Lithuanian Plaza, Chicago

Lithuanians in Chicago and the nearby metropolitan area are a prominent group within the "Windy City" whose presence goes back over a hundred years. Today the Chicago area possesses the largest Lithuanian community outside Lithuania, who have dubbed the city as Little Lithuania, and many Lithuanian-Americans refer to it as the second capital of Lithuania. Lithuanian-Americans from Chicago have had a significant impact on politics in both the United States and Lithuania.

Lithuanians have been documented as arriving in the US since 1918, when Lithuania re-established its independence from Imperial Russia. 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. The Lithuanian community in Chicago was most famously immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel about the treatment of workers in the , The Jungle, whose story revolves around telling the life of a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus.

The first and most prominent Lithuanian enclave in Chicago was called "Lithuanian Downtown" which was located along Halsted street in Bridgeport and founded by Lithuanians who settled nearby their Old World neighbors, the Poles, who were located in a Polish Patch in the vicinity of St. Mary of Perpetual Help. It was here that the Lithuanian church of Saint George was founded as the first Lithuanian parish in the Midwest, foreshadowing the prominence that Bridgeport would play as one of the key centers of Lithuanian activity throughout the United States. A large number of the early buildings of this district were built by the first prominent Lithuanian community leader, Antanas Olšauskas (pronounced Ole-shau-skus), circa 1910. Centered on Thirty-third and Halsted, Bridgeport was Chicago's leading Lithuanian neighborhood from the 1890s through the 1950s. Although the numbers of Lithuanians in the area began to fall off in the 1950s, one of Lithuanian Chicago's longtime institutions, Healthy Food Restaurant on Halsted near Thirty-second street has closed its doors on December 15, 2009 after 71 years.

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