Humboldt Park

Chicago’s Puerto Rican community welcomes visitors to this West Side neighborhood with two Puerto Rican flags, cast in steel and standing 59 feet tall, which frame a stretch of Division Street called ‘Paseo Boricua’. The neighborhood’s 207-acre namesake public park, designed by noted landscape architect Jens Jensen, provides a perfect setting for outdoor recreation, and features Chicago’s only non-Lakefront sand beach. Humboldt Park is also home to a spectacular Rose Garden and a pair of bronze bison originally cast for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

Humboldt Park: Chicago’s Puerto Rican Center

Written by Alan Solomon, with research assistance from the Chicago Neighborhood Tourism Project.

Puerto Rico is celebrated here, more than anywhere else in the city. True. But . . .

The first two restaurants inside the Western Avenue gateway to Paseo Boricua -- four blocks of Division Street lovingly devoted to Puerto Rican culture -- are El Paisano Tacos (Mexican) and the New China Restaurant (not Puerto Rican).

On North Avenue just west of Kedzie, John Roeser III and John Roeser IV -- not Puerto Rican -- still operate the bakery opened in 1911 by the first John Roeser. A few blocks farther west, Cemitas Puebla serves up those namesake cemitas, wonderful sandwiches (try the milanesa or the carne asada) once unique to central Mexico.

This is, after all, Chicago, where diversity rules.

That said, for the last half-century the Humboldt Park neighborhood along with several blocks of West Town east of the park have been the Midwestern center of all things Puerto Rican. And since the mid-1990s, the center of that center has been Paseo Boricua. ("Paseo" is a passageway; "Boricua," a word linked to the pre-Columbian Taino islanders, is another term for Puerto Rican.) 
 

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