Chicago

Chicago , city (1990 pop. 2,783,726), seat of Cook co., NE Ill., on Lake Michigan; inc. 1837. The third largest city in the United States and the heart of a metropolitan area of over 8 million people, it is the commercial, financial, industrial, and cultural center for a vast region and a midcontinental shipping point. A major Great Lakes port, it is also an historic rail and highway hub. O'Hare International Airport is the second busiest in the nation. An enormous variety of goods are manufactured in the area. Despite an overall decline in industry, Chicago has retained large grain mills and elevators, iron- and steelworks, steel fabricators, and meatpacking, food-processing, chemical, machinery, and electronics plants. The city has long been a publishing center; the Chicago Tribune is among the most widely read newspapers in the country.

Chicago covers over 200 sq mi (520 sq km); it extends more than 20 mi (32 km) along the lakefront, then sprawls inland to the west. Its metropolitan area stretches in the north to the Wisconsin border and in the south to industrial suburbs on and beyond the Indiana border. In addition to its noted expressways and boulevards, Chicago has a system of elevated (partly underground) railways that extend into the heart of the city, making a huge rectangle, the celebrated Loop, which gives its name to the downtown section.

Neighborhoods and Points of Interest

In or near the center of the city are the Merchandise Mart, the world's largest commercial building; the Chicago Public Library, with the Harold Washington Library Center downtown as well as neighborhood and traveling branches; the Chicago Board of Trade building; and the homes of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chicago Civic Opera. La Salle Street is the financial center. On the lakefront, which has many beaches, are Grant Park, with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Natural History Museum, the Adler Planetarium, the Buckingham Memorial Fountain, and the John G. Shedd Aquarium; and Millennium Park, with the Jay Pritzker Pavilion (designed by Frank Gehry ). Nearby is Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears (National Football League). To the north is the Navy Pier recreation and entertainment complex (opened 1995) and along Michigan Avenue lies the "magnificent mile," Chicago's famous shopping district.

In the residential district to the north lies Lincoln Park, with the Chicago Historical Society building, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, a zoological garden, and a conservatory; sculpture in the park includes the noted standing figure of Abraham Lincoln (1887) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the John P. Altgeld memorial monument (1915) by Gutzon Borglum. The North Side is also the site of Wrigley Field, the home of the National League Cubs, one of Chicago's two major league baseball teams.

The American League's White Sox play on the South Side at U.S. Cellular Field. The South Side of Chicago also is the seat of the Univ. of Chicago, with its imposing Gothic buildings; the John Crerar Library of scientific books is there. Nearby is Jackson Park, with the Museum of Science and Industry. Much of the South Side, however, comprises poor and working-class residential areas, including the homes of the nation's largest African-American population. There, also, were the Union Stock Yards (founded 1865 and closed in the 1970s). At the southern edge of the city are once-enormous iron- and steelworks.

The vast West Side is usually spoken of as a region of nationalities because of the many groups living there, in close proximity yet more or less separate culturally. These neighborhoods grew rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th cent. In the West Side and the suburbs to the west are large industrial areas and two well-known parks—Garfield Park, with its noted conservatory, and Humboldt Park. The west is famous for Hull House, the settlement house founded (1889) by Jane Addams . In 1961 the Hull House location, part of an urban renewal project, was selected as the site of the Chicago campus of the Univ. of Illinois.

Other points of interest in Chicago are McCormick Place, the mammoth convention and exhibition center on the lakefront; the Auditorium, designed by Louis H. Sullivan; St. Patrick's Church (dedicated 1856); and a water tower that survived the great fire of 1871. Besides the Univ. of Chicago, the city's institutions include De Paul Univ., Northeastern Illinois Univ., Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola Univ. of Chicago, Mundelein College, Roosevelt Univ., St. Xavier College, Chicago State Univ., Columbia College, North Park College, parts of Northwestern Univ., and the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago (including the medical center). There are a number of theological seminaries, and schools of music, art, and law. The noted Newberry Library and the Library of International Relations are in Chicago, and the city has a vibrant theatrical community. The city's other major sports teams are the Bulls (basketball) and Blackhawks (hockey).

History

From the Early Days to 1850

Notable as dividing lines in the city are the two branches of the Chicago River. In early days the river was important because the narrow watershed between it and the Des Plaines River (draining into the Mississippi through the Illinois River) offered an easy portage that led explorers, fur traders, and missionaries from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains. Father Marquette and Louis Jolliet arrived here in 1673, and the spot was well known for a century before Jean Baptiste Point Sable (or Point DuSable or Point de Sable), a black man possibly of Haitian origin, set up a trading post at the mouth of the river. John Kinzie, who succeeded him as a trader, is usually called the father of Chicago.

A military post, Fort Dearborn , was established in 1803. In the War of 1812 its garrison perished in one of the most famous tragedies of Western history. Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1816, and the construction of the Erie Canal in the next decade speeded the settling of the Midwest and the growth of Chicago. Harbor improvements, lake traffic, and the peopling of the prairie farmlands brought prosperity to the city. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, however, authorized by Congress in 1827 and completed in 1848, was soon rendered virtually obsolete by the arrival of railroads.

