Tri-Taylor

The Tri-Taylor neighborhood, whose name combines the triangular shape of its boundaries and its main thoroughfare, Taylor Street, is located about a mile west of Chicago's Little Italy. The community served as one of Chicago's gateways to Italian immigration beginning in the late 1800s, with "the largest waves of Italian population growth occurred between 1880 and the start of the First World War, and these immigration patterns created an Italian-American social fabric that would remain until the 1940s." Construction began on the Illinois Medical Center in 1941, which effectively cut Tri-Taylor off from Little Italy, and "in the early 1960s, ground was broken on the Eisenhower Expressway, which borders the neighborhood to the north, further disrupting the community." Residents feared that the neighborhood would be sacrificed by the "ever-expanding medical district and the expressway," but a "turning point came in 1983, when the National Register accepted the application of neighborhood residents to designate the area with historic district status."