Cermak Road
| Anton Cermak Memorial Parkway 2200 South |
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| West end | Illinois Route 56 (Butterfield Road), in Oak Brook, Illinois |
|---|---|
| East end | Martin Luther King Drive in Chicago |
| Other | |
| Known for | Anton Cermak |
Cermak Road, also known as 22nd Street, is a 19-mile-long, major east-west street on Chicago's near south and west sides and the city's western suburbs. In Chicago's street numbering system, Cermak is 2200 south, or twenty-two blocks south of the baseline, Madison Street (Chicago). Normally, one mile comprises eight Chicago blocks, but the arterial streets Roosevelt Road, formerly named Twelfth Street and at 1200 South, and Cermak Road (Twenty-Second Street) were platted before the eight-blocks-per-mile plan was implemented. Roosevelt Road is one mile south of Madison Avenue and there are twelve blocks within that mile. Cermak Road is two miles south of Madison Avenue and there are ten blocks within the mile between Roosevelt and Cermak Roads.
The street was named after Democratic politician Anton Cermak, Mayor of Chicago from 1931 until 1933. Cermak was shot and killed on February 15, 1933, by an assassin who was aiming for President Franklin Roosevelt. Cermak was a Czech immigrant credited with creating a multi-ethnic Democratic political coalition that included formerly Republican African Americans. The street was chosen to honor Cermak because it passes through the neighborhoods of Pilsen and Lawndale, both at the time heavily Czech-American. The adjoining suburbs of Cicero and Berwyn were also home to a large Czech population during the first half of the 20th century.
A trip from east to west along Cermak Road traces a historical timeline of the Chicago area, from Yankee industrialists' masonry mansions in the Prairie District on the lakeshore, to mammoth printing presses and manufactories banking the Chicago River and Sanitary Canal, past immigrants' crowded brick housing, schools and churches, along boulevards of temporary middle class success and massive plants that produced twentieth century equipment for the nation, through commercial districts made up of shops and savings banks that boomed in the 1920s. Further west, a river and forests curtained off the farmland that was eventually developed into asphalt-encircled shopping malls or steel-framed, glass-walled corporate towers. Transportation evolved from waterborn lake and river vessels to steam powered railroads reaching across the continent and electrified urban systems connecting neighborhoods and towns to super highways overlaying all of the predecessors.
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