A Death in Pilsen

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Pilsen: A neighborhood on the near southwest side of Chicago. During the late 19th Century, the area was settled by Czech immigrants, those hailing from the Bohemian and Moravian provinces of what was then called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They named this new home after Plzen, the fourth-largest city in what is now the Czech Republic.

Although other nationalities, including Germans, Poles, Slovaks, and Lithuanians, moved into the area, Pilsen remained a solidly Bohemian enclave until the middle of the 1950s, when Mexican immigrants began settling there. Today, Pilsen’s population of about 45,000 is nearly 90 % Hispanic.

“On January 26, 1946, the first official war bride contingent boarded the S.S. Argentina, a 20,600-ton Moore-McCormick liner which had transported over 200,000 troops during wartime. There were 452 brides, thirty of them pregnant; 173 children... The women had husbands in forty-five of the forty-eight states.”

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