History

By virtue of its location, Chicago became the great engine of America's westward expansion. The patch of land where Chicago stands straddles a key point along an inland water route linking Canada, via Lake Erie, to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi River.

The French, busy expanding their own territory in North America throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, were the first Europeans to survey the topography of the future Chicago. The French policy in North America was simple -- to gradually settle the Mississippi Valley and the Northwest Territory (modern Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). The policy relied on an alliance between religion and commerce: The French sought a monopoly over the fur trade with the Native American tribes, whose pacification and loyalty they attempted to ensure by converting them to Catholicism.

The team of Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Joliet, an explorer, personified this policy. In 1673 the pair found a short portage between two critically placed rivers, the Illinois and the Des Plaines. One was connected to the Mississippi, and the other, via the Chicago River, led to Lake Michigan and onward to Montreal and Quebec.

Chicago owes its existence to this strategic 1 1/2-mile portage trail, which the Native Americans had blazed in their travels over centuries of moving throughout this territory. Marquette was on the most familiar terms with the Native Americans, who helped him make his way over the well-established paths of their ancestral lands. The Native Americans did not anticipate the European settlers' hunger for such prime real estate.

First Settlement

Over the next 100 years, the French used this waterway to spread their American empire from Canada to Mobile, Alabama. Yet the first recorded settlement in Chicago, a trading post built by a French Canadian of Haitian descent, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, did not appear until 1781. By this time, the British already had conquered the territory, part of the spoils of 70 years of intermittent warfare that cost the French most of their North American holdings. After the American War of Independence, the Illinois Territory was wrested from British and Native American control in a campaign led by the Revolutionary War hero Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The campaign ended with a 1795 treaty ceding the land around the mouth of the Chicago River to the United States.

Between du Sable's day and 1833, when Chicago was officially founded, the land by the mouth of the Chicago River served as a military outpost that guarded the strategic passage and provided security for a few trappers and a trading post. The military base, Fort Dearborn, which stood on the south side of what is now the Michigan Avenue Bridge, was first garrisoned in 1803.

At first the settlement grew slowly, impeded by continued Native American efforts to drive the new Americans from the Illinois Territory. During the War of 1812, inhabitants abandoned Fort Dearborn, and many were slain during the evacuation. But before long, the trappers drifted back; by 1816, the military, too, had returned.

Conflict diminished after that, but even as a civil engineer plotted the building lots of the early town as late as 1830, periodic raids continued, ceasing only with the defeat of Chief Black Hawk in 1832. A year later the settlement of 300-plus inhabitants was officially incorporated under the name Chicago, said to derive from a Native American word referring to the powerful odors of the abundant wild vegetation (most likely onions) in the marshlands surrounding the riverbanks.

Commerce & Industry

Land speculation began immediately, and Chicago was carved piecemeal and sold off to finance the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which would eliminate the narrow land portage and fulfill the long-standing vision of connecting the two great waterways. Commercial activity quickly followed. Chicago grew in size and wealth, shipping grain and livestock to the Eastern markets and lumber to the prairies of the West. Ironically, by the time the Illinois and Michigan Canal was completed in 1848, the railroad had arrived, and the water route that gave Chicago its raison d'être was rapidly becoming obsolete. Boxcars, not boats, became the principal mode of transportation throughout the region. The combination of the railroad, the emergence of local manufacturing, and, later, the Civil War caused Chicago to grow wildly.

The most revolutionary product of the era sprang from the mind of Chicago inventor Cyrus McCormick, whose reaper filled in for the farmhands who now labored on the nation's battlefields. Local merchants not only thrived on the contraband trade in cotton but also secured lucrative contracts from the federal government to provide the army with tents, uniforms, saddles, harnesses, lumber, bread, and meat. By 1870, Chicago's population had grown to 300,000, a thousand times greater than its original population, in just 37 years since incorporation.

The Great Fire

A year later, the city lay in ashes. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 began on the southwest side of the city on October 8. Legend places its exact origin in the O'Leary shed on DeKoven Street, although most historians have exonerated the long-blamed bovine that locals speculate started the blaze by kicking over a lantern. The fire jumped the river and continued north through the night and the following day, when it was checked by the use of gunpowder on the South Side and rainfall to the north and west. The fire took 300 lives, destroyed 18,000 buildings, and left 90,000 homeless.

