When Greektown was ‘a mile long and 24 hours’
The telltale landmarks are fewer now than they were when the Tribune offered readers concise directions to Greektown 70 years ago. “When you reach the point on Halsted St. near Harrison where window signs look like the names over fraternity house doorways you may know you are in a Greek neighborhood,” a reporter noted.
A series of displacements, along with population shifts common to any immigrant community, have left a diminished Greektown. Today, there is an empty lot where the Pegasus and Santorini restaurants long stood. The Parthenon restaurant closed in 2019. For half a century, patrons cheered “Opa!” as waiters lit its famed saganaki, a flaming cheese dish.
One of the establishments still in business, The Ambassador Public House on Halsted, advertises itself as an ecumenical sports bar. Its myriad television sets screen athletic events from around the world. Soccer once was the only sport debated in Greektown’s coffee houses — “where men sit and talk for hours on thousands of trivial and important things,” as Saloniki, a Greek newspaper published in Chicago, noted in 1915.
But the caffeina have disappeared. Greek-speaking residents are gone.
Yet Greektown’s faithful prefer thinking it akin to the phoenix: a fabled bird destined to rise from its own ashes. Like other immigrant groups that forsake tenements for suburbs, Greeks visit the old neighborhood propelled by an unquenchable taste for its old-country customs.
Greektown’s founding father was Christ Chakonas, who was born in Sparta and arrived in Chicago shortly after the Great Fire of 1871. Seeing opportunity in its ashes, he returned to his hometown and brought over relatives and neighbors, according to the late DePaul University professor Andrew T. Kopan.
For that, Chakonas is remembered as the “Columbus of Sparta.”
“By 1882, the Greek settlement of Chicago was a thriving community numbering nearly 1,000 people in the vicinity of Clark and Kinzie Streets on the Near North Side,” Kopan wrote in “Hellenism in Chicago.”
From there, settlement moved to the Greek Delta, so named because the nearby streets, Blue Island, Harrison and Halsted, resemble delta, a triangular letter of the Greek alphabet.
In 1909, the Tribune proclaimed it: “A country without women, a country without homes, without the kind but authoritative voice of mothers, without the laugh of young girls, without the
prattle of children — this is the country in which 18,000 Greeks in Chicago live.”
The reporter was told that Greek men came to Chicago intending to return, after earning enough money to buy land or build a house in their native village. If they are married, their wives and children remain in Greece. Should one be tempted to stay here, the shelves of a Greek Delta store remind him of his resolve:
“The neighborhood groceries have nearly every food or staple article that the Greeks used to eat in their native country — from cheese and herring to olive oil, Greek wines and cognacs and Greek spices which serve as appetizers,” the reporter observed.
Two decades later, the Greek American novelist Harry Mark Petrakis wrote of his first day as a stock boy at a similar store. The Greek owner asked what he saw. He said produce and cheese and was proclaimed a bonehead, Petrakis recalled in his memoir “Stelmark.”
“You don’t understand that a whole nation and a people are in this store,” the owner said, pointing to slabs of feta, a goat’s milk cheese. “Alexander the Great demanded it on his table with his casks of wine when he planned his campaigns.”
As the Greek Delta was close to Chicago’s wholesale markets, the first Greek immigrants could buy foodstuff and become pushcart peddlers, even before learning English. An obvious path of advancement was moving on from peddling food through the city’s neighborhoods to opening restaurants.
In 1909, the Tribune estimated there were 400 Greek-owned restaurants serving American food in Chicago. Four years earlier, there were half a dozen, the community’s old-timers told a reporter.
“The Greek caters to the American workingman,” the Tribune observed. “His meals are not fancy. They are plain and wholesome and in general strive to give one ‘his money’s worth.’ ”
Reflecting on its readers’ social advancement, the editor of Saloniki coined an aphorism in 1916:
“Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world,” said the philosopher and engineer Archimedes. The Greek immigrant who has come to America says, ‘Give me an opportunity and I will become a successful businessman.’ ”
As more Greeks arrived in Chicago, the Delta’s population grew around Hull House, Jane Addams’ pioneering social services center for newcomers to the city.
“We knew nothing of them until one night we observed the street and the saloon above us in Halsted St. were filled with them,” a Hull House worker told the Tribune in 1902. “They were the first Greeks to have been in the district.”
By 1930, Greektown had 30,000 first- and second-generation Greeks united by love of their homeland. When Alec Gianaras learned that the church in the hamlet where his parents were born had been bombed in World War II, he sent funds to rebuild it and buy food and clothing for its parishioners.
Gianaras had risen from flunky to president of a manufacturer of electric transformers. On a 1953 visit to Greece, he told the Tribune, he found its inhabitants had named the hamlet Gianaras.
Yet while Chicago’s Greeks shared a common heritage, they were divided according to the topography of their former homeland.
Greece is crisscrossed by mountains that isolate one region from another. So Greektown had a Messenia Brotherhood for immigrants from southern Greece, an Ephesians Society for Chicagoans from the Ionian islands, and a Macedonian Megas Alexandros Club, in honor of Alexander the Great.
The Greek king’s supporters were opposed to a Liberal Party’s prime minister. In Greektown, Holy Trinity Church was loyal to the king, but part of the congregation left and founded St. Basil’s Church.
There was also a secular faction that met in the International Café. There they heard lecturers like Clarence Darrow, the famed civil liberties lawyer and avowed atheist. On other nights, the restaurant presented belly dancers.
That quirkiness made for a vibrant, fascinating neighborhood. But it couldn’t save it from Mayor Richard J. Daley’s decision to replace Greektown with the University of Illinois’ Circle Campus.
“When James Panagakis closes his restaurant today at Harrison and Halsted Streets, this once-colorful area known as ‘Grika town’ closes with him,” the Tribune noted on May 3, 1964. “The city department of urban renewal allowed him to stay through Greek Easter, which is today, and then the bulldozers will push it down.”
It was the second time Panagakis lost his business to the neighborhood’s urban renewal. He arrived in Chicago in 1912, and worked in others’ businesses while saving the money to buy his first location for Diana’s grocery and restaurant, in 1936. It was bulldozed when the Eisenhower Expressway was built.
Some restaurants and shops survived by moving a few blocks up Halsted. But Robert Sarantopulos of Bridgeview thought of how much had been lost as he watched his daughter march in an Hellenic Heritage parade there in 2001.
“Twenty years ago, Greek Town was a mile long and 24 hours,” Sarantopulos told a Tribune reporter. “Ten years ago, we were half a mile. Now we’re two blocks.”
Yet Greektown endures thanks to gentrification’s upside. As shabby tenements were replaced by upscale condos, newcomers discovered filotimo — the Greek tradition of making a stranger feel welcome.
It gave Halsted Street restaurants another customer base. For waiters’ cries of “Opa!” were joyfully echoed by diners’ brogues, drawls and the cultivated English of Ivy League professors transplanted to Circle campus.