Chicago

Chicago, city, seat of Cook county, northeastern Illinois, U.S. With a population hovering near three million, Chicago is the state’s largest and the country’s third most populous city. In addition, the greater Chicagoland area—which encompasses northeastern Illinois and extends into southeastern Wisconsin and northwestern Indiana—is the country’s third largest metropolitan area and the dominant metropolis of the Midwest.

The original site for Chicago was unremarkable: a small settlement at the mouth of the Chicago River near the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Indeed, a common notion for the origin of the city’s name is an Algonquian word for a wild leek (or onion) plant that grew locally. However, Chicago’s location at the southwestern end of the vast Great Lakes system could not have been more ideal as the country expanded westward in the 19th century, and perhaps this is reflected in another interpretation of the Native American term as meaning “strong” or “great.” Regardless of which derivation is correct, it was soon recognized that the Chicago River formed a critical link in the great waterway that arose mid-century between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. With the rise of railways soon thereafter, the young city became the country’s railway hub, which helped diversify the city’s rapidly growing industrial base. Chicago continued as America’s crossroads with the explosive growth of air travel after World War II, which eased the city’s transition into a postindustrial economy.

Chicago sprawls along the lakeshore and extends inland to meet its suburbs in a ragged line. At its greatest extent, the city is some 25 miles (40 km) from north to south and 15 miles (25 km) from east to west. Area 228 square miles (591 square km). Pop. (2000) 2,896,016; Chicago-Joliet-Naperville Metro Division, 7,628,412; Chicago-Joliet-Naperville Metro Area, 9,098,316; (2010) 2,695,598; Chicago-Joliet-Naperville Metro Division, 7,883,147; Chicago-Joliet-Naperville Metro Area, 9,461,105.

Character of the city

A drive across Chicago’s lively immigrant neighbourhoods is a trip around the world: the cultures of virtually every country can be found in food stores, restaurants, clothing shops, music and video dealers, places of worship, and street-corner conversations. Chicago’s dizzying growth in the 19th century led to a reputation not only for disorder and political corruption but also for creativity in the arts, architecture, and business. The resulting economic opportunities also contributed to the diversity of the city’s population.

Chicago never fulfilled its dream of becoming the largest American city, but between 1890 and 1982 it was second only to New York City. That fact has contributed much to the city’s reputed personality. In the 19th century it had the image of being aggressive and self-promoting, stealing population and businesses from the East. Chicago’s “Windy City” nickname, in fact, came not from lake breezes but from its braggadocio—exhibited most dramatically in the 1890s, when it pushed aside New York and St. Louis, Mo., in the competition to become the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Poet Carl Sandburg hailed it as the “city of the big shoulders,” cunning and cruel, yet creative and strangely attractive. It was the “toddlin’ town” of the 1920s tune, and Frank Sinatra famously proclaimed it “my kind of town.” New York writer A.J. Liebling belittled its provinciality in a stinging series of magazine articles, collected in the 1952 book Chicago: The Second City. Chicagoans eventually forgot the book, but the adopted epithet stuck. Under the regime of the late mayor Richard J. Daley, efficient municipal services made it the “city that works.” Chicagoans still like to refer to it as the “city of neighbourhoods,” even though that description can carry connotations of segregation by race, ethnicity, and social class.

Few cities evoke as many contrasting pairs of images as Chicago. During the 19th century it was regarded as exceptional for the speed of its growth and the diversity of its population, yet its interior location supposedly made it a much more “typically American” city than New York. One-third of Chicago lay in ashes in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, but it was rebuilt in record speed during the onset of an economic depression. It was the city of the humble immigrant and the new millionaire, the home of brazen criminals such as Al Capone and of great humanitarians such as settlement-house pioneer Jane Addams and child-welfare crusader Lucy Flower. There were raucous saloons under the watchful eye of temperance leader Frances Willard. Fetid wooden slums and horrific public housing high-rises have coexisted cheek by jowl with a uniquely innovative architectural tradition and the beautiful Gold Coast lakefront neighbourhood just north of the river. Chicago traditionally has been a shot-and-a-beer town whose best-known culinary inventions include a deep-dish pizza and a hot dog elaborately overloaded with garnishes. At the same time, it has long enjoyed a reputation for cutting-edge innovation in the arts, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has maintained a high level of international renown.

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Chicago has been a stranger’s town throughout its history. Its position as a hub for rail and air travel has always meant that at any one time a large portion of the people in the city are out-of-towners. Over the years its location has fostered a lively convention trade—a fact that has led hundreds of organizations and corporations to call it home. As the metropolis of the country’s midsection, from the southern Great Plains to Canada and as far west as the Rocky Mountains, Chicago ranks among the country’s top tourist destinations. On any given day, the parking lots of its museums are filled with cars from dozens of surrounding states, while its varied retailers and wholesalers have long been an interstate and international magnet for shoppers.

Landscape

Climate

Chicagoans have a pair of old adages about the local climate. The first—“If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour and it will change”—may have something to do with the fact that temperature and precipitation, borne by prairie winds from Iowa or Minnesota, routinely collide with conditions generated by Lake Michigan to produce abrupt weather alterations. The second—“There are two seasons in Chicago: Christmas and the Fourth of July”—refers to the sometimes stark extremes in the weather. About 50 °F (28 °C) separate the January average of 28 °F (−2 °C) and the July average of 75 °F (24 °C). The average annual precipitation is 35 inches (900 mm). Chicagoans can enjoy lying on the beach in summer and skating in the parks in winter.

