Wicker Park takes its name from the small triangular park in front of you and the brothers who donated it in 1870. After the Great Fire, prosperous German and Scandinavian merchants, many in the brewing trade, built grand Victorian mansions along these streets, especially on Hoyne and Pierce Avenues, a stretch that came to be called Beer Baron Row. In the early twentieth century it became a Polish immigrant stronghold, dense enough to be called the Polish Downtown, and the novelist Nelson Algren walked these streets and set his hard-edged stories among them.
By the 1990s the cheap rents and faded grandeur drew artists and musicians, and Wicker Park became the center of Chicago's alternative and indie-rock scene. Look at the six-corner intersection where Milwaukee, North, and Damen meet, anchored by the triangular Flat Iron Arts Building, then wander a side street to find the beer barons' surviving mansions.