Pyterek, Rev. P. H.
Clergyman. Born Aug. 1, 1878 in Chicago, Ill. Education: St. Stanislaus parochial school. St. Mary's College, St. Mary's, Ky., St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, Md.; ordained March 28, 1903. Pastor of St. Helen's parish, Chicago, Ill. Residence: 2315 W. Augusta St., Chicago, Ill.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943
PYTEREK, REV. PETER H.The rise and fall of the Polish population in the Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park coincided for the most part with the best years of the Rev. Peter H. Pyterek. Yet, in the absence of a grass roots history of Chicago, the most powerful Polish priest of Humboldt Park is not as well known as Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow and other writers who came from the Jewish families who lived among his congregation. When Pyterek came along, he was exactly what the Archbishop of Chicago needed to serve the large numbers of Poles in every corner of the archdiocese.
Peter H. Pyterek was born in Chicago on August 1, 1878, to a pair who came from Poland in 1872 with one child and had another girl and two boys while they were glued to St. Stanislaus parish.
After he went through the parochial school, the young Pyterek spent two years at St. Jerome College in Canada, one year at St. Mary's College in Kentucky, and took his final exams at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was ordained March 28, 1903.
Exactly where he began his priestly duties is not certain. Owing to ill health, he spent two months in California. In 1906, he left St. Joseph Church in Chicago, where he had been an assistant, to sheperd the Polish farmers in Posen, where the St. Stanislaus B. &. M. parish was established in 1894 and lots were still offered for five dollars down and one dollar a week, and take care of a six-year-old Polish mission in Blue Island, three miles closer to Chicago than Posen.
Actually the Pol never left the neighborhood. He ish mission became a test run for Father Pyterek. It became a separate parish under the name of St. Isidore on April 1, 1911, when he moved to Blue Island and set up living quarters for himself and nuns and classrooms in different parts of a two story building. Felician Sisters were ready to take charge of the parish school in October 1912.
Within a short time Archbishop James E. Quigley saw enough. On June 6, 1913, he appointed Father Pyterek to organize the Polish Catholics in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. Pyterek was no stranger to this side of the city. The outstanding landmark, nothing more than a park, boulevards and lagoons laid out on 209 acres of land, was annexed into the city in 1869 and named after Baron Friedric Von Humboldt, a famous German scientist and explorer. Because the section had no public transportion until the 1880s and 90s, the population was slow to bud. The Pytereks was one of the first Polish families to buy a home in Humboldt Park and by 1900 the priest's father, first name unknown, was no longer living. His mother, Josephine, who was born in Poland in February of 1849, worked as a midwife in the community, and Stanley, who was born in May 1874, was a saloon keeper. When the Polish community of Chicago raised enough money for an equestrian statue of General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, it erected it in 1904 at the park's entrance, not far from Stanley Pyterek's saloon.
Father Pyterek celebrated the first Mass of St. Helen's parish on July 13, 1913, in the assembly hall of a public school on Augusta Blvd., and Archbishop Quigley waited until September 6, 1914, to dedicate the church on the same boulevard near Western Avenue. The brick structure, designed by the architectural firm of Worthmann & Steinbach, had a church on the first floor and eight classrooms on the second floor. The parish school started out with 312 children and pretty soon was too small to handle the increasing enrollment. Father Pyterek built another school in 1925; it had an enrollment of 1,532 children five years later.Because Father Pyterek's parish busted out at the seams, with as many as 2500 families at its peak, the Archbishop of Chicago, George Cardinal Mundelein, founded another Polish parish in 1926 in Humboldt Park. Because apartment buildings and two-flat houses had taken up virtually the entire neighborhood, the Archdiocese turned St Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, which it bought for $77,000, into St Fidelis (Polish) Church. At the time the population within the parish boundaries was predominately Polish who came from overcrowded Polish parishes to the east of Humboldt Park.
Father Pyterek never left the neighborhood. In St. Helen's Home, as he called a converted apartment building at 2315 W. Augusta Blvd., he lived into the 1930s with an assistant priest or two, a chauffeur, his mother, and the mother superior of the parish school, Stephanie Bojnowska, who came from Poland in 1893, and 25 nuns. St. Helen's remained a tightly-knit Polish parish throughout his life. After he died on October 25, 1955, the congregation accepted persons from Puerto-Rico, Mexico, and South America, African Americans, and many displaced Polish families. The parishioners who didn't like the change moved away. Even the Kosciuszko statue was moved. By 1990, half of the 65,836 persons in Humboldt Park were black.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2006)