Polish Museum of America

On Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago's West Town neighborhood, a building that once housed the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America holds something unusual: the oldest ethnic museum in the United States.

The Polish Museum of America opened on January twelfth, nineteen thirty-seven, and the address was not accidental. Milwaukee Avenue was the spine of Polish Downtown, the largest Polish community outside of Warsaw itself. At its peak in the early twentieth century, this corridor held parishes, fraternal halls, newspapers, theaters, and social organizations that served hundreds of thousands of Polish immigrants and their children.

The museum was chartered on October fifteenth, nineteen thirty-five, by the board of the Polish Roman Catholic Union. Their impulse was specific: to preserve what was being lost. Immigration from Poland had largely ended after the restrictive quota laws of nineteen twenty-four, and the generation that had arrived in the late eighteen hundreds was aging. Documents, photographs, folk costumes, and religious objects from dozens of parishes were at risk of being scattered or discarded.

The collection that assembled here became extraordinary. The Paderewski Room is now considered the largest collection of memorabilia related to Ignacy Jan Paderewski anywhere in the world. Paderewski was the pianist who became prime minister of Poland after the First World War, and he signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of his country in nineteen nineteen. When he died in New York in June of nineteen forty-one, his personal possessions came here: a Steinway piano built especially for him, furnishings from his suite at the Buckingham Hotel, and the pen he used to sign that treaty.

The building itself, constructed in nineteen thirteen, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum holds general Casimir Pulaski's Revolutionary War-era artifacts, painted religious panels from Polish Highlander communities, and archives from parishes across America documenting a migration that brought more than two million Poles to the United States between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty-four.

The Polish Downtown around it largely dispersed to the suburbs after the Second World War. The museum stayed.