As the first and only Italian Catholic Church in the city in its early years, Assumption claimed a congregation of 10,000.
#CHICAGO 1930 STREET PICTURES WINDOWS#
The splendid altar and spectacular stained glass windows were contributed by the Cuneo, Sbararo, and Lagorio families. The generosity of the prominent Genovesi families and the artistic skills of Italian artisans made Assumption Church into a remarkable repository for devotional art. Sosteneus Moretti first built the basement foundation which was used as a place of worship until the fully completed church building was dedicated on the Feast of the Assumption, August 16, 1886. The original Genoese/Lucchese neighborhood in the shadow of today’s Merchandise Mart produced the first Italian Catholic Church of the Assumption in 1881, staffed by Servite Since the major colonies had usually had a Catholic church as their focal center, a brief rundown of neighborhood/parish history offers a suitable structure for understanding the communal history of Chicago’s Italians as they moved from immigrants to ethnics. Typical chain migration patterns prevailed with families and villages gradually re-forming in Chicago neighborhoods as workers accumulated savings with which to send for their relatives and buy homes. Though the core Italian neighborhoods remained Italian, it was often different Italians who lived there, since earlier settlers were likely to have moved west to more desirable neighborhoods
Following the pattern of ethnic succession, there were always remnants from previous ethnic population, mixed with the current dominant ethnic populations, with a sprinkling of families from the ethnic group that might become the majority in a generation or two. In fact, no Chicago neighborhood was ever exclusively Italian. Into the 1920s people moved around a lot. Though in its heyday the Taylor Street area contained some 25,000 people-a third of the city’s Italian population, there was from almost the beginning an absence of one large and densely populated Italian district. As chain migration proceeded, newcomers naturally headed to neighborhood of their paesani and family, solidifying the dispersal of the Italian population in Chicago. There were outlying colonies like Roseland, near the Pullman works and there were Italian settlements in satellite suburbs like Chicago Heights. They clustered in the “River Wards” in all three directions from the Loop. Because they came to Chicago to work, they lived near their places of employment. If all Italian immigrants to Chicago had settled in the same neighborhood, the concentration of their political, economic, and cultural power would have produced a much different history. There was never just ONE Little Italy in Chicago. There was never just ONE Little Italy in Chicago This is chapter 2 ofĭrawing heavily on the pioneering work of Rudolph Vecoli, Dominic Candeloro in the selection below (taken from his Chicago’s Italians: Immigrants, Ethnics, Americans) sketches out the various Italian neighborhoods in the Chicago area in the 1900s stressing a variety and a multiplicity that gave strength to the Italian sub-culture but which also served to scatter political and economic power of Italian Americans.
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