Chicago

• 1. Introduction

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  Chicago sits on the western shore of Lake Michigan, and if you arrived there in 1833, you would have found a settlement of fewer than 200 people scratching out a life on what was then the American frontier. Within sixty years of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, that same city held over 3 million souls. It reached its all-time peak of 3.6 million by the 1950 census, making it the fastest-growing city the modern world had ever seen.

  How does a swampy portage between two river systems become the third-largest city in the United States, home to the world's busiest derivatives market and a skyline that rewrote the rules of construction everywhere? The name itself tells part of the story. Chicago derives from a French rendering of the Miami-Illinois word for a wild relative of the onion and garlic, a plant called Allium tricoccum that once grew in extraordinary abundance across this stretch of lakeside prairie. The explorer Henri Joutel noted in his 1688 journal that the garlic grew "profusely" in the area.

  What follows is the story of the place those wild garlic fields became: a city built on fire, engineered against its own rivers, and shaped by wave after wave of people who arrived with almost nothing and remade themselves and it in turn.

• 2. The Settlement Before the City

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  Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was the first known permanent settler in what would become Chicago. He was of African descent, perhaps born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the territory now called Haiti, and he established his trading settlement in the 1780s. He is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago.

  The region had long been home to the Potawatomi, who had themselves displaced the Miami, Sauk, and Meskwaki peoples from the land. In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, a portion of land intended for a military installation was transferred to the United States by native tribes under the Treaty of Greenville. The U.S. Army built Fort Dearborn there in 1803, and the Potawatomi destroyed it during the War of 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn before it was later rebuilt.

  The dispossession moved in deliberate stages. The Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi ceded additional land under the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. Then, in 1833, the Potawatomi were removed from their remaining land under the Treaty of Chicago and sent west of the Mississippi River as part of the federal Indian removal policy. The Town of Chicago was formally organized on the 12th of August 1833, with a population of roughly 200. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, the 4th of March 1837, and the first public land sales had begun two years earlier, on the 15th of June 1835, with Edmund Dick Taylor serving as Receiver of Public Monies.

• 3. Fire and Reconstruction

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  On the 8th of October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned through an area roughly 4 miles long and 1 mile wide. At least 300 people died and more than 100,000 were left without homes. Yet the railroads, the stockyards, and much of the industrial infrastructure survived. What rose from the wreckage was more than rebuilt Chicago; it was a new philosophy of construction.

  In 1885, the Home Insurance Building became the first steel-framed high-rise in the world. Steel-skeleton construction allowed buildings to rise far beyond the limits of masonry, and Chicago demonstrated the principle to the world. By 1974, the Sears Tower, now named the Willis Tower, claimed the title of the world's tallest building. Today it stands as the third tallest in the Western Hemisphere, trailing only One World Trade Center and Central Park Tower.

  The fire was not just a catalyst for engineering. It also forced the city to confront questions of sanitation and urban planning that had been building for years. Chicago's sewage problems predated the fire. The Common Council had approved engineer Chesbrough's plan for the United States' first comprehensive sewerage system back in February 1856. That project required raising much of central Chicago to a new grade, with buildings physically lifted by jackscrews. But untreated waste still found its way into the Chicago River and then into Lake Michigan, fouling the city's drinking water. The response was to tunnel 2 miles out into the lake to newly built water cribs. Then, in 1900, Chicago completed a project unprecedented in civil engineering: it reversed the flow of the Chicago River entirely, so that water would flow away from Lake Michigan rather than into it.

• 4. The Architecture of Time and Space

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  Chicago's railway managers convened in 1883 with a problem that affected every city on the continent. Trains could not run on schedules when every station kept its own local time. Their solution was a standardized system of North American time zones, a convention that then spread across the entire continent.

  The same impulse toward rational organization shaped the city's streets. Chicago's grid grew from the original 58-block townsite and eventually required that every new addition to the city be laid out with eight streets to the mile in one direction and sixteen in the other. Diagonal streets, many of them originally Native American trails, cut across this grid. Chicago's Western Avenue became the longest continuous urban street in the world.

  The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition drew 27.5 million visitors to former marshland at what is now Jackson Park. The Ferris wheel made its first appearance at that exposition. The fair was so influential that the English word "midway" for a fairground derives from the Midway Plaisance, a strip of park land that still runs through the University of Chicago campus. The University itself had moved to that South Side location in 1892, a year before the exposition opened. The city's municipal device, a Y within a circle, also originated at this moment, the result of a contest run by the Chicago Tribune in 1892 in anticipation of the fair.

