• Chicago Arts District (Halsted St)
• National Museum of Mexican Art
• 16th Street Murals
• Harrison Park

East Pilsen takes its name from the larger Pilsen neighborhood, itself named for Plzen, the Czech city that gave the area's 19th-century Bohemian immigrants a namesake tavern, "At the City of Plzen." German and Irish families settled the area first in the 1840s, but it was Slovak immigrants John and Elizabeth Podmajersky, who arrived in 1914 and began buying property along Halsted Street for their dairy business, whose family would eventually reshape the neighborhood's east end.

Their grandson, John Podmajersky III, formally launched the Chicago Arts District here in 2002, converting old factories and warehouses into artist lofts and galleries across a seven-block stretch of Halsted Street. Today the district anchors more than 30 galleries and studios, the 16th Street Murals turn a railway embankment into public art, and the National Museum of Mexican Art, expanded into nearby Harrison Park in 2001, anchors the neighborhood's continuing Mexican-American cultural identity.

MY-NHD's East Pilsen collection is cut from the same cloth as the neighborhood itself: an immigrant enclave that reinvented its old factories into a working arts district, one gallery at a time.