After Pawel Chudzicka graduated from Yale, in 1995, he moved to Chicago to study law at Loyola because a family friend had already instilled in him an admiration for the city. And Chudzicka, now a partner at Bell, Boyd & Lloyd LLP, hasn't looked back since the day he left Yale's Ivy towers for Chicago.
"Now I would not think of living anywhere else besides in the city," said Chudzicka, who immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1991 and now lives in downtown Chicago. "Here I combine my Polish roots with a U.S. education."
Chudzicka, who represents TVN (one of the largest Polish media companies), says that it's easy to keep up with Polish life in Chicago. Poles have been coming to Chicago since the 18th century and now have sizable populations in neighborhoods on the South Side and North and West suburbs.
Areas of Chicago teem with Polish restaurants, bookstores and coffee shops. The nearly one million Polish-Americans in Chicago have made the city their home away from home, with a new life not too far from what it once was across the Atlantic.
Pawl Pieprasiemski, the deputy consul general of Poland in Chicago, attributes the friendly relationship between Poland and Chicago to "many gestures and many signs of cooperation, and not only that but gestures of friendships." Chicago signed its first-ever sister agreement with Warsaw in 1960, formalizing the beginning of a long-lasting relationship between the two cities.
"I feel very Polish here, and I'm actually glad that I have spent half my life in the United States and the other half in Poland," said Chudzicka, who identifies with his Polish side by reading Polish media and with his American side by living downtown.
Organizations such as the Polish American Association help new arrivals assimilate while also providing them with information about Polish schools, ethnic media sources, traditional foods such as pierogi (Polish dumplings) and bigos (a stew with meat and cabbage) and the full-fledged Polish nightlife scene.
"Obviously, English is needed for work here, but if you didn't speak it, you could still do everything here," said Joanna Borowiec, the executive director of the Polish American Association. "It does feel like home."
The community of first- and second-generation Poles residing in Chicago makes sure that Polish visitors feel at home too. A crowd of about 7,000 Polish-Americans welcomed Lech Kaczynski, president of the Republic of Poland, to Millennium Park in fall 2007.
The Polish Women's Wrestling Team also found a temporary home in Chicago when they visited in February 2008 for the Chicago Cup at Welsh-Ryan Arena at Northwestern. Members of the team met Mayor Richard M. Daley and had lunch downtown at ESPN Zone.