They called it Hunkytown. Not on any city map, never on a streetcar sign, but from the 1890s through the 1950s, if you stepped off the trolley at South 17th and Carson, you were in Slovakia. The air smelled of coke smoke and kapustnica simmering on a back-of-the-house stove. Pittsburgh held more Slovaks than any city outside Slovakia itself, and the South Side held more Slovaks than anywhere else in Pittsburgh.
This is the story of how a stretch of brick rowhouses along the Monongahela, and a knot of mill towns upriver, became the largest Slovak settlement in the world beyond the homeland.
Pittsburgh, The Place
The South Side runs along the south bank of the Monongahela River, opposite downtown, hemmed in by the river on one side and the steep wooded ridge of the Slopes on the other. East Carson Street is the spine. A flat grid of brick and frame rowhouses crowds the flats below, while narrow wooden steps zigzag up the Slopes to small church-domed plateaus.
The North Side faces downtown across the Allegheny, anchored by old Allegheny City, now folded into Pittsburgh proper. Out past the city limits, the Monongahela Valley unspools through Homestead, Munhall, Braddock, Duquesne, McKeesport. Mill towns. The 10 Carson and the East Busway run east. The river runs west, toward the Point, where the three rivers meet.
How Pittsburgh Became Slovak
Before the Slovaks
The South Side was originally Birmingham, a separate borough laid out in 1811 by Dr. Nathaniel Bedford and named for the English iron town. Glass, iron, and shipbuilding came first. By the 1860s, German immigrants filled the flats and worked the early furnaces. Allegheny City, north of the river, was Pittsburgh’s German twin.
Then Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Works opened in Braddock in 1875, and the J&L South Side Works hit full stride in the 1880s. The mills needed bodies. The Germans were moving up. Word went back across the Atlantic that western Pennsylvania was hiring.
The Slovaks Arrive (1880s to 1920)
Slovak emigration began in earnest in the 1880s. Between 1870 and 1914, close to half a million Slovak-speakers left Upper Hungary for the United States, most of them landing in Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh and its mill suburbs caught the largest share.
The pull was steel. The push was a colder thing. Slovakia did not exist as a state in 1900. It was Felvidék, Upper Hungary, ruled from Budapest, and the Hungarian government’s Magyarization policy had been grinding away at Slovak language and identity since 1867. Slovak schools were closed. Slovak surnames were rewritten in Magyar. Slovak children in the worst-affected counties were sent to Hungarian-language schools by force.
The Šariš, Spiš, Zemplín, and Ung counties of the far northeast lost the most people. These were the poorest, the most rural, the most mountainous, and the most pressed. Whole villages came in chains, one cousin pulling the next.
The first wave landed in the cinder pits and billet yards of the J&L South Side Works, the Homestead Steel Works, the Carrie Furnaces. Slavic immigrants made up roughly half the workforce in Pittsburgh’s mills by the early 1900s. They took the jobs nobody else would: twelve-hour shifts at fifteen cents an hour, often seven days a week, in heat that ruined men by forty.
They lived in the Second Ward of the South Side, in tenements where almost half of Slovak families took in boarders to make rent. The water was bad. The toilets were shared. The children slept three to a bed. And still they came.
The Peak (1918 and the Pittsburgh Agreement)
By 1918 the South Side, the South Side Slopes, parts of Lawrenceville and Bloomfield, and the entire upriver Mon Valley were ringed with Slovak parishes and fraternal halls. The community was confident enough, organised enough, and rich enough in newspaper editors and lodge presidents to think about the homeland.
On May 30, 1918, roughly 20,000 Czechs and Slovaks marched from the North Side to the old Exposition Hall at the Point. The next day, May 31, twenty-nine men sat down in the Loyal Order of Moose Building at 628 Penn Avenue downtown and signed a six-sentence memorandum. It promised a republic, a democratic constitution, and Slovak as an official language in Slovak lands.
The signers included Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the future first president of Czechoslovakia, and leaders of the Slovak League of America, the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Slovak Evangelical Union, and the Czech National Federation. The document is now known as the Pittsburgh Agreement. Czechoslovakia was declared independent five months later, on October 18, 1918.
