Avondale, Chicago
Avondale is one of the 77 community areas of Chicago in Illinois, United States. It is on the Northwest Side of the city. The northern border is Addison Street from the north branch of the Chicago River in the east to Pulaski Road in the west. The neighborhood extends further west along Belmont Avenue to the Milwaukee District North Line. Its southern border is Diversey Avenue from the Milwaukee District North Line to the Chicago River.
In 2025, Avondale was ranked the world’s fifth coolest neighborhood by Time Out, higher than any other U.S. city. This represents an increase in ranking from 2022, when Time Out ranked Avondale the sixteenth coolest neighborhood in the world.
History
The first European settler in Avondale was Abraham Harris who settled the area three years after its 1850 incorporation into Jefferson Township. In 1869, Avondale was incorporated as a village. It has been speculated that developer and Pennsylvania native John Lewis Cochran named the village in honor of the miners and rescue workers who died in the Avondale coal mine fire. Atypical for the time, Avondale was racially integrated in the nineteenth century with twenty African American families moving to the area and building Avondale's first church in the 1880s. Avondale, along with the rest of Jefferson Township, was annexed by the City of Chicago in 1889.Factories and other industries sprang up around the start of the 20th century due to the Chicago River and Avondale's dense network of transportation corridors that were built in the 1870s and improved after its annexation into Chicago including replacement of cable cars with electric powered streetcars. The resulting jobs in the area were responsible for drawing the initial wave of European immigrants.
Avondale was the site of one of Chicago's "Seven Lost Wonders", the Olson Park and Waterfall complex at Diversey and Pulaski.
Beginning in the 1980s, Latino settlement began in Avondale. A multiplicity of other diverse Eastern European ethnicities came to the area following the End of Communism in 1989, leading to Avondale's nickname as the neighborhood "Where Eastern Europe meets Latin America".
Starting in the mid-2000s, gentrification began to take hold in the Avondale area as it had in neighboring Wicker Park, Logan Square and Bucktown.
Demographics
Avondale has traditionally had a large Polish population, with patches of German, Scandinavian, and Italians settlement as well. In recent years this blue-collar neighborhood has witnessed an increase in its social diversity. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe witnessed an influx of Eastern European immigrants such as Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and Belarusians, particularly alongside Poles in the "Polish Village". The emigration of peoples from the Soviet Bloc in Avondale since then has grown to include Russophone nationals from Central Asia and even Mongolia. A strong Filipino community is present in Avondale as well, which is home to Chicago's Filipino TV outlet. Latino settlement beginning in the 1980s led to an increase in Avondale's Hispanic population from 37.6% in 1990 to 62.0% in 2000, with increased numbers of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central American immigrants. Because of gentrification, the last decade has seen a reversal of this trend, as the non-Hispanic white population has been expanding faster than the Hispanic population.Transportation
Avondale is served by the 'L' at two stations along the Blue Line. The station is on the northeastern edge next to the Kennedy Expressway at the intersection of Kimball Avenue and Belmont, less than three blocks away from St. Hyacinth's former mission of Our Lady of Lourdes; the station is located in the median of the same expressway adjacent to the neighboring Villa District.Avondale is also accessible by a number of bus routes run by the CTA.
- Running Northwest/ Southeast:
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56 Milwaukee - Running North/ South:
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49 Western - *
53 Pulaski - *
82 Kimball-Homan - *
94 California - Running East/ West:
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76 Diversey - *
77 Belmont - *
152 AddisonNeighborhoods
Polish Village
The Polish Village or Jackowo and Wacławowo, together make up one of Chicago's largest and most vibrant Polish Patches. The neighborhoods derive their Polish names from the two contiguous Polish Roman Catholic parishes- Saint Hyacinth's Basilica and St. Wenceslaus Church. Milwaukee Avenue is the district's main commercial strip, which includes a number of sausage shops, restaurants, and bakeries. In English the area is usually referred to as the Polish Village - the name featured on signs hung on street lamps over the district. Pulaski Avenue, named after the Polish Revolutionary War hero, runs through the area.The Polish communities of Jackowo and Wacławowo appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Polish settlement spread further northwest along Milwaukee Avenue. The neighborhood experienced its heyday as the cultural nexus of Chicago's Polonia during the 1980s and 1990s with the so-called Solidarity and Post-Solidarity waves of Polish migration to Chicago, including a number of political refugees. Until the recent installation of an automated system, on Sunday mornings the CTA driver would announce "Yats- koh- voh", signaling the stop for St. Hyacinth Basilica as Poles shuttled off the bus on their way to Mass. Local landmarks and institutions increasingly became revitalized and renewed while taking on an increasingly ethnic hue by catering to these recent arrivals from Poland. The historic Milford Theatre served as the central Polish cinema arts venue like Jefferson Park's Gateway Theater today, with locals giving it the nickname "Cinema Polski", drawing even street photographer Vivian Maier.