The city began to rebuild as soon as the rubble was cleared. By 1873 the city's downtown business and financial district was up and running again, and 2 decades later Chicago had sufficiently recovered to stage the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition commemorating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America.

The Great Fire gave an unprecedented boost to the professional and artistic development of the nation's architects. Drawn by the unlimited opportunities to build, they gravitated to the city in droves. And the city raised a homegrown crop of architects. Chicago's reputation as an American Athens, packed with monumental and decorative buildings, is a direct by-product of the disastrous fire that nearly brought the city to ruin.

In the meantime, as many immigrants forsook the uncultivated farmland of the prairie to join Chicago's labor pool, the city's population continued to grow. Chicago still shipped meat and agricultural commodities around the nation and the world, and the city was rapidly becoming a mighty industrial center, creating finished goods, particularly for the markets of the ever-expanding Western settlements.

The Cradle of Trade Unionism

Chicago never seemed to outgrow its frontier rawness. Greed, profiteering, exploitation, and corruption were as critical to its growth as hard work, ingenuity, and civic pride. The spirit of reform arose most powerfully from the ranks of the working classes, whose lives were plagued by poverty and disease, despite the city's prosperity. When the sleeping giant of labor awakened in Chicago, it did so with a militancy and commitment that would inspire the union movement throughout the nation.

By the 1890s, many of Chicago's workers were already organized into the American Federation of Labor. The Pullman Strike of 1894 united black and white railway workers for the first time in a common struggle for higher wages and workplace rights. The Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies, which embraced for a time so many great voices of American labor -- Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Helen Gurley Flynn -- was founded in Chicago in 1905.

An African-American Capital

The major change in Chicago in the 20th century, however, stems from the enormous growth of the city's African-American population. Coincident with the beginning of World War I, Chicago became the destination for thousands of blacks leaving the Deep South. Most settled on the South Side. With the exception of Hyde Park, which absorbed the black population into an integrated middle-class neighborhood, Chicago gained a reputation as the most segregated city in the United States. Today, although increased black representation in local politics and other institutions has eased some tensions, the city remains far more geographically segregated than most of its urban peers.

The Chicago Machine

While Chicago was becoming a center of industry, transportation, and finance, and a beacon of labor reform, it was also becoming a powerhouse in national politics. Between 1860 and 1968, Chicago was the site of 14 Republican and 10 Democratic presidential nominating conventions. (Some even point to the conventions as the source of Chicago's "Windy City" nickname, laying the blame on a politician who was full of hot air.) The first of the conventions gave the country Abraham Lincoln; the 1968 convention saw the so-called Days of Rage, a police riot against demonstrators who had camped out in Grant Park to protest the Vietnam War. As TV cameras rolled, the demonstrators chanted, "The whole world is watching."

And it was; many politicos blame Mayor Richard J. Daley for Hubert Humphrey's defeat in the general election. (Maybe it was a wash; some also say that Daley stole the 1960 election for Kennedy.)

A few words about (the original) Mayor Daley: He did not invent the political machine, but he certainly perfected it. Daley understood that as long as the leaders of every ethnic and special-interest group had their share of the spoils, he could retain ultimate power. His reach extended well beyond Chicago's borders; he controlled members of Congress, and every 4 years he delivered a solid Democratic vote in the November elections. Since his death in 1976, the machine has never been the same.

Today Daley's son, Richard M., holds his father's former office, but he doesn't control the Cook County machine. Mayor Richard M. Daley has abandoned his late father's power base of solid white working-class Bridgeport for the newly developed (some would say yuppie) Central Station neighborhood just south of the Loop. The baby boomer appears to be finding himself, but many in the city still enjoy calling him -- with more than a hint of condescension -- "Richie."

The city has ongoing problems. With roughly 2.8 million people total, Chicago has nearly equal numbers of black and white residents -- a rarity among today's urban areas -- but the residential districts continue to be some of the most segregated in the country. Families are trying to cope with the school system, which has been undergoing major restructuring, but its outlook is still dismal. In 1995 the federal government seized control of the city's public housing, pledging to replace dangerous high-rises with smaller complexes in mixed-income neighborhoods. It is a long-term goal, but authorities have been gradually tearing down the notorious apartment buildings of Cabrini Green, where then-mayor Jane Byrne moved briefly to show her support for the crime-victimized residents.

