no longer the place where you wake up speaking Lithuanian to the woman next door. But it is still where the parish was founded, where the monument stands, where the museum holds the archive, and where the family graves face east toward the homeland. That is its own kind of continuity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Lithuanians settle in Marquette Park?
Lithuanians moved to Marquette Park beginning in the 1920s from older Lithuanian neighborhoods in Bridgeport, Town of Lake, and Back of the Yards on Chicago’s Southwest Side. The pull factors were new brick bungalows, a 300-acre park, and the founding of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish in 1927 as an anchor for Lithuanian-language religious and community life.
Are Lithuanians still in Marquette Park today?
The Lithuanian residential community has largely moved to the southwest suburbs, especially Lemont, Oak Lawn, Justice, and Darien. The Lithuanian institutional presence in Marquette Park remains strong, with Nativity BVM church, the Lithuanian Youth Center, Seklycia restaurant, the Balzekas Museum, and the Darius and Girenas Memorial all still active.
What are the most famous Lithuanian landmarks in Marquette Park?
The most famous Lithuanian landmarks are Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary church at 6812 S Washtenaw Avenue, the Darius and Girenas Memorial in Marquette Park itself, the Lithuanian Youth Center at 5620 S Claremont Avenue, the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture at 6500 S Pulaski Road, and Lithuanian Plaza Court on 69th Street.
Where in Lithuania did the Marquette Park Lithuanians come from?
The pre-WWII economic migrants came from all five Lithuanian ethnographic regions, with especially strong representation from Suvalkija in the southwest, Aukstaitija in the northeast, and Zemaitija on the Baltic coast. The post-1948 displaced persons wave was more urban, with many arriving from Kaunas, Vilnius, and Klaipeda after years in European refugee camps.
When did Lithuanians first arrive in Marquette Park?
Lithuanian families began moving into Marquette Park in the 1920s, drawn from older Lithuanian enclaves further north. The community reached critical mass in 1927 with the founding of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish, and grew dramatically after 1948 when the Displaced Persons Act brought roughly 36,000 Lithuanian refugees to the United States, many of whom settled in this neighborhood.
If your family’s story passed through Marquette Park, or any of the Chicago neighborhoods the Lithuanians made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the parishes of Suvalkija and Zemaitija to the bungalows on Washtenaw, to wherever you live now.