Pilsen

Lore & Background

The Chicago White Sox began play at South Side Park on 39th Street in Armour Square in 1900 and have remained in the neighborhood ever since. Comiskey Park opened in 1910 on a site that was formerly a city dump, four blocks north of South Side Park. The new Comiskey Park, currently known as Rate Field, opened in 1991 across 35th Street from the old ballpark. Comiskey Park was demolished in 1991 and converted into a parking lot.

In Their Own Story

The radio was a 1987 Zenith, the kind with the little antenna you had to twist out of the top, and it sat on the counter of a hardware store on 18th Street, crackling with the sound of a Sox game in the seventh. The owner, a heavyset man with a mustache that had gone silver at the edges, was sweeping the tile floor and muttering about the pitcher's arm slot. Behind the counter, a kid of maybe eleven was trying to balance a bat on one hand while reading the line score on a scrap of paper. The store smelled like sawdust, motor oil, and the faint sweetness of a tamales pot in the back. Outside, the August heat pressed down on the asphalt and the only sound was the distant hum of the 18th Street bus and the radio, the radio, the radio. The kid didn't own a season ticket. He didn't even own a real glove yet—his mother was saving for one. But the game was on, the South Side was listening, and for the length of an at-bat, the whole block belonged to the pinstripes.

Reader's Guide

Armour Square is bounded by 18th Street to the north, Pershing Road to the south, the Union Pacific railroad tracks on the west, and the Dan Ryan Expressway to the east. It includes Chinatown and the CHA Wentworth Gardens housing project. The neighborhood is served by the CTA Red Line (Cermak-Chinatown and Sox-35th stops) and Metra's Rock Island Line via the 35th Street station.

Did You Know?

• Armour Square has three Catholic parishes: Santa Lucia, St. Therese Catholic Community, and St. Jerome Croatian Catholic Church.
• A 2014 survey found that 46.6% of Armour Square speaks Chinese at home.
• The 3406 census tract in the south of Armour Square is 99% black or African American.
• In September 2022, the Chicago Plan Commission approved a plan to renovate a vacant Armour Square warehouse into 47 solar-powered apartments.