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Little Village is the name on the arch; South Lawndale, community area 30, is the name on the city’s maps. It is the largest Mexican community in the Midwest, built on blocks that Czech immigrants laid out after the fire, with 26th Street as one of the busiest shopping streets in Chicago.
South Lawndale sits south of the BNSF tracks and north of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, from Western Avenue west to the city line at Cicero, with the Cook County Jail complex on its southern edge and the Pink Line along its northern one. The city named it in the 1920s as the south half of the old Lawndale subdivision; residents renamed the eastern two-thirds Little Village, La Villita, in the 1960s, and Marshall Square is the northeastern corner near the boulevard.
About 71,000 people live here, more per block than in most of the city, and 26th Street between Sacramento and Kostner is the commercial spine, with the welcome arch at Albany.
Little Village is most of the area: the 26th Street corridor, the parks (Piotrowski, Shedd, Washtenaw), the schools built after the 2001 hunger strike won the Little Village Lawndale High School campus, and the two-flats and bungalows on the side streets. Our Little Village guide covers it.
Marshall Square is the northeast corner, around Marshall Boulevard and 24th, with the boulevard’s greystones and the Pink Line at California a short walk away; it is where the area meets Pilsen’s Heart of Chicago and North Lawndale.
Czech and other Eastern European families settled here after the Great Fire, moving west along 26th Street from Pilsen; the churches and the sokol halls are theirs. Factories along the rail lines brought more residents in the early twentieth century, and Polish families arrived in numbers in the middle of it. Mexican families began moving in during the mid-1960s, many displaced by the University of Illinois campus and expressway construction on the Near West Side, and by the 1980s Little Village had become the center of Mexican Chicago.
The Crawford Generating Station on the canal, one of the city’s last coal plants, closed in 2012 after a long neighborhood campaign; the 2020 demolition of its smokestack, which covered the neighborhood in dust, and the warehouse built on the site are still argued over.
The Pink Line runs along the area’s north edge with stations at California, Kedzie, Central Park, Pulaski and Kostner, about twenty-five minutes to the Loop. The 26th Street bus (route 60) is the local artery; California, Kedzie and Pulaski buses run north to the Blue Line and south to the Orange Line. The Stevenson Expressway runs along the canal.
Brick two-flats and three-flats from the 1900s to the 1920s, frame cottages and rear houses on the older eastern blocks, and brick bungalows on the western ones toward Cicero, most of them with more than one household inside. Greystones line the boulevards. Vacant lots are fewer than in the neighborhoods north of the tracks, and the housing has been kept up by owners who stayed.
Read our two-flat guide before touring; a legal basement unit and an illegal one look alike from the sidewalk and are worth very different amounts.
Little Village is the neighborhood name for most of South Lawndale, Chicago’s official community area 30; Marshall Square, in the northeast corner, is the other neighborhood inside it.
On the West Side, between the BNSF railroad tracks and the Sanitary and Ship Canal, from Western Avenue west to Cicero Avenue, with 26th Street running through the middle.
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