Just in time for fall, a re-blossoming neighborhood will feature its finest at Sunday’s Harvest Festival in Boston’s Polish triangle. The festival, held in honor of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a sacred icon of the Virgin Mary, is the latest instance of the Polish neighborhood’s renewal being put on display. The afternoon-long celebration (noon to 6 p.m.) at the Dorchester Avenue church will include music and dancing, children’s activities, Polish food, a book sale, and more, all to benefit the parish. Mayor Martin Walsh will also make an appearance to mark the five-year anniversary since then-Mayor Thomas Menino officially named the neighborhood as the “Polish Triangle.”

The Triangle, a small neighborhood between Dorchester Avenue and Boston Street on the Dorchester and South Boston line that is bisected by Interstate 93, has been home to the city’s Poles for more than a century. But in the last two decades, the neighborhood, like so many other parts of the city, has changed in a slowly gentrifying manner. Two years ago, the headline of a Boston Globe article offered that the neighborhood was “losing its ethnic identity,” over an article depicting a graying and withering neighborhood.

That is no longer the case, says Peter Suchcicki, president of the Polish Area Congress, an organization that helps to organize young Poles in eastern Massachusetts around Polish culture and shared causes.

Now in his late 20s, Suchciki moved to the Triangle neiughborhood five years ago after growing up i in Chelsea. “This area really is the heart of Polonia in Boston and Massachusetts,” he said, noting the presence in the neighborhood of other active young Poles in their 20s and 30s, among them Chris Lisek, president of the Polish American Citizens Club, Nicole Wiktorowski, a member of both the Citizens Club and the McCormack Civic Association, Mark Wisniewski, vice president of the Polish American Congress, and Darek Barcikowski, publisher of the Polish/English weekly newspaper White Eagle/Bialy Orzel.

Barcikowski’s parents parents own and operate the popular neighborhood staples Cafe Polonia and Baltic Deli. Cafe Polonia, the state’s only Polish restaurant, was recently featured on the highly followed Food Network TV series “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives,” and regularly draws non-Poles into the neighborhood in search of pierogi and kielbasa.

“The food is really a driver for non-Polish people,” Suchcicki said. “The Polish organizations are working hard to show the full Polish culture with Polish dancers, the cultural foundation, showing the accomplishments of Polish people in general. But it’s definitely Cafe Polonia, Dj’s, Euromart, the Baltic Deli, and others that are drawing people here.”

Barcikowski, who helps his family run their restaurants while living on the North Shore, said the area institutions are adapting to a changing clientele. The Citizens Club is renovating, trying to make better use of its exhibition areas, and is throwing a Halloween party this year hoping to attract non-Poles to the neighborhood. Barcikowski said his parents’ deli has adapted, too, offering lighter lunch offerings such as salads and sandwiches for professionals on a break from work. “The neighborhood and community is really open to embracing these changes and sharing its culture with everyone else,” he said.

But, Barcikowski noted, the Triangle is still a neighborhood where you will see Polish women driving in from the suburbs on weekend mornings to pick up their favorite foods from the homeland at local grocers.
The neighborhood’s location at the northern tip of Dorchester wedged into a section of South Boston has put it at the forefront of the city’s white-hot residential development that is quickly spreading southward. “My only concern is that rents in the area are too high,” Barcikowski said. “Families can’t afford to live here anymore. With people that have been here for generations, when they move out, the neighborhood loses.”