As part of a class I am taking at the University of Illinois at Chicago on the history of religion, I put together this photo-tour of Devon Avenue. Devon is an avenue that runs west from Lake Michigan through the Edgewater and West Ridge neighborhoods on the far north side of Chicago.

The area was initially developed in the 1850s. Supposedly, it was named after a street in the early commuter suburbs of Philadelphia, as the developer of Rogers Park was from that city. But according to devonavenue.com, it was originally named Church Street and was renamed to Devon Avenue because the initial residents were English immigrants from Devonshire. While I don't doubt that it was renamed, as many streets in Chicago were renamed in the early 1910s, that it was the center of an English neighborhood seems dubious to me because there wasn't ever a significant flow of English immigrants to Chicago; it was founded too late in American history. Most people of English heritage who moved to Chicago would have been born in New England.

In any case, Devon Avenue quickly developed a large Jewish community and, again, according to devonavenue.com, it was the principle shopping district for the Chicago Jewish community. In the early 19th century, a large enough community of Croatian Catholics existed in Edgewater that Devon Avenue was chosen to be the site of one of Chicago's Croatian Catholic parish churches: St. Henry.

In the latter part of the 20th century, Devon became the center of Chicago's Indian and Pakistani communities, which introduced Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism to the religious salad bowl.

The street is probably one of the most eclectic mix of religions in the city (and ergo, the world, as Chicago is one of the religiously diverse cities in the world), and it makes for a very interesting study of the relationship of a large religions in proximity. Unfortunately, I was unable to capture that. Because of the inadequacies of the descriptive power of the lens, and my rather limited photographic abilities (especially with a cheap digital camera from a bike), these pictures are a poor record of the religious diversity of Devon Avenue.