Lithuanians in Chicago
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Little Lithuania, Chicago, United States, is the largest Lithuanian community outside Lithuania, referred to by many Lithuanian-Americans as the second capital of Lithuania. Lithuanian-Americans from Chicago have had a huge effect on both American and Lithuanian politics.
Lithuanians have been arriving in America since 1918, when Lithuania declared its independence from Imperial Russia. It should be noted that, although this is the first official record, Lithuanians began arriving at least two decades earlier; however, they were listed as Russian citizens. This is compounded by the fact that, prior to Lithuanian independence, most if not all official documents were written in Russian, Polish or German. Thousands of Lithuanians have since moved to Chicago, providing a good source of labor for the growing city.
Little Lithuania is the center of Lithuanian culture in North America. It houses the only museum about Lithuanians in the Western Hemisphere, the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, which provides a wealth of information about Lithuania and Lithuanian culture. Little Lithuania has a number of Lithuanian restaurants, bookstores, and other shops. Even the current president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, is a former resident of the Chicago area. Chicago is home to the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania, and the city's large Lithuanian-American community maintains close ties to what is affectionately called the Motherland.
A number of the most architecturally significant churches of the Archdiocese of Chicago were built as national parishes by Lithuanian immigrants such as Holy Cross, Providence of God, and Nativity B.V.M., which is dedicated to our Our Lady of Šiluva. Opulently decorated with a proclivity towards Renaissance and Baroque ornamentation, Lithuanian churches were designed in the spirit of the architecture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's heyday. Like Chicago's Polish Cathedral's, these churches were statements meant to recall an era when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania spanned from the Baltic to the Black Sea, having been built at a time when Lithuania was under Russian occupation.
Lithuanians initially settled in areas adjacent to the ethnic group most familiar from their old world homeland, the Poles, a pattern found with most other immigrant groups in Chicago. Chicago neighborhoods in which Lithuanian immigrants lived during the 20th century include Bridgeport, Brighton Park, Marquette Park, and the Back of the Yards. The most recent wave of immigrants has settled in the Chicago suburbs of Lemont, Darien and Woodridge. The central figure in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel about the treatment of workers in the Chicago stock yards, The Jungle, was a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus.