Chicago & the Great Black Migration

From 1915 to 1960, hundreds of thousands of black Southerners poured into Chicago, trying to escape segregation and seeking economic freedom and opportunity. The "Great Black Migration" radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally, from an Irish-run city of recent European immigrants into one in which no group had a majority and no politician -- white or black -- could ever take the black vote for granted. Unfortunately, the sudden change gave rise to many of the disparities that still plague the city, but it also promoted an environment in which many black men and women could rise from poverty to prominence.

From 1910 to 1920, Chicago's black population almost tripled, from 44,000 to 109,000; from 1920 to 1930, it more than doubled, to 234,000. The Great Depression slowed the migration to a crawl, but the boom resumed when World War II revived the economy, causing the black population to skyrocket to 492,000 by 1950. The postwar expansion and the decline of Southern sharecropping caused the black population to nearly double again, to 813,000, by 1960.

While jobs in the factories, steel mills, and stockyards paid much better than those in the cotton fields, Chicago was not the paradise that many blacks envisioned. Segregation was almost as bad here as it was down South, and most blacks were confined to a narrow "Black Belt" of overcrowded apartment buildings on the South Side. But the new migrants made the best of their situation, and for a time in the 1930s and 1940s, the Black Belt -- dubbed "Bronzeville" or the "Black Metropolis" by the community's boosters -- thrived as a cultural, musical, religious, and educational mecca. As journalist and Great Migration historian Nicholas Lemann writes in The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, "Chicago was a city where a black person could be somebody."

Some of the Southern migrants who made names for themselves in Chicago included black separatist and Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed; Robert S. Abbott, publisher of the powerful Chicago Defender newspaper, who launched a "Great Northern Drive" to bring blacks to the city in 1917; Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who headed an antilynching campaign; William Dawson, for many years the only black congressman; New Orleans-born jazz pioneers Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong; Native Son author Richard Wright; John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines and one of Chicago's wealthiest residents; blues musicians Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf; Thomas A. Dorsey, the "father of gospel music," and his greatest disciple, singer Mahalia Jackson; Robert Taylor, head of the Chicago Housing Authority, after whom the CHA's most notorious buildings are named; and Ralph Metcalfe, the Olympic gold-medalist sprinter who turned to politics once he got to Chicago, eventually succeeding Dawson in Congress.

When open-housing legislation enabled blacks to live in any neighborhood, the flight of many Bronzeville residents to less crowded areas took a toll on the community. Through the 1950s, almost a third of the housing became vacant, and by the 1960s, the great social experiment of urban renewal through wholesale land clearance and the creation of large tracts of public housing gutted the once-thriving neighborhood.

Community and civic leaders now appear committed to restoring the neighborhood to a semblance of its former glory. Landmark status has been secured for several historic buildings in Bronzeville, including the Liberty Life/Supreme Insurance Company, 3501 S. King Dr., the first African-American-owned insurance company in the northern United States, and the Eighth Regiment Armory, which, when completed in 1915, was the only armory in the United States controlled by an African-American regiment. The former home of the legendary Chess Records at 2120 S. Michigan Ave. -- where Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley gave birth to the blues and helped define rock 'n' roll -- now houses a museum and music education center. Willie Dixon's widow, Marie Dixon, set up the Blues Heaven Foundation (tel. 312/808-1286) with financial assistance from rock musician John Mellencamp. Along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, between 24th and 35th streets, several public-art installations celebrate Bronzeville's heritage. The most poignant is sculptor Alison Saar's Great Northern Migration bronze monument, at King Drive and 26th Street, depicting a suitcase-toting African-American traveler standing atop a mound of worn shoe soles.

For tours of Bronzeville, contact the Chicago Office of Tourism's Chicago Neighborhood Tours (tel. 312/742-1190; www.chgocitytours.com); Tour Black Chicago (tel. 312/332-2323; www.tourblackchicago.com); or the Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council (tel. 773/548-2579).