Drive east out of Buffalo on Genesee Street and the city does not so much end as soften, the dense brick blocks of the old East Side giving way to bungalows and double lots and, eventually, to Cheektowaga. The Polish in Cheektowaga, New York did not arrive here. They followed a road their grandparents had already walked, out of the crowded Polonia of the city and into the wide suburban grid that grew up around an orphanage and a country chapel. By the turn of this century, nearly four in ten residents of the town claimed Polish ancestry, making Cheektowaga, by share of population, the most Polish municipality in the United States.
The Place
Cheektowaga lies immediately east of Buffalo in Erie County, on the flat creek-laced plain between the city and the airport. Its name comes from an Iroquoian word, ji-ik-do-wah-gah, usually translated as “place of the crab apple tree,” a reminder of the Neutral people who lived here before the Holland Land Purchase. The town was formally carved out of Amherst on 22 March 1839.
For most of the nineteenth century it was farmland, settled first by Alsatian and German Catholics. The transformation came after the Second World War, when the rural lots were subdivided for housing and new highways stitched the town to the city. Today it is the second largest suburb of Buffalo, after Amherst, and home to roughly 89,900 people.
How It Became Polish
The Polish story of Cheektowaga begins not with a real estate boom but with an act of charity, and to understand it you have to start in Buffalo itself.
The city fills up first
Polish immigrants began arriving in Western New York in serious numbers in the 1870s and 1880s, part of the great migration that sent Poles to Chicago, the South Side of Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cleveland’s Slavic Village, Detroit and Buffalo. They settled on Buffalo’s East Side around St Stanislaus parish, in a district that would become known as the Polish neighbourhood of Broadway-Fillmore in Buffalo, once called the second largest Polish colony outside Warsaw. It was crowded, devout, and growing faster than its housing could hold.
For families pressed into those narrow streets, the open farmland to the east was an obvious release valve. Poles began buying lots in the sparsely settled sections of Cheektowaga along Genesee, Walden, Bailey and William streets, close enough to walk back into the parish on Sunday but with room for a garden and a second floor.
An orphanage anchors a neighbourhood
The seed of Polish Cheektowaga was the Immaculate Heart of Mary Orphan’s Home, at 2600 William Street. The Felician Sisters took in their first child there on 26 April 1882, with Father Jan Pitass, the towering figure of Buffalo Polonia, entrusting the boy to their care. Originally called the Polish Orphan Asylum and Home for the Aged, it was incorporated on 12 November 1895, and its cornerstone was blessed on 4 October 1896.
The home pulled Polish families to its edges. The streets that grew up around it took names like Pitass, Walkowiak and Dombrowski. By 1903 the institution housed eighty-five boys, eighty-five girls and forty-eight elderly residents on roughly ten acres at William Street and Kennedy Road, and over its life it cared for more than six thousand children before its last admission in 1979 and its closure in 1983.
A parish of their own
By 1905 the Polish neighbourhood around the orphanage had grown large enough to need its own church. St Josaphat parish was established on 16 October 1905, with Father Andrew Garstka as its first pastor. The earliest Masses were said in the orphanage chapel, and the campus served as the first school.
Two years later the community built in earnest. Rev. Wladyslaw Hordych bought an old barn on William Street to use as a temporary school, then purchased land at William and Mansion streets, where in the first months of 1907 a three-storey combination church and school went up. A Polish parish in a suburb that had been, until then, German and Alsatian, was a declaration of permanence.
The post-war flood
The trickle became a flood after 1945. The same subdivision boom that turned Cheektowaga’s farms into ranch houses and split-levels coincided with a generation of Polish-American families ready to leave the aging East Side. Factories such as the Westinghouse plant on Genesee Street gave them work close to home, and the Thruway gave them mobility.
They came as a community, not as scattered individuals, carrying their parishes, their butchers, their polka halls and their feast days east with them. By the 2000 census, Polish was the single largest reported ancestry in the town at 39.9 per cent, ahead of German at 29.9, Italian at 16.0 and Irish at 14.1. No American municipality of any size was more Polish, by share, than Cheektowaga.
The Landmarks
Our Lady Help of Christians Chapel, Union Road at Genesee Street. Cheektowaga’s oldest church, built in 1853 in the Greek Revival style by the Alsatian settler Joseph Batt in fulfilment of a vow made during a storm at sea. Though it predates the Polish arrival, it became a beloved pilgrimage site for German, Polish and Italian immigrants, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 14 December 1978.
St Josaphat Church, William and Mansion streets. The mother parish of Polish Cheektowaga, established in 1905 and built out from 1907. For more than a century it was the spiritual centre of the families who spilled east from the orphanage, and its name, honouring a Ruthenian saint, signalled the Eastern European faith taking root in the suburb.
Immaculate Heart of Mary Orphan’s Home, 2600 William Street. The institution that drew the first Polish families to this corner of Cheektowaga. Run by the Felician Sisters from 1882, it cared for over six thousand children before closing in 1983, and the Polish street names around it still mark the neighbourhood it created.