A distinct flowering of Polish arts and culture took place here in Avondale, an environment where Poles could finally freely express themselves without worrying about incurring the wrath of government censors or political repression. The events and activities organized here by Chicago's Polish community played a key role in shaping the chain of events that eventually resulted in the collapse of the Communist government in Poland, bringing down the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since after World War II. An expressive and now decaying mural in the McDonald's parking lot combining Polish patriotic and folkloric motifs by Caryl Yasko titled "Razem", or together in Polish, was painted thanks in part to funds furnished by the Polish American Congress in 1975. It now stands near the corners of Belmont and Pulaski in mute testament to this bygone renaissance.
Just to the north of Jackowo is Wacławowo and the parish of St. Wenceslaus, with its impressive church. Housing stock there primarily consists of brick two-flats built in the first half of the 20th century prior to World War II, although there are a number of bungalows present in the area neighboring the Villa District to the north.
Belmont Gardens
Belmont Gardens spans the Chicago Community Areas of Logan Square and Avondale like neighboring Kosciuszko Park, located within its northwest portion, where the Pulaski Industrial Corridor abuts these residential areas. The boundaries of Belmont Gardens are generally held to be Pulaski Road to the East, the Union Pacific/Northwest rail line to the West, Belmont Avenue to the North, and Fullerton Avenue to the South.Most of the land between Fullerton Avenue and Diversey Avenue as well as Kimball Avenue to the Union Pacific/Northwest rail line was empty as late as the 1880s, mostly consisting of the rural "truck farms" that peppered much of Jefferson Township. This began to change with the annexation of this rustic hinterland to the city in 1889 in anticipation of the World's Columbian Exposition that would focus the country's eyes on Chicago just a few years later in 1893.
Belmont Gardens's first urban development began thanks to Homer Pennock, who founded the industrial village of Pennock, Illinois. Centered on Wrightwood Avenue, which was originally laid out as "Pennock Boulevard", was planned to be a hefty industrial and residential district. The development was so renowned that the village was highlighted in a History of Cook County, Illinois authored by Weston Arthur Goodspeed and Daniel David Healy. Thwarted by circumstances as well as the decline of Homer Pennock's fortune, this district declined to the point that the Chicago Tribune wrote about the neighborhood in an article titled "A Deserted Village in Chicago" in 1903. The original name of the Healy Metra Station was originally named after this now lost settlement.
While Homer Pennock's industrial suburb failed, Chicago's rapid expansion transformed the area's farms into clusters of factories and homes. At the start of the 20th century as settlement was booming, Belmont Gardens and Avondale were at the Northwestern edge of the Milwaukee Avenue "Polish Corridor"- a contiguous stretch of Polish settlement which spanned this thoroughfare all the way from Polonia Triangle at Milwaukee, Division and Ashland to Irving Park Road.
Belmont Gardens offered more than just a less congested setting for its new residents. Due to its proximity to rail along the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, the area developed a plethora of industry that still survives in the city's Pulaski Industrial Corridor. It was adjacent to his own factory that Mr. Walter E. Olson built what the Chicago Tribune put at the top of its list of the "Seven Lost Wonders of Chicago", the Olson Park and Waterfall Complex, a 22-acre garden and waterfall remembered by Chicagoans citywide as the place they fondly reminisce heading out to for family trips on the weekend. The ambitious project took 200 workers more than six months to fashion it out of 800 tons of stone and 800 yards of soil.
Latino settlement in the neighborhood began in the 1980s. Today the area still retains its blue collar feel as much of surrounding Logan Square and Avondale undergo increased gentrification.