Chicago. Founded in 1833 on Lake Michigan's swampy shores, Chicago rebounded from a devastating fire in 1871 to become America's fastest‐growing city. Surpassing the one‐million population mark by 1890, it ranked for years as the nation's second‐largest metropolis. Long a railroad hub, it would later claim one of the world's busiest airports, O'Hare International. A
meatpacking and industrial powerhouse, late nineteenth‐century Chicago was not only “hog butcher to the world” (Carl Sandburg) but also a manufacturing and printing center and home to the retailing giants Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. The social elite, led by tycoons like the meatpacker Philip Armour, the industrialist George Pullman, the hotelier Potter Palmer, and the merchant Marshall Field, inhabited a different world from that of the immigrants portrayed in William Stead's
If Christ Came to Chicago (1894) and Upton
Sinclair's
The Jungle (1906).
Gilded Age Chicago was a hotbed of unionism and radical activism, epitomized by the
Haymarket Affair (1886) and the
Pullman Strike (1894). The
Progressive Era reformers John
Dewey and Jane
Addams and the revivalist Dwight L.
Moody shaped the urban culture as well.
Chicago is known for architectural innovation. The first steel‐frame skyscrapers arose after the 1871 fire. The University of Chicago (1892), funded by John D.
Rockefeller, favored the Gothic style. Local boosterism combined with a civic‐space ideology to create the “White City” at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The Architect Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), overseer of this project, also pioneered regional planning with his
Plan of Chicago (1909). Chicago inspired such architects as Louis
Sullivan and Frank Lloyd
Wright and, later, the International Style landmarks of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. For much of the late twentieth century, it boasted the world's tallest structure, the Sears Tower. The city also developed an extensive park system along the lakefront and in the neighborhoods.
From the 1870s on, Chicago lured immigrants: Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, and others from Eastern Europe; later, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Asians. From the
Reconstruction Era on, thousands of
African Americans migrated to Chicago. All these groups helped define the self‐contained character of the city's neighborhoods, each with its distinctive ethnic, religious, and cultural institutions. Most neighborhoods had commercial cores at major streetcar intersections, featuring ornate movie theaters and branches of department stores like Marshall Field's and Carson Pirie Scott. After 1900, Chicago's neighborhoods acquired a definable look: brick bungalows and flats and large masonry courtyard apartments. White flight to the suburbs paralleled a post‐1950s surge in the minority population. Misconceived
urban renewal efforts produced high‐rise (and often high‐crime) housing projects such as Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini‐Green. The contrast between Chicago's quiet neighborhood life and the sometimes violent intrusion of larger social and political realities was epitomized in the Prohibition Era lawlessness of the gangster Al
Capone and again in the racial unrest of the 1960s and the violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Known for its brash politics, Chicago produced one of the nation's enduring political machines, extending through the mayoralties of Republican Big Bill Thompson (1915–1923, 1928–1932) and Democrats Anton Cermak (1932–1937), Richard J.
Daley (1954–1976), and his son Richard M. Daley (1989– ). Harold Washington (1922–1987), elected in 1984, was the city's first black mayor.
Chicago's musical culture extends from
jazz and
blues clubs to the Chicago Symphony and the Lyric Opera. The Art Institute leads an array of cultural institutions. Chicago has produced such diverse writers as Theodore
Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Harriet Monroe, Richard
Wright, Saul
Bellow, and Studs Terkel. Professional baseball, football, and basketball teams vie for Chicagoans’ loyalty. Like other major cities, Chicago lost population after 1960, while “Chicagoland”—the larger metropolitan area beyond the city limits—grew dramatically.
See also
Architecure;
Chicago Fire;
Department Stores;
Immigration;
Literature: Civil War to World War I;
Literature: Since World War I;
Printing and Publishing;
Railroads;
Sixties, The;
Skyscrapers;
Suburbanization;
Thomas, Theodore;
Twenties, The;
World's Fairs and Expositions.
Bibliography
Irving Cutler , Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid‐Continent, 1982.
Dominic A. Pacyga and and Ellen Skerrett , Chicago: City of Neighborhoods, 1986.
William Cronon , Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1992.
Judith A. Martin
