Homes for sale in
Lower West Side.

In the mid-19th century the Lower West Side was settled by German and Irish immigrants who lived in poor, overcrowded conditions, and a cholera outbreak eventually pushed many of them to leave. By the late 19th century the area was dominated by Czech immigrants, who became its most prominent group and named the district after Plzen, known in German as Pilsen, the fourth-largest city in today's Czech Republic. They were joined by Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and other groups largely of Slavic descent, many of whom worked in the nearby stockyards and factories. This Bohemian era gave Pilsen its enduring architecture, with brick and stone two-flats, greystones, and cottages built in the 1880s and 1890s in Italianate, Romanesque, and Queen Anne styles, plus the locally distinctive Bohemian Baroque detailing recognized when the Pilsen Historic District was listed on the National Register in 2006.

The neighborhood's second great chapter began in the late 1960s, when large numbers of Latinos, many displaced by the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago and other urban-renewal projects, moved into Pilsen. By 1970 Latinos had become the majority, surpassing residents of Eastern European descent, and through the 1980s and 1990s the Mexican-origin community grew so substantially that a large share of the Chicago area's Mexican-origin population lived in Pilsen during that period. A defining moment came in 1974, when, after years of protests and boycotts, the Board of Education approved funding to build a neighborhood high school, and Benito Juarez Community Academy opened in 1977. Census figures show some gentrification and a decline in the Mexican-American population from 2000 to 2010, prompting local advocacy groups to push to preserve the area's Mexican-American culture.