Am-Pol Eagle, 3620 Harlem Road. The weekly English-language newspaper of Buffalo’s Polish-American community, founded around 1959 by Matthew Pelczynski and still published from Cheektowaga. It carries local news, columns, recipes and the all-important calendar of feast days, festivals and polka dances.
Polish Villa, Union Road. A long-running Cheektowaga restaurant serving the food families grew up on: kielbasa, pierogi, golabki, potato pancakes and homemade noodles. It is the kind of room where a christening, a wake and a Dyngus Day party can all happen in the same week.
Hanzlian’s Homemade Sausage and Deli, 2351 Genesee Street. A neighbourhood butcher and deli on the old Genesee corridor, carrying fresh kielbasa and the locally made Babcia’s Pierogi. Shops like this are how a cuisine survives a move to the suburbs, one Saturday morning order at a time.
Where They Came From
The Poles who filled Buffalo and then Cheektowaga did not come from a country that existed on the map. Through their decades of migration, Poland was partitioned among Prussia, Austria and Russia, and the immigrants are best understood by which empire they fled.
The earliest wave, from the 1850s through the 1890s, came largely from the Prussian and German-ruled lands of western Poland, pushed out by agricultural change and the pressures of Germanisation. A second and larger wave came from Galicia, the Austrian-ruled south, a region wrapped around the northern Carpathians and counted among the poorest corners of Europe.
Galicia was the engine of the mass migration. By 1882 the average peasant holding there had shrunk to about seven acres, and by 1896 to under six, too little to feed a family. What began as seasonal labour migration into Germany turned, in the 1880s, into a transatlantic exodus, the same Galician current that carried Poles to the docks of Fells Point in Baltimore and far beyond. These were not lone adventurers. They moved through chains of kin and village, arriving in cities where neighbours and cousins had already settled, which is precisely why Buffalo’s Polonia, and then Cheektowaga, grew village by village rather than person by person.
Cheektowaga Today
The Polish share of Cheektowaga is no longer what it was. The American Community Survey of recent years puts Polish ancestry around 26 per cent, down from the 39.9 of 2000, as the founding generation passes and younger families marry across the old lines and move farther out. Some of the anchor parishes have merged or closed, part of a wider contraction of Catholic Buffalo.
Yet the heritage is anything but invisible. Cheektowaga remains one of the centres of gravity for the Buffalo region’s Dyngus Day, the Easter Monday festival of polka, pussy willows and squirt guns that has grown from a parish-hall custom into one of the largest Polish celebrations in America. Parties at halls like Randolph Hall, parades and polka legends keep the suburb on the festival map every spring.
The wider town has changed shape too. Since the Walden Galleria opened on 1 May 1989, becoming Western New York’s largest mall at around 1.6 million square feet, Cheektowaga has been as much a regional shopping and airport hub as an ethnic enclave. The bungalows still stand, the delis still sell kielbasa, the Am-Pol Eagle still lands on doorsteps, and on the right Monday in spring you can still hear an accordion three streets over. The Polish in Cheektowaga, New York are no longer the whole story of the town, but they remain the reason it has one worth telling.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Cheektowaga considered the most Polish town in America?
By the 2000 census, 39.9 per cent of Cheektowaga residents reported Polish ancestry, the highest share of any sizeable municipality in the country. The Polish in Cheektowaga, New York built that majority by moving east in waves from Buffalo’s crowded East Side Polonia, settling around a Polish orphanage and parish.
How did Polish families end up in Cheektowaga rather than staying in Buffalo?
Buffalo’s East Side filled up faster than it could house people, so Polish families bought lots in the open farmland just east along Genesee, Walden, Bailey and William streets. The Immaculate Heart of Mary Orphan’s Home, opened in 1882, and St Josaphat parish, founded in 1905, anchored the first Polish neighbourhood there.
Where did Buffalo and Cheektowaga’s Poles originally come from?
Most came from Poland during its partition among Prussia, Austria and Russia. An early wave arrived from Prussian-ruled western Poland in the mid to late 1800s, followed by a larger migration from impoverished Galicia in the Austrian south, driven by shrinking farm holdings from the 1880s onward.
What is Dyngus Day and why does Cheektowaga celebrate it?
Dyngus Day is an Easter Monday tradition involving polka, pussy willows and water, brought by Polish immigrants and revived in modern Buffalo from the mid 2000s. Cheektowaga, as one of the most Polish communities in the region, hosts parties, parades and polka bands as part of the area’s celebrations.
Are there still Polish restaurants and shops in Cheektowaga?
Yes. Polish Villa serves kielbasa, pierogi and golabki, while delis such as Hanzlian’s on Genesee Street sell fresh kielbasa and locally made Babcia’s Pierogi. The Am-Pol Eagle newspaper on Harlem Road still chronicles the community’s events.
Is Cheektowaga still as Polish as it used to be?
Less so by the numbers. Recent surveys put Polish ancestry around 26 per cent, down from nearly 40 per cent in 2000, as the founding generation ages and families disperse. The heritage remains strong in the food, the parishes and the spring festivals, even as the town has also become a major regional shopping and airport hub.
If your family’s story passed through Cheektowaga, or any of the places Polish families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Galician village too small to feed its children, to a bungalow off Genesee Street and a parish that drew you east, to wherever you are now.