On the fourth weekend of every August, the smell of fried onions and simmering sauerkraut drifts across East 22nd Street, and a polka band tunes up under a tent behind a red brick church. This is Zabawa, which means fun time in Polish, and it is the loudest annual proof that the Polish in Erie, Pennsylvania are still here, still cooking, still dancing on the same east side ground their great-grandparents bought lot by lot in the 1880s.
Erie is a lake city with a Polish accent. After the Germans, Poles are the single largest ancestry group in town, and almost everything they built they built within walking distance of the bay, on the streets running east from State.
The Place
Erie sits on the south shore of Lake Erie in the far northwest corner of Pennsylvania, a working port roughly equidistant from Cleveland and Buffalo. For more than a century it was a manufacturing city, with foundries, paper mills, locomotive works and shipyards drawing labour from across Europe.
The Polish quarter grew up on the east side, in a grid of modest frame houses between the lake and the factories. The numbered streets, East 3rd through the upper 20s, became the spine of Erie Polonia, and the corners of Wallace, Reed, German and Hess still carry its churches and clubs.
This was never a wealthy neighbourhood. It was a neighbourhood of homeowners, the kind of place where a man working a furnace shift could buy a house, raise eight children and bury his parents from the parish three blocks away. It is a Pennsylvania story with cousins across the state, from the Italian quarters of the Italians in Norristown to the Jewish enclave of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh.
How It Became Polish
The first family, 1868
The story has a precise beginning. On 30 May 1868, Andrew and Catherine Mendlewski arrived in Erie with their six children and became the city’s first Polish family. They came, as nearly everyone who followed would, for the factory jobs that Erie’s industry was throwing off faster than the local population could fill them.
For a decade or so the trickle stayed small. By 1883 there were only about 85 Polish families in the city. Then the wave broke.
St. Stanislaus, the mother parish
Faith came before brick. In the early 1880s the growing community bought six lots at the corner of 13th and Wallace Streets, and the Rev. Karol Lanz collected $1,963.50 toward a church. Bishop Tobias Mullen blessed the cornerstone on 19 October 1884, and the first St. Stanislaus, a small wooden church, was dedicated on 11 October 1885.
The parish got its defining leader the next year. The Rev. Andrew Ignasiak, a Polish-born priest ordained only months earlier, was installed on 22 August 1886 and stayed until 1934, nearly half a century. Under him St. Stanislaus opened a school in 1887 with 70 children, then watched it balloon: a new school in 1901 enrolled 650.
The wooden church could not hold the crowds. The present brick St. Stanislaus, at 13th and Wallace, was built through the 1890s and dedicated on 25 September 1898. It remains, in the language of Erie Polonia, the mother parish, the church from which the others descend.
The daughter parishes
As the immigrants kept coming, one parish was not enough. In 1902 the Thaddeus Kosciuszko Society moved to found a second Polish church on the southern edge of the quarter, and Holy Trinity was formally dedicated on 6 December 1903 at East 22nd and Reed.
St. Hedwig followed in 1911, near 3rd and Wallace, closer to the lake. St. Casimir came in 1914, after Congressman M. M. Liebel Jr. donated property at Sixth and Hess Avenue and Bishop Fitzmaurice laid its cornerstone on 15 November 1914. Four Polish Roman Catholic parishes now ringed the east side, each with its own school, hall and societies.
It is hard to overstate what those four churches meant. They were not only places of worship. They were credit unions, employment offices, language schools and social clubs, the institutions through which a Polish-speaking labourer became an Erie citizen without surrendering his heritage.
The Falcons and the clubs
Around the parishes grew a thick web of fraternal life. The Polish Falcons, a national gymnastic and patriotic society, organised Nest 610 in October 1914 with the help of the Rev. Francis Robaczewski, pastor of St. Hedwig. The Falcons first drilled in the parish hall, then built their own home at 448 East 3rd Street in 1925, and broke ground for the current building, with a hall, bar, kitchen and bowling alleys, in 1950.
St. Stanislaus alone spun off singing societies, benevolent funds and the CYMA Club, the East Side Boys Club, founded in 1920. The Moniuszko Singing Society had been going since 1891. This was civic infrastructure built by people who, a generation earlier, had owned nothing.
War and after
The community paid the ordinary American price. From St. Stanislaus alone, 357 parishioners served in the First World War and 13 were killed; in the Second World War, 774 served and 22 died. The men came home, the parishes consecrated and renovated their churches, and through the post-war decades the east side stayed solidly, audibly Polish.
The Landmarks
St. Stanislaus Church, 13th and Wallace Streets. The mother parish of Erie Polonia, its present brick church dedicated in 1898. It absorbed St. Hedwig in 2017 and partnered with Our Mother of Sorrows Parish in 2024, but it still stands at the heart of the old quarter, the oldest Polish Catholic congregation in the Diocese of Erie.
Holy Trinity Church, 2220 Reed Street. Founded by Polish immigrants in 1902 and dedicated in 1903, with a new church begun in 1940. Each year on the fourth weekend of August it hosts Zabawa, the Polish festival of nationally known polka bands, home cooking and baked goods that draws Erie back to the east side.
Urbaniak Brothers Quality Meats, 310 East 24th Street. A family butcher and Polish market at the corner of 24th and German, with roots in the mid-1930s, when Ben Urbaniak and his brothers Chester, Edward and Ted sold meat at the old 12th Street Market. It still smokes its own kielbasa, hams and bacon, and makes kiszka, the Polish blood sausage.
