Describe the cultural history of Pilsen in your own words?
Answers
Answer:
When one Bohemian resident opened a restaurant called “At the City of Plzen” to honor the second largest city in West Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), residents began to refer to the neighborhood as Pilsen. The subsequent naming of the post office as Pilsen Station institutionalized the moniker.
Rich in Latino culture, Pilsen is a neighborhood that overflows with music, art, culinary tradition, and nightlife. It's home to award-winning restaurants, iconic music venues, and sensational murals as far as the eye can see.
When was Pilsen established?
1840s
Early History and Settlement (1840s – 1880s) During the 1840s, the area that would become known as Pilsen had its earliest settlement. The first set- tlers were Irish and German immigrant laborers who helped build the Illinois and Michigan Canal which connected the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River.
Answer:
Pilsen’s story is one of struggle and triumph: recently arrived immigrants struggling to navigate a foreign, often unwelcoming new land; factory workers struggling for a livable wage and an eight-hour day, even in the face of violent suppression; neighbors struggling to make their streets safe, their schools respectable, their air clean enough to breathe, and their homes secure.
It is only in recent years that many of those struggles have borne fruit and given way to a new struggle: one to maintain the identity and affordability of what is now a profitable location for developers and investors.
The first immigrants to make a home on Pilsen’s long-standing prairie grass were from Ireland. Although they would eventually become the most powerful political constituency in Chicago, in the early days they were treated as less than dirt. They arrived by the hundreds in the 1840s, promised ample work for anyone with a strong back and willing hands.
First, they built the Illinois and Michigan Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. Then they built the Southwestern Plank Road, which became today’s Ogden Avenue. Soon after, they built the Burlington Railroad tracks.
Their backbreaking labor fueled historic growth. When these immigrants arrived, Chicago was on the cusp of becoming a great metropolis. As the canal, road, and rail lines became operational between 1840 and 1855, Chicago’s population grew exponentially – from 4,470 to more than 75,000 in just 15 years.