A nation was drafted in a Pittsburgh fraternal hall, by men whose day jobs were running steel and pouring iron and pressing kielbasa.
The interwar decades were the high water mark. The South Side had its own Slovak weeklies, its own butchers, its own bakeries selling kolache and rohlíky, its own Slovak-language Masses. The Mon Valley towns each had two or three Slovak parishes apiece. The Slovak Catholic Sokol opened its Pittsburgh social club at 2912 East Carson in 1946, by which time the second generation was already running things.
The Change (1980s onward)
The steel crash gutted everything. Between 1979 and 1987, the Mon Valley lost more than 150,000 manufacturing jobs. Homestead Works closed in 1986. Duquesne closed in 1984. The J&L South Side Works, the original anchor, closed in 1981.
The South Side Flats hollowed out. The Slopes held on longer because the houses were small, paid off, and held by old people who would not leave. Suburban dispersal was already underway by the 1950s, when the second and third generation moved up to Brentwood, Whitehall, Pleasant Hills, West Mifflin. The mills had built their tickets out.
By 1992 the Diocese of Pittsburgh consolidated five South Side parishes, including the Slovak St. Matthew, into a single new parish called Prince of Peace. The Slovak Mass moved to memory. The bakeries thinned. The halls turned into bars.
But the community never disappeared. It dispersed.
The Landmarks of Slovak Pittsburgh
St. Matthew Slovak Catholic Church, 1900 block of Mary Street, South Side. Founded in 1903 as the Slovak national parish of the South Side flats, with the cornerstone laid on July 4, 1905, and the building dedicated in 1906. The mill workers raised the money themselves. The parish closed in 1992 and the building was later eyed for loft-style condominiums. The shell still stands.
St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, 506 Saline Street, Four Mile Run. Founded in 1910 by Rusyn immigrants from the Carpathian Mountains, in a small valley they called Ruska Dolina, Rusyn Valley, beside the Jones & Laughlin mill. Andy Warhol was baptised here. His family worshipped here through his Pittsburgh years. The onion domes still rise over the Parkway East, visible to every commuter heading downtown.
The Pittsburgh Agreement site, 628 to 634 Penn Avenue, downtown. The Loyal Order of Moose Building where the Czechoslovak nation was drafted on May 31, 1918. A state historical marker now stands on the block. The building itself is long gone, but the address remains a kind of pilgrimage stop for Slovak diplomats visiting the city.
Slovak Catholic Sokol Club, 2912 East Carson Street, South Side. Opened as a social hall in 1946 by members of the Slovak Catholic Sokol fraternal benefit society, which was founded in 1905 in New Jersey but found its largest base in western Pennsylvania. The hall still hosts bingo on Sundays and Tuesdays, weddings on Saturdays, and Slovak Catholic Sokol Branch 16 meetings throughout the year.
The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky Street, North Side. The largest single-artist museum in North America, opened in 1994 in a 1911 distribution warehouse a block from PNC Park. The museum quietly documents the Rusyn-Slovak immigrant family that produced the most famous American artist of the twentieth century. His parents came from a mountain village called Miková in northeast Slovakia. He never quite left that village behind.
The John Kollar Slovak Literary and Library Society. Founded on the South Side in 1912 and still tied to several South Side churches more than a century later. Named after the great Slovak poet and pan-Slavic thinker Ján Kollár, the kind of club where a working man could borrow a Slovak-language novel after a twelve-hour shift.
The Slovak Heritage Festival, Cathedral of Learning, Oakland. Held each November in the Slovak Nationality Room at the University of Pittsburgh. The 35th anniversary festival took place in 2025. Haluški with cabbage. Pirohi with potato and cheese. Holupki, klobasa, and the long line for the bakery table that forms before doors open.
Where the Pittsburgh Slovaks Came From
The Pittsburgh Slovaks came overwhelmingly from the eastern and northern reaches of present-day Slovakia, the regions that were poorest, most mountainous, and most exposed to Magyarization. Šariš, around Prešov and Bardejov. Spiš, around Levoča and Spišská Nová Ves. Zemplín, around Michalovce and Humenné. And from further west, Trenčín, Žilina, Liptov, Orava, and the Spiš foothills running into the High Tatras.
