Lifestyle and Leisure
The history of Chicago
Chicago is a place that is equally as diverse but with its own, entirely different identity. We look briefly at the city's history
When the area that now makes up Chicago was purchased from Native American tribes in the treaty of St Louis in 1816, the American government could never have foreseen what the small settlement would become. By 1833 the town still only had a population of around 400 but it would soon become one of the fastest-growing cities in the world.
By 1890 the population had reached well over a million as Irish, Polish, Swedish and German-American Immigrants flocked to its streets, encouraged by opportunistic Yankee landowners and businessman. The major explosion in the city's growth came after the opening of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad in 1848 allowed for increased trade between the Great Lakes shipping industry and the east and west coasts. As a result of its prime location between the three, the city was an ideal place to set up a manufacturing industry that could serve the whole of the US. Manufacturing and retail flourished and, by the turn of the century, Chicago, with its near monopoly of America's meat packing trade, was playing a massive part in the growth of the nation's wealth.
In 1885, the city was the first in the world to construct a skyscraper and, in the process, not only changed the way it looked, but effectively changed the way cities around the world would look for good. By the early 20th century, 'Chi Town' had continued to develop in much the same way as New York – skyscrapers continued to pop up, social conflict divided the grid iron city into class-influenced and racially subdivided communities, building projects tended to favour the wealthy, whilst the poor found themselves stuck in unforgiving neighbourhoods. And like the Big Apple, the melting pot had not quite mixed together, so tolerance of one another's differences wasn't universal, to say the least. Yet, fuelled by immigration, the population continued to grow and the mixture of inhabitants was as diverse as ever.
Whilst recent years have seen a major decline in this sort of de facto segregation and the adoption of more universal integrationist attitudes, one of the divisions within the city that still plays a massive part in Chi Town's identity to this day is the rivalry between the North Side and the South Side. Although the rivalry in modern times is largely defined by what baseball team people support, it originally came from the ethnic distinctions between the halves of the city – the north was home to wealthy German, Swedish, and Polish communities, whilst the south was divided into poorer Irish, Italian, Lithuanian and Polish communities. In modern times wealth is more evenly distributed throughout Chicago, but the North Side is still considered the more affluent half of the city. It is home to a larger commercial district and has benefitted from the construction boom to a much bigger extent than the south. America's tallest building, the Sears Tower, can be found on the North Side along with the rest of the impressive skyscraping structures that dominate the Windy City skyline.
These days, the north would consider itself the cultural centre of the city, pointing to its thriving Asian and African American community as well as its large gay community as evidence of this. Whilst the new millennium has brought with it a citywide gentrification, traditionally the south was – and still is – home to a higher proportion of blue collar industrial workers. Much like the South Bronx and Queens in New York, throughout the 20th century Chicago's South Side gained a reputation for gangs and crime. In the 1960s, the strategic building of the Dan Ryan expressway was used to separate the large Puerto Rican, Mexican and black communities from the affluent white neighbourhoods with similar effects to the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Big Apple. Yet, in recent years, as race relations have improved and city planning has moved away from its segregationist policies, the South Side has become a major cultural centre and tourist attraction in itself.
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