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City Overview The ‘Windy City’ lives up to its name, situated as it is on the western shore of Lake Michigan – part of the huge inland sea of the Great Lakes. However, the term was actually started by New York Sun editor Charles Dana who, in 1893, grew exasperated with the long-winded boastings of the city’s politicians. Their civic pride was, even so, not misplaced. Chicago had changed from a mere village of 350 people in 1830, to the growing nation’s ‘Second City’ (to New York), capable of hosting the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition, which attracted 26 million visitors during its six-month run. The Exposition was the culmination of a phoenix-like recovery from the great fire of 1871, which left 90,000 citizens (‘Chicagoans’) homeless. The city has always had a dual character. As a centre of industry and business, becoming the hub of each new mode of transport as it developed (roads, canals, railways, aeroplanes), Chicago keeps its feet firmly on the ground and in the real world. Indeed, this position at the centre of a transport web was one of the factors that shaped the culture that Chicago is so famous for, focused here in the 1920s during Prohibition and epitomised by gangsters like Al Capone and police adversaries like Eliot Ness. However, Chicago has always prided itself on being a varied and profound centre for culture. All year round, there are festivals, exhibitions, parades and full programmes of theatre, dance, art and all types of music. This is, after all, the city that coined the term ‘jazz’ and was home to architects Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School of Architects. Fittingly, with architecture being perhaps the ultimate combination of industry and art, the world’s first steel-framed skyscraper was built here. The Art Institute houses American artist Grant Wood’s classic work, American Gothic, as well as an renowned collection of the French Impressionists, while works by Magritte and Andy Warhol can be found at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in the northwest suburb of Oak Park, which he described ungenerously as full of ‘wide lawns and narrow minds.’ The modern city focuses on the area known as the Loop, where the raised metropolitan railway (known as the ‘El’) circles the central Downtown business and shopping district. From here, the adjacent neighbourhoods are simply called the North, West, South and East Sides. Chicago is one of the most ethnically diverse cities both in the USA and in the world. Over 50 languages are spoken here and one glance at the city’s list of annual parades shows just how many different communities wish to celebrate and display their cultures. Today, the city’s economy no longer relies upon the heavy industry such as steel production, which attracted such huge numbers of immigrants but looks more toward communications, information technology and financial institutions backed by the drive of research and development both in commerce and in its academic faculties. For instance, the Chicago Board of Trade, although founded in 1848 to trade in futures and options, is still one of the world’s major centre for such business. Chicagoans are always working hard at something, even if it is sport, which they practise fanatically, especially along the lakeshores – and the severe winters and scorching summers don’t stop them in this pursuit. In fact, this industriousness and the lake combine well together to represent Chicago in a way quite similar to how the original American Indians thought of it. They named it ‘Checaugou’, after the River Checaugou, which flowed into this lake. The word translates as ‘strong’ or ‘great’ and modern-day Chicago certainly lives up this heritage. |
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