Little Italy, Chicago

Little Italy, sometimes called University Village, is a neighborhood on the Near West Side of Chicago, Illinois. The current boundaries of Little Italy are Ashland Avenue on the west and Interstate 90/94 on the east, the Eisenhower Expressway on the north and 18th Street to the south. It lies between the west side of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus in the Illinois Medical District and the east side of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. The community is made up of diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds as a result of immigration, urban renewal, gentrification and the growth of the resident student and faculty population of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Its Italian-American heritage primarily evident in the Italian-American restaurants of Taylor Street. The neighborhood is home to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame as well as the historic Roman Catholic churches Our Lady of Pompeii, Notre Dame de Chicago, and Holy Family.

The recent history of the neighborhood waves of urban renewal, starting with the construction of expressways in the 1950s, the development of UIC in the 1960s, the demolition of public housing in the 1990s and 2000s, and redevelopment of Maxwell Street in the 2000s. Along with these changes, housing prices in the area have risen.

While there are several Italian-American communities that thrive within the Chicago metropolitan area, Taylor Street, the port-of-call for Chicago's Italian American immigrants, inherited the title of Chicago's "Little Italy." Taylor Street's Little Italy is part of a larger community area — Chicago's Near West Side. Dominant among the immigrant communities that comprised the Near West Side during the mass migration of Europeans around the start of the 20th century, were Italians, Greeks and Jews. Other ethnic groups vacated the neighborhood beginning in the early 1900s, and only the Italian-American enclave remained as a vibrant community.

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