Our Story

Lawrence and Western is a corner. Nothing famous about it. Just one of those Chicago intersections you know because you’ve passed through it a thousand times.

For me, though, it means a little more.

My father’s family came to Chicago from Greece and settled in this neighborhood in the 1960s. On my mother’s side, my family came here from both Sweden and Greece in the 1920s and was split between both the north and south sides. Chicago has been part of our family story for generations, making me a fourth-generation Chicagoan.

I was born here, but when I was 11 years old my family moved to Florida. And that’s probably when I first started to understand how much Chicago had gotten into me.

Because when you leave, you start noticing all the things you assumed existed everywhere.

Try finding a real Chicago-style thin crust pizza somewhere else. Or a Vienna Beef hot dog made the way it’s supposed to be made. Suddenly you’re explaining what a gangway is. Or a frunchroom. Or dibs. You say “the Jewels” and someone looks at you like you just made the word up. And for some reason, everyone thinks you have an accent.

Those little things start to matter.

Eventually, I came back to Chicago as an adult because, as far as I’m concerned, this is the greatest city in the world.

That’s really where Lawrence and Western comes from.

There are plenty of places selling Chicago shirts. Most of them are about the skyline, the flag, or the things someone remembers after spending a weekend downtown.

That’s not what I wanted to make.

I wanted to make shirts about the Chicago you actually remember.

The neighborhood hot dog stand. The tavern-style pizza cut into squares. The corner store. The ballpark that isn’t there anymore. The amusement park your parents or grandparents still talk about. The characters, sayings, restaurants, neighborhoods, teams, places and little pieces of Chicago history that somehow became part of who we are.

The kind of things you might not appreciate until you leave—or until they’re gone.

Some of these shirts are nostalgic. Some are inside jokes. Some are probably so specific that people outside Chicago won’t understand them at all.

Perfect.

Because these shirts aren’t really for them.

They’re for the people who see a design and immediately remember a place, a person, a story, a neighborhood, or a version of Chicago they thought they had forgotten.

No explanation necessary.

Lawrence and Western is Chicago for people who know Chicago.

The clearest version of our customer is a family that moved to Arizona, or Florida, or wherever, and still reminisces about this city at the dinner table. They cannot order the pizza they want out there. They cannot get the sandwich right. But what they can do is put on a shirt that says the thing out loud without saying anything at all, and wait for the one person in the room who reacts. That reaction is the entire product. It is why we keep the designs specific instead of broad, and why we would rather three people in a grocery line understand a graphic completely than three hundred understand it vaguely. If you are still on the stoop, good. If you are three time zones out and counting, this was built for you first.