Street Corners: Halsted and Van Buren – A Neighborhood Transformed From Residences to Restaurants

John Theoharis, president of the Greektown Association. José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

My great-grandfather passed through Ellis Island in 1902, a 22-year-old laborer with $18 in his pocket and a brother at 111 South Morgan Street in Chicago. The ship’s manifest listed many other men from his poor village of Achladokambos, most destined for the same neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side, then the biggest Greek immigrant community in the country.

Few Greeks live in Greektown now, but the neighborhood retains an important role in Chicago’s diverse mosaic. In 2003, more than a century after my great-grandfather came here, my fiancée and I held our rehearsal dinner at Costa’s — one of four Greek-owned businesses burned in a fire on Feb. 1 at Halsted and Van Buren Streets.

Through urban decay and revival, Greektown has endured as an enclave in a city of neighborhoods. Best-known to non-Greeks for serving souvlaki, gyros and grilled fish, the neighborhood just west of the Loop is also a mecca for Greek-Americans from the area who want to savor their ancestral culture.

Greektown preserved its character more effectively than many other parts of Chicago in the recently fizzled building boom, said John Theoharis, co-owner of two restaurants on Halsted and president of the Greektown Association. He describes contemporary Greektown as a modern-day Athenian agora, just blocks from skyscrapers.

“A lot of parts of the city are losing their authenticity and their identity,” Mr. Theoharis said over a bowl of lentil soup at his Meli Café & Juice Bar last week. “When you sit at a table in Greektown, it’s not just what you’re eating. You’re exchanging ideas.”

Almost 110,000 people in the Chicago area, or slightly more than 1 percent of greater Chicago’s population, claim Greek ancestry. The vast majority live in the suburbs.

In the early 1900s, though, the men on my great-grandfather’s ship joined families who made their first American homes in crowded buildings on Halsted, Harrison, Ashland, Taylor, Blue Island, Madison — home to 30,000 Greeks.

My great-grandfather, Ioannis Koutouzos, spent two long stints in Chicago over the next 50 years. He worked here to support a wife and children in his native village in Greece, including my maternal grandmother.

Greektown all but vanished in the 1960s with construction of the Eisenhower Expressway and the University of Illinois at Chicago. When my father arrived from Greece in 1970, he settled instead in Greektown North near Lawrence and Western Avenues and soon met my mother, who also had moved to the North Side from Greece.

Meanwhile, old Greektown became restaurant row. When the Near West Side began to gentrify in the early 1990s, the suburban sons and daughters of Greek immigrants joined the plate-smashing, saganaki-seeking non-Greek hordes who had kept the neighborhood alive.

Young Greek-Americans favor nightspots like 9 Muses Bar & Grill, also owned by Mr. Theoharis and his business partner. The bar’s patrons line-danced in the street — forcing the police to shut down Halsted and re-route C.T.A. buses around Greektown — to celebrate the Greek team’s 2004 European soccer championship.

Although the destruction of Costa’s drew the most attention after the fire, three other businesses that catered to many Greek-Americans were also damaged: a grocery that my uncle George Sianas had owned before retiring to Greece; a pastry shop; and the Greektown Music store owned by Yianni Morikis of Des Plaines. He said he hoped to re-open at the same spot.

“I love my culture too much to leave,” Mr. Morikis said.