USA, Canada /
Chicago as the city Poles chose to settle in America [44]
Have you ever eaten at a place near Midway - Cuisine of Zakopane area?
There are a couple of restaurants on Archer. The Polish Highlanders...and something that I will butcher the spelling of because I no longer have the 2006 calendar. I haven't eaten at either.
Poles flocked to Chicago because of the nearly unlimited supply of jobs for unskilled labor. This included Poles who may have originally settled near Pittsburg, which also had a great need for labor. The immigration acts of the 1920's greatly reduced the supply of immigrants, but by then Poles, as well as every other immigrant culture were well established in the city.
Why Chicago, as oppossed to say, Pittsburg, or Detroit? I don't know. I can speculate, though. Chicago had very segregated neighborhoods, which made it very easy for new immigrants to asssimlate. It was probably common in most big cities. Perhaps the Chicago Poles just had better leadership, and perhaps Chicago had a better political climate than other cities. It became the destination for Polish immigrants. While other immigrant communities began to lose their identity after World War II, the Polish community has maintained it's identity. This can be attributed to a few factors. Poland was probably the most populous country under Soviet influence. They had the community to start with, and it grew proportionally as people left Poland. People left Lithuania, Romania, Hungary, and Czechs and Slovaks too, and there were/are communities in Chicago for each group, but the Polish community only got bigger. The new blood kept the community vibrant. Whereas immigration has all but ended from the Scandanavian nations, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, Poles continued to head to Chicago.
