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Pilsen, East Pilsen and the Heart of Chicago make up the Lower West Side, community area 31, the neighborhood between 16th Street and the canal that Bohemian immigrants named for their home city and Mexican families made their own. Eighteenth Street is its main street and its museum is the National Museum of Mexican Art.
The Lower West Side runs from 16th Street on the north to the Stevenson Expressway and the Sanitary and Ship Canal on the south, and from the Dan Ryan on the east to Western Avenue on the west. Pilsen is the eastern two-thirds, from the river to Ashland; the Heart of Chicago is the older name for the blocks west of Ashland to Western; East Pilsen is the loft and studio pocket nearest the river and the Ryan.
One thing to notice on any block: the houses sit below the sidewalk. The city raised its street grades by several feet in the second half of the 1800s to drain the low ground and lay sewers, and many of the neighborhood’s early cottages stayed where they were, which is why so many front doors are a half-flight down. About 33,000 people live here now, roughly ten thousand fewer than in 2000.
Pilsen is the name almost everyone uses for the whole area: 18th Street’s bakeries, taquerias and galleries, Thalia Hall, Harrison Park, the murals on nearly every viaduct and the Pilsen Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2006. Our Pilsen guide covers it block by block.
East Pilsen is the industrial edge east of Halsted toward the river, where the old factories along Cermak and 18th became artists’ studios and lofts, with the Chicago Arts District at its center. The Heart of Chicago is the quieter western third, from Ashland to Western around Oakley Boulevard’s old Italian blocks, with the Western station on the Pink Line at its edge.
Germans and Irish came first in the 1840s and 1850s, and Czech families from Bohemia named the neighborhood for Plzeň in the 1870s. The Battle of the Viaduct, the worst fighting of the 1877 railroad strike in Chicago, happened at 16th and Halsted. The McCormick Reaper works recruited skilled northern Italian workers in 1890, which is how the Heart of Chicago got its Italian blocks, and the Schoenhofen brewery at 18th and Canalport made the Green River soda.
Mexican families began arriving in the late 1930s, the numbers jumped in the late 1960s, and by 1970 Latinos were the majority. Mario Castillo painted the first Mexican mural in Pilsen in 1968, and the murals have not stopped since. The National Museum of Mexican Art opened in Harrison Park in 1987. The rents and prices of the last fifteen years are the neighborhood’s current argument.
The Pink Line stops at 18th, Damen and Western, about twenty minutes to the Loop; the Orange Line’s Ashland station serves the south edge, and Metra’s BNSF line stops at Halsted and Western. The 18th Street bus runs the length of the main street, and Halsted, Ashland, Damen and Western run north to the Blue Line and the Near West Side. The Stevenson and the Dan Ryan meet at the area’s southeast corner.
Brick two-flats and three-flats built by Bohemian craftsmen in the 1880s and 1890s, many with the sunken first floors described above, frame cottages behind them on the alley, courtyard buildings on the corners, and converted factories and warehouses toward the river. New construction has arrived on the vacant lots along 18th and Blue Island. The old buildings are among the best-built of their era in the city, with carved stone and pressed-metal cornices worth keeping.
Read our two-flat guide and the buying something older guide; a Pilsen flat with its original woodwork is a different thing from a gut rehab, and both have their price.
Pilsen is the neighborhood name for most of the Lower West Side, Chicago’s official community area 31; East Pilsen and the Heart of Chicago are the other names used inside it.
Between 16th Street and the Stevenson Expressway, from the Dan Ryan west to Western Avenue, south and west of the Loop.
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