The Rusyn villages of the far northeast, including Miková where the Warhola family was from, sent a heavy share as well. Andrej Warhola arrived in 1912 and went to work in a coal mine. Julia Justina Zavaczki, his future wife, joined him in 1921. Their son Andrew was born in Pittsburgh in 1928.
Most of the people who left these counties were rural. They were small-plot farmers, shepherds, woodcutters, day labourers. They had never seen a city the size of Pittsburgh. They came because someone in the next village over had written a letter home about a job in a mill.
Pittsburgh Today
The metro Pittsburgh area still holds around 66,000 people of Slovak ancestry, and the wider region counts more than 100,000 with full or partial Slovak heritage. Pennsylvania remains the most Slovak state in the country, with more than 175,000 residents of Slovak descent. Pittsburgh is still, by a comfortable margin, the largest Slovak community in the world outside Slovakia itself.
It does not look the way it did. The South Side Flats is a bar and restaurant strip now, with college students and young professionals living above the storefronts where Slovak butchers and bakers once worked.
The Slopes are quieter, still holding pockets of original families, with the easternmost wedge between Jane Street and Handler Street still home to descendants of the first Carpathian arrivals. The Mon Valley towns are slowly redeveloping. Braddock has its boosters. Homestead has its Waterfront. The mills are mostly gone, but the parishes the mill workers built are still standing in many of them.
What survives is a community of memory and quiet practice. Sunday liturgies in Byzantine Catholic and Slovak Roman Catholic parishes across the metro. The Slovak Heritage Festival each November. The Sokol Club bingos. The grandmothers who still make pirohi by hand and the grandchildren who are starting to learn how. The Velvet Revolution travellers who fly back to Šariš every few years to find the village their great-grandmother left in 1908.
The mills built Pittsburgh, and Slovak hands built the mills. The story keeps walking forward, in suburban kitchens and old hilltop churches, three generations and four generations from a village in the foothills of the Tatras.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Slovaks settle in Pittsburgh?
Slovaks settled in Pittsburgh primarily for work in the steel mills, coal mines, and foundries of western Pennsylvania, which were hiring aggressively from the 1880s onward. The pull of mill jobs combined with the push of poverty and Hungarian government Magyarization in the Slovak counties of Upper Hungary brought hundreds of thousands of Slovaks to the Pittsburgh region between 1880 and the mid-1920s.
Are Slovaks still in Pittsburgh today?
Yes. The greater Pittsburgh region still has more than 100,000 residents of full or partial Slovak heritage, making it the largest Slovak community in the world outside Slovakia. Pennsylvania remains the most Slovak state in the country, with around 175,000 residents of Slovak descent, most of them concentrated in the Pittsburgh metro and the Mon Valley mill towns.
What are the most famous Slovak landmarks in Pittsburgh?
The most important Slovak landmarks include the former St. Matthew Slovak Catholic Church on the South Side, the Slovak Catholic Sokol Club at 2912 East Carson Street, the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Four Mile Run where Andy Warhol was baptised, the Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side, and the Pittsburgh Agreement historical marker on Penn Avenue downtown.
Where in Slovakia did the Pittsburgh Slovaks come from?
The Pittsburgh Slovaks came overwhelmingly from the eastern and northern regions of present-day Slovakia. The largest numbers came from Šariš, Spiš, and Zemplín counties in the northeast, with significant additional arrivals from Trenčín, Žilina, Liptov, and Orava. The Rusyn villages of the far northeast, including Miková where the Warhola family was from, also sent a large share.
When did Slovaks first arrive in Pittsburgh?
Slovak immigration to Pittsburgh began in the 1880s and peaked between 1900 and 1920. By the early 1900s, Slavic immigrants made up roughly half the workforce in Pittsburgh’s mills, and the Slovak community was concentrated in the South Side, the South Side Slopes, parts of the North Side, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, and the steel towns of the Mon Valley.
If your family’s story passed through the South Side, the Slopes, or any of the Mon Valley mill towns where the Slovaks made a home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Šariš or Spiš, to a parish on Mary Street, to wherever you are now.