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Chicago (IPA:)
is a city in the state of Illinois and the largest in the
Midwest. With a population of nearly 3 million people located
almost entirely in Cook County (a portion of the city's
O'Hare International Airport overlaps into DuPage County),
Chicago is the third largest city in the United States.
The population of Chicago's metropolitan area, which covers
several counties (and commonly called Chicagoland), contains
over 9.7 million people in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana,
making it the third largest metropolitan area in the U.S.
Adjacent to Lake Michigan, it is the largest city located
on the Great Lakes and the world's twenty-second largest
urban area by population. Chicago has been classified as
an alpha world city for its worldwide economic influence.
Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837. Its location
at the site of a portage between the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi River watershed aided the city's rapid growth.
Today, Chicago is a leading global city and a major transportation
hub, as well as the business, financial, and cultural capital
of the American Midwest.
Chicago offers a rich cultural heritage: Teams from each
of the major league sports , a financial district anchored
by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange located at the foot
of LaSalle Street in the Chicago Board of Trade Building,
the shopping of the Magnificent Mile, a blossoming Theatre
district, a thriving arts culture anchored by the Art Institute
of Chicago and bolstered by the modern offerings of the
Millennium Park.
History
The name "Chicago" is the French
rendering of the Miami-Illinois name shikaakwa, meaning “wild
leek”.Etymologically, the sound /shikaakwa/
in Miami-Illinois literally means 'striped skunk', and
was a reference to wild leek, or the smell of onions.The
name was initially applied to the river, but later came
to denote what is presently the site of city. The sound
Chicago is said[attribution needed] to be the result of
a French mis-transcription of the original sound by Louis
Hennepin, a Catholic priest, missionary and explorer, who
in 1683 first placed the place name 'Chicago' on a map.[citation
needed]
During the mid-18th century the area
was inhabited primarily by Potawatomis, who had taken
the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples. The
first settler in Chicago, Haitian Jean Baptiste Pointe
du Sable, arrived in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi
woman, and founded the area’s first
trading post. In 1803 the United States Army built Fort
Dearborn, which was destroyed in the 1812 Fort Dearborn
massacre. The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi later ceded
the land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St.
Louis. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized
with a population of 350. Within seven years it grew to
a population of over 4,000. The City of Chicago was incorporated
on March 4, 1837.
The city began its step toward regional
primacy as an important transportation hub between the
eastern and western United States. Begun in 1836, Chicago’s
first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, opened
in 1848, a year which also marked the opening of the
Illinois and Michigan Canal. The canal allowed steamboats
and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the
Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought many
new residents from rural communities as well as immigrants
from abroad. The city’s
manufacturing and retail sectors became dominant among
Midwestern cities and subsequently influenced the American
economy, particularly in meatpacking, with the advent of
the refrigerated rail car and the regional centrality of
the city's Union Stock Yards.
During its first century as a city, Chicago
grew at a rate that ranked among the fastest growing in
the world. Within the span of forty years, the city's population
grew from slightly under 30,000 to over 1 million by 1890.
By the close of the 19th century, Chicago was the fifth
largest city in the world,[7] and the largest of the cities
that didn't exist at the dawn of the century. Within fifty
years of the Chicago Fire, the population had tripled to
over 3 million.
Artist's rendering of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.In
February of 1856, the Chesbrough plan for the building
of Chicago’s (and indeed the United States’)
first comprehensive sewerage system was approved by the
Common Council;[9] a project that necessitated the physical
raising of much of central Chicago to a new grade. Untreated
sewage and industrial waste now flowed into the Chicago
River, thence into Lake Michigan, polluting the primary
source of fresh water for the city. The city responded
by tunneling two miles (3 km) out into Lake Michigan
to newly built water cribs. Nonetheless, spring rains
continued to carry polluted water as far out as the water
intakes. In 1900, the problem of sewage was largely resolved
when Chicago undertook an innovative engineering feat.
