The Death of Jackowo (and Possible Rebirth)
At Bruno’s Barber Shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Avondale, owner Steve Ciesielski, a genial 53-year-old with bleached blond hair and beard, is showing off his new tattoo. An image of a straight razor, the kind that gets sharpened on a leather strop, it’s a symbol of both the old and the new. Steve’s father, Bruno, used a barber’s razor decades ago to service Polish immigrants who had fled Communism to haul boxes at the Florsheim shoe factory or cut meat in the Fulton Market district. Now hipsters who work on laptops and live in condo buildings like the Shoemaker Lofts, which was converted from the old factory in 2006, come to Bruno’s to sit in the old-fashioned red leather chairs, hot towels on their faces, awaiting the same lather and shave.
The shop has a funky, homey look, with hanging plants and paintings of ships and Pope John Paul II. New window decals to refresh the place are some of the last white-and-red accents in a neighborhood where once nearly every business displayed a Polish flag. Wearing a white barber’s jacket patterned with combs, brushes, and razors and standing over a lathered-up customer, Ciesielski chats about the reshaping of the neighborhood. “There’s nothing one can do. These changes are normal and inevitable. But Jackowo is a good area. It will bounce back — in a new form, though. They are coming, little by little,” he says, glancing at the new condos rising across the street.
Bruno’s is a survivor in Jackowo (pronounced yahts-KOH-voh), a patch roughly bounded by Diversey on the south, Belmont on the north, the Kennedy on the east, and the Union Pacific Northwest railroad tracks on the west. The name is derived from the neighborhood’s anchor parish: St. Hyacinth Basilica (the saint’s name translates to Jacka in Polish, and owo indicates “village”). Wacławowo (vahts-wa-VOH-voh), a less prominent Polish patch that runs from Belmont to Addison, is served by St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church. Together, they are known as the Polish Village. Most of this area falls within Avondale, except for a northern stretch in Irving Park.
Bronisław “Bruno” Ciesielski opened his shop in 1969, when he was 25, four years after he came to the United States. He was one of the only barbers around who would give young men haircuts that were hip for that time — that is, not crewcuts, but rather long over the ears and shaggy. From the windows of the shop at 3110 North Milwaukee Avenue, Bruno saw the rise of Jackowo, how it became the biggest and most important Polish neighborhood in the United States from the 1970s through the early 2000s — a source of funding and support for the Solidarity movement abroad and of political power here. It was a place of welcome for a new breed of Polish immigrants, many arriving on “vacation visas” and then staying for decades.
“If someone kidnapped you and blindfolded you and brought you to Jackowo, you’d think you were in Poland,” recalls Bruno, who is now retired. It was, as previous generations of immigrants had called their patches of the city, “Poland elsewhere.”
The center of Chicago “Polonia,” the term for Poles outside of Poland, had moved northwest in the 1960s along Milwaukee Avenue, from West Town to north of