Dabrowski’s Restaurant and Deli, 4003 Main Street, Lawrence Park. Family owned and operated since 1983, on the corner of Main Street in the Lawrence Park borough just east of the city. It is one of Erie’s go-to counters for pierogi and the rest of the Polish table, a sign that the food outlived the tight boundaries of the old quarter.
Polish Falcons Nest 610, 448 East 3rd Street. The fraternal hall the Falcons built in 1925 and rebuilt around 1950, with a stage, bar, kitchen and bowling alleys. A second Erie nest, Nest 123, keeps a hall at 602 East 19th Street. Between them they are the secular spine of east-side Polish life.
St. Casimir Church, Sixth and Hess Avenue. The youngest of the four Polish parishes, its cornerstone laid in 1914 on land donated by Congressman M. M. Liebel Jr. It now belongs to Our Mother of Sorrows Parish, a sign of how the four congregations have consolidated as the neighbourhood thinned.
Where They Came From
Erie’s Poles were part of the great late-nineteenth-century emigration from the partitioned homeland, when Poland did not exist on the map and its land was carved between Prussia, Austria and Russia. Most who reached industrial America came from the German-ruled and Austrian-ruled regions, from Poznan, Galicia and the villages of the south and west, pushed by rural poverty and pulled by factory wages.
Chain migration did the rest. A man arrived, found work in an Erie foundry or paper mill, wrote home, and sent for a brother, a cousin, a fiancee. They clustered by village and by parish, which is why the east side filled so densely and so fast, 85 families in 1883, around 800 by 1901.
They were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and they carried their devotions intact: the Corpus Christi processions, the singing societies, the saints’ names for their churches. The parish was the unit of memory, the place where Polish was still spoken, sung and confessed long after the children switched to English in the schoolyard.
It is a pattern that repeats wherever Poles settled in industrial America. The same parish-centred Polonia took root in the Buffalo suburb of the Polish community in Cheektowaga, New York, in the mill towns of Polish Wallington, New Jersey and neighbouring Garfield, and most famously in Cleveland’s Slavic Village, three hours west along the same lake. Erie’s east side belongs to that map.
Erie Today
The factories that built the east side are mostly gone, and so is the density of the old Polonia. The four parishes have been merging and partnering for years: St. Hedwig folded into St. Stanislaus in 2017, St. Casimir into Our Mother of Sorrows. The east side is poorer and more mixed than it was, and the Polish names on the mailboxes are fewer.
And yet the bones hold. St. Stanislaus and Holy Trinity still ring their bells. Urbaniak Brothers still sells kielbasa by the pound to people who drive across town for it, and the Falcons still bowl in their hall on East 3rd. Polish remains the second-largest ancestry in the city, a fraction below German.
The clearest measure is Zabawa. Every August the east side fills again, the polka bands play behind Holy Trinity, the pierogi go out by the thousand, and Erie remembers out loud that it was, and in a quieter way still is, a Polish town. The neighbourhood has thinned, but it has not forgotten how to throw a party in its own honour. For the broader statistical picture, the demographics of Erie confirm Polish ancestry as the city’s second-largest, just behind German.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Polish in Erie, Pennsylvania live?
Historically the Polish in Erie, Pennsylvania settled on the city’s east side, in the grid of numbered streets running east from State toward the lake. The anchors were four parishes around Wallace, Reed, Hess and East 3rd Streets, and that quarter remains the heart of Erie Polonia, though the community has spread and thinned over the decades.
When did Poles first settle in Erie?
The first Polish family, Andrew and Catherine Mendlewski and their six children, arrived on 30 May 1868. The community stayed small at first, about 85 families by 1883, then grew rapidly to roughly 800 families by 1901 as factory work drew immigrants from partitioned Poland.
What is the Zabawa Polish Festival?
Zabawa, which means fun time in Polish, is an annual festival hosted by Holy Trinity Church at 2220 Reed Street on the fourth weekend of August. It features nationally known polka bands, traditional Polish food and baked goods, and is the largest yearly celebration of the Polish in Erie, Pennsylvania.
What are the Polish Catholic churches in Erie?
Erie had four Polish Roman Catholic parishes: St. Stanislaus at 13th and Wallace (the mother parish, dedicated 1898), Holy Trinity at 22nd and Reed (1903), St. Hedwig near 3rd and Wallace (1911) and St. Casimir at Sixth and Hess (1914). Several have since merged as the east-side population declined.
Where can I buy Polish food in Erie?
Urbaniak Brothers Quality Meats at 310 East 24th Street is a long-running Polish butcher known for house-smoked kielbasa and kiszka. Dabrowski’s Restaurant and Deli, at 4003 Main Street in Lawrence Park, has served pierogi and Polish dishes since 1983.
How large is Erie’s Polish community?
Polish ancestry accounts for roughly 9 percent of Erie’s population, making it the second-largest ancestry group in the city after German. That is one of the more notable Polish American concentrations in Pennsylvania outside the larger metropolitan areas, a legacy of the east-side parishes that organised the community for more than a century.
If your family’s story passed through Erie, or any of the places Poles have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in partitioned Poznan or Galicia to a frame house off East 22nd Street, to wherever you are now.