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The expansive Chicago region, however, is large enough to see simultaneous double-digit differences in temperature. Although city pavements are known to absorb and radiate enough heat to affect local meteorological patterns, the lake often provides a moderating influence, slightly warming the areas near it in winter, cooling them in summer, and generating occasional lake-effect showers and snowfalls.

People

The most important fact about Chicago’s population is its historic and rich diversity. Early Chicago was inhabited by the Sauk (or Sac), Fox, and Potawatomi peoples, and the first permanent nonnative resident, Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable (or DuSable), was of French-African heritage by way of the West Indies. French Canadian traders mixed with settlers from New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants began to pour in during the 1840s. In 1850 more than half of the population was foreign-born. During the latter half of the 19th century, arrivals from Italy, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Lithuania, Bohemia, China, and smaller countries entered the city through diverse portal neighbourhoods that were located just northwest and southwest of downtown. As they moved outward, they created communities that were virtually self-contained enclaves of commercial, social, and cultural activity. Elaborate churches and synagogues, many of which still survive, were often the centre of their lives.

Race became a divisive issue after the turn of the 20th century. Job opportunities during World War I and restrictions on foreign immigration after 1924 lured tens of thousands of African Americans from the South. These new arrivals poured into a community on the city’s South Side that had existed since the mid-19th century. Soon dubbed Bronzeville, it became a centre of vibrant African American culture, amusement, and entrepreneurship. Mounting racial tensions, exacerbated by overcrowded and segregated housing on the South Side and the return of former soldiers, exploded in July 1919 into one of the country’s worst race riots, which claimed 38 lives. Meanwhile, Mexican Americans, who had responded to the same wartime opportunities and who were exempt from the 1924 legislation, came by the thousands, attracted by jobs in railroading, steel, and meatpacking. The Great Depression of the 1930s effectively halted the city’s growth, but World War II again attracted thousands of African Americans to work in defense plants and initiated a new wave of migration that grew rapidly during the 1950s. Refugees from Lithuania, Poland, and other eastern European countries also arrived after the war, as did newcomers from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. At the same time, a thriving Japanese American community sprang from the relocation of workers from wartime internment camps to Chicago.

Since the latter part of the 20th century, the city’s population growth has been fueled by migrants from both around the country and around the world. By the early 21st century, African Americans made up roughly one-third of the population, and whites constituted some two-fifths. Mexican Americans, whose numbers have mushroomed faster than those of any other group, have settled in a corridor extending southwestward from the Pilsen and Little Village neighbourhoods near downtown to suburban Cicero. They have been joined by others from every country in Central and South America. African immigrants have come from all regions of that continent. Hispanics now make up a growing one-fourth of the city’s population. The relaxation of immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s brought a substantial wave into the South Asian community, making Devon Avenue on the far North Side its arrival portal and main shopping street. There sari stores coexist with Jewish delis, Russian bookstores, and Palestinian markets. Meanwhile, Korean Americans also have prospered in small businesses scattered across the city. In 1975, arrivals following the Vietnam War created an instant neighbourhood centred near the lake on Argyle Street, where Cambodians, Thai, Hmong, and other Southeast Asians leaving their homelands have found opportunity.

Change has been a constant factor in the ethnic and neighbourhood makeup of the city, forcing many groups to struggle to maintain their communities. Urban renewal for expressways and public housing was the major destabilizing factor during the 1950s and ’60s, notably for African Americans and Puerto Ricans. The loss of industrial jobs also devastated neighbourhoods, while chain stores drew money out of local circulation. Federal home loans—which restricted where and how funds could be spent—along with increased capacity on commuter rail lines and new expressway construction encouraged the post-World War II generations to build new homes in the suburbs, leaving behind aging parents in declining city neighbourhoods. In many areas the thousands of bungalows that had been built in a relatively short period of time all started to deteriorate. Without new housing stock to replace decaying structures, the downward cycle toward abandonment began in many areas of the South and West sides. The departing families were replaced by newly arrived minorities, whose poverty and race were disadvantages in an increasingly segregated city.

The destruction of the old housing stock produced a loss of population, which led to the closing of such community anchors as churches, schools, and hospitals. Politicians and planners tried to contain the African American communities by constructing expressways around those areas and concentrating the residents of minority neighbourhoods in rows of monolithic public-housing high-rise apartment buildings. The Robert Taylor Homes near the lakefront on the South Side was the largest such project ever built in the country.

The most recent destabilizing factor in some areas of the city has been gentrification. Conveniently located old houses and apartment buildings have lured enough financing to transform once-abandoned districts into communities of upscale housing units. Since the last decades of the 20th century, thousands of new residents have moved into the light-manufacturing belt surrounding the Loop. Where immigrant workers once carried their lunch pails to work in factories, these young urban professionals clutch briefcases and talk on their cell phones as they walk to work in downtown office towers. Similar developments are transforming the housing and manufacturing districts along several rapid-transit (popularly, “L,” for “elevated”) lines and in parts of the traditionally African American communities along the south shore of the lake. Boutiques and coffeehouses have displaced small grocers and other marginal merchants. While the process has saved neighbourhoods in one sense and brought back large numbers of affluent residents to the city, it has also tended to increase property values and tax assessments to the point where longtime residents of more-modest means are displaced. Indeed, many of the 1960s-era public-housing projects (including Robert Taylor) have now been razed, although some provisions have been made for housing the former tenants.