• 5. Migration and the Making of Modern Chicago

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  Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population of Chicago grew from 44,103 to 233,903. This Great Migration brought tens of thousands of Black Americans north from the Southern United States, drawn by industrial jobs in the steel mills, railroads, and shipping yards. The cultural consequence was a flowering called the Chicago Black Renaissance, part of the broader New Negro Movement, which transformed the city's art, literature, and music.

  The migration also collided with entrenched racial violence, including the Chicago race riot of 1919. By the 1920s and 1930s, the great majority of Black migrants had settled in a zone on the South Side called the Black Belt, and in some blocks the racial segregation was total. Around that time, the block of 4600 Winthrop Avenue in the Uptown neighborhood was the only one in the neighborhood where African Americans could live or open establishments.

  The same decades brought an entirely different kind of upheaval. The ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919 made alcohol illegal nationwide, launching what Chicago came to know as the gangster era, running roughly from 1919 to 1933. Al Capone, Dion O'Banion, Bugs Moran, and Tony Accardo all battled law enforcement and each other on the city's streets. The era's most infamous episode was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, when Capone's men killed seven members of Bugs Moran's North Side gang.

  World War II brought yet another wave of change. Between 1939 and 1945, Chicago alone produced more steel each year than the United Kingdom. On the 2nd of December 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.

• 6. Music, Food, and Cultural Identity

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  Poetry magazine was founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, who was then working as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune. The magazine published T. S. Eliot's first professionally printed poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and launched the careers of Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. It was also the vehicle through which Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg reached wider audiences.

  Chicago's musical contributions are harder to trace to a single founding act. The city is the birthplace of house music, a form of electronic dance music, and of industrial music; in the 1980s and 1990s Chicago was the global center for both. It also carries deep roots in blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and hip-hop. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs at Symphony Center and is recognized as one of the finest orchestras in the world. The Lyric Opera of Chicago performs at the Civic Opera House. Lollapalooza, which originated in 1991 as a touring festival, has made Chicago its permanent home since 2005.

  In the realm of food, Chicago asserts distinct regional identity through dishes with traceable institutional origins. Deep-dish pizza is said to have originated at Pizzeria Uno. The Chicago-style hot dog arrives on a poppy seed bun loaded with pickle relish, yellow mustard, pickled sport peppers, tomato wedges, dill pickle spear, and celery salt, with ketchup considered an affront by devoted enthusiasts. The Italian beef sandwich is thinly sliced beef simmered in au jus on an Italian roll. The tradition of flambeing the Greek dish saganaki tableside originated in Chicago's Greek community. One of the world's most decorated restaurants, Alinea, holds three Michelin stars and is located in Chicago.

• 7. Government, Sport, and the City Today

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  Chicago has been governed exclusively by Democrats since 1931, when the Great Depression wiped out the Republican political machine. The city's mayoral office carries significant power; the mayor is elected to four-year terms with no term limits. Richard J. Daley served from 1955 and left a deep imprint on the city's physical fabric, overseeing construction of the Sears Tower and O'Hare International Airport and presiding over the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention. His son, Richard M. Daley, elected in 1989, became Chicago's longest-serving mayor before declining to seek a seventh term. In 1979, Jane Byrne became the city's first female mayor. In 1983, Harold Washington became its first Black mayor; he was re-elected in 1987 but died of a heart attack shortly after. In 2019, Lori Lightfoot became the first African American woman and the first openly LGBTQ mayor to hold the office. Brandon Johnson assumed office as the 57th mayor on the 15th of May 2023.

  The city's sports culture carries its own long timeline. The Chicago Cubs have played in Chicago since 1871 and hold the record for the longest championship drought in American professional sports, failing to win a World Series between 1908 and 2016. The Chicago Bulls, with Michael Jordan at the center, won six NBA championships in eight seasons during the 1990s. The Chicago Blackhawks, one of the NHL's Original Six teams, have won six Stanley Cups, including championships in 2010, 2013, and 2015.

  Today, the Chicago metropolitan area generates over $919 billion in GDP, ranking sixth globally as of 2024. The city's economy is deliberately diverse; no single industry employs more than 14% of the workforce. O'Hare International Airport is routinely ranked among the world's ten busiest by passenger traffic. And 55 million people visited Chicago's cultural institutions, beaches, and restaurants in 2024 alone, drawn to a city that first appeared on a French map as a field of wild garlic.