The city actually reversed the flow of the river, a process
that started with the construction and improvement of
the Illinois and Michigan Canal and completed with the
finishing of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal) leading
to the Illinois River which joins the Mississippi River.
The Chicago Water Tower, one of the few surviving buildings
after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.After the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed a third of the city, including
the entire central business district, Chicago experienced
rapid rebuilding and growth.During Chicago's rebuilding
period, the world's first skyscraper was constructed
in 1885 using steel-skeleton construction.
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's
Columbian Exposition on former marshland at the present
location of Jackson Park. The Exposition drew 27.5 million
visitors, and is considered among the most influential
world's fairs in history. The University of Chicago
had been founded one year earlier in 1892 on the same
South Side location. The term "midway" for
a fair or carnival referred originally to the Midway
Plaisance, a strip of park land that still runs through
the University of Chicago campus and connects Washington
and Jackson Parks.
The city was the site of labor conflicts
and unrest during this period, which included the Haymarket
affair on May 4, 1886. Concern for social problems among
Chicago’s
lower classes led Jane Addams to be a co-founder of Hull
House in 1889, the first of what were called settlement
houses. Programs developed there became a model for the
new field of social work. The city also invested in many
large, well-landscaped municipal parks, which also included
public sanitation facilities.
The 1920s brought notoriety to Chicago
as gangsters, including the notorious Al Capone, battled
each other and law enforcement on the city streets during
the Prohibition era. The 1920s also saw a major expansion
in industry. The availability of jobs attracted African
Americans from the South. Arriving in the tens of thousands
during the Great Migration, the cultural impact of the
newcomers was immense. It was during this wave that Chicago
became a center for jazz, with King Oliver leading the
way.
In 1933, Mayor Anton Cermak was assassinated while in
Miami with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On December 2, 1942, physicist Enrico
Fermi conducted the world’s first controlled nuclear
reaction at the University of Chicago as part of the
top-secret Manhattan Project.
The Sears Tower, at 108 Stories, stands as Chicago's tallest
building since its completion in 1974 and is the tallest
free standing structure in the United States.Mayor Richard
J. Daley was elected in 1955, in the era of machine politics.
Starting in the 1960s, many upper- and middle-class citizens
started leaving the city for the suburbs, as was the
case in many cities across the country. It took the heart
out of many residential neighborhoods, leaving impoverished
and disadvantaged citizens behind. Structural changes
in industry caused heavy losses of jobs for lower skilled
workers.
The city hosted the tumultuous 1968
Democratic National Convention, which featured physical
confrontations both inside and outside the convention
hall, including full-scale police riots in city streets.
Major construction projects, including the Sears Tower
(which in 1974 became the world’s
tallest building), McCormick Place, and O'Hare Airport,
were undertaken during Richard J. Daley's tenure. When
he died, Michael Anthony Bilandic was mayor for three years.
His loss in a primary election has been attributed to the
city’s inability to properly plow city streets during
a heavy snowstorm. In 1979, Jane Byrne, the city’s
first female mayor, was elected. She popularized the city
as a movie location and tourist destination.
In 1983 Harold Washington became
the first African American to be elected to the office
of mayor, in one of the closest mayoral elections in
Chicago. After Washington won the Democratic primary,
racial motivations caused Democratic alderman and ward
committeemen to back the Republican candidate Bernard
Epton, who ran on the slogan Before it’s
too late, a thinly veiled appeal to fear. Washington’s
term in office saw new attention given to poor and minority
neighborhoods. His administration reduced the longtime
dominance of city contracts and employment by ethnic whites.
Current mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the late Richard
J. Daley, was first elected in 1989. He has led many progressive
changes to the city, including improving parks; creating
incentives for sustainable development, including green
roofs; and major new developments. Since the 1990s, the
city has undergone a revitalization in which some lower
class neighborhoods have been transformed into pricey neighborhoods
as new middle class residents have settled in the city.
Special Thanks to : Wikipedia, the free
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