The Fire and Industrialization

By 1860 a number of rail lines connected Chicago with the rest of the nation, and the city was launched on its career as the great midcontinental shipping center. Gurdon S. Hubbard had already contributed to the establishment of the meatpacking industry, with its large stockyards. In 1871 the shambling city built of wood was almost entirely destroyed by a great fire (according to legend started when Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern), which killed several hundred people, rendered 90,000 homeless, and destroyed some $200 million worth of property.

Chicago was rebuilt as a city of stone and steel. Industries sprang up, attracting thousands of immigrants. Many ethnic groups contributed to the modern city, including Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Jews, Italians, Poles, Czechs, African Americans, Lithuanians, Croats, Greeks, and Chinese. With industry came labor strife, highlighted by the Haymarket Square riot of 1886 and the great strikes at Pullman in 1894 (see Debs, Eugene V. , and Altgeld, John P. ). Upton Sinclair's novel of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, aroused public indignation and led to investigations and improvements.

Center of Culture

The city, although proud of its reputation for brawling lustiness, was also the center of Midwestern culture. Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra founded a great musical tradition. Chicago's literary reputation was established in the early 20th cent. by such men as Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene Field, Edgar Lee Masters, and James T. Farrell. Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel would continue this tradition later in the century.

Most notable in the development of American thought and taste in art was the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. One of the architects at the fair was Louis H. Sullivan , who, together with D. H. Burnham, John W. Root, Dankmar Adler, Frank Lloyd Wright , and others, made Chicago a leading architectural center. In 1909, D. H. Burnham and Edward Bennett devised their Plan of Chicago, later known as the "Burnham Plan," a forward-looking piece of city planning containing many features that were implemented later. It was here that one of the distinctive U.S. contributions to architecture, the skyscraper , came into being. Chicago's continuing interest in this type of structure is seen in the John Hancock Center (1968), the Amoco Building (1973, now the Aon Center), and the Sears Tower (1974), which is the tallest building in the United States.

The Twentieth Century

Between World War I and 1933, Chicago earned unenviable renown as the home ground of gangsters—Al Capone being perhaps the most notorious—and its reputation for gangster warfare persisted long after that violent era had passed. Despite the worldwide depression of the 1930s, Chicago's world's fair, the Century of Progress Exposition (1933-34), proved how greatly the city had prospered and advanced. Perhaps the most significant event in World War II occurred (Dec. 2, 1942) under the stands of the Univ. of Chicago's Stagg Field, when Enrico Fermi and a group of scientists working on the government's atom bomb project achieved the world's first nuclear chain reaction. With the war came considerable growth in the Chicago metropolitan area, especially in outlying suburbs.

The city itself declined 23% in population between 1950 and 1990, although its diverse economic base spared it the worst of the economic decay of other large Midwestern cities. The population decline was reversed between 1990 and 2000, when it grew some 4%, largely due to the influx of Hispanic and Asian residents. Chicago's many cultural and other attractions make it a popular convention city; among the 25 national political conventions held there were the Republican national conventions of 1952 and 1960 and the Democratic national conventions of 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1996. The 1968 Democratic National Convention saw violent clashes between demonstrators and Chicago police and the National Guard. Mayor Richard J. Daley was criticized by the media for his manner of putting down the demonstrations, but Chicagoans overwhelmingly supported him. Chicagoans subsequently elected their first woman mayor (Jane Byrne , 1979-83) and their first African-American mayor (Harold Washington , 1983-87). Richard M. Daley was first elected to the office his father long held in 1989.

Bibliography

See R. A. Cromie, The Great Chicago Fire (1958); C. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture (1964); T. A. Herr, Seventy Years in the Chicago Stockyards (1968); H. M. Mayer and R. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (1969); B. Berry et al., Chicago (1976); I. Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Midwest (1982); M. H. Ebner, Creating Chicago's North Shore (1988); W. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (repr. 1992); A. Ehrenhalt, The Lost City (1995); D. L. Miller, City of the Century (1996); J. R. Grossman et al., ed., The Encyclopedia of Chicago (2004).

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

Chicago City on the sw shore of Lake Michigan, ne Illinois, USA. In the late 18th century it was a trading post and became Fort Dearborn military post (1803). With the construction of the Erie Canal and railways, and the opening up of the prairies, Chicago attracted settlers and industry. Large areas of the city were destroyed by fire in 1871, but its expansion continued. It became a noted cultural centre in the late 19th century with the establishment of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891) and several literary magazines. It is the major industrial, commercial, cultural and shipping centre of the Midwest. It has many colleges and universities, the largest rail terminal in the world and one of the world's busiest airports, O'Hare. Chicago is renowned for its architecture. The world's first skyscraper was built here in 1885 and, until 1996, the Sears Tower was the world's tallest building, 443m (1454ft). Industries: steel, chemicals, machinery, metalworking. Pop. (2000) 2,896,016.