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Chicago, Illinois

Chicago is a city in the state of Illinois in the United States with 2,705,994 residents (U.S. Census, 2018), which is the United States' third largest city and the Midwest's largest city. Chicago forms a larger Chicago-Naperville-Elgin (metropolitan area) metropolitan area, which also encompasses parts of Indiana and Wisconsin, and has about 9.5 million residents and is the United States' third largest metropolitan area.

The city is located northeast of Illinois, in a relatively flat landscape on the southwest side of Lake Michigan and has a length of more than 100 miles along it. Downtown, in particular, has several skyscrapers. The settlement extends far west on the former prairie. In the north, west and south there is an expanding belt of suburbs.

The name Chicago is from a French rendition of the Miami- Illinois people's word "shikaakwa," which may mean "wild onion," " skunk, " or "powerful." City nicknames include "The Windy City", "Chi-town" and "City of the Big Shoulders". The former refers to a changing climate (humid and hot summers, cold winters) and the latter to the city's many tall buildings.

It is a Norwegian Consulate General in Chicago.

Population

49.1 percent of the city's population is white, 30.5 percent are of African-American descent, 6.2 percent are Asians, and 0.3 percent are from North American indigenous peoples (2018). There has been considerable immigration to the city from many nations, including Norway, over the years. In 1920, more than 97,000 Norwegians of first and second generation Norwegians lived in Chicago. The city was then the third largest "Norwegian city" after Kristiania (Oslo) and Bergen.

Several Chicago neighborhood names testify to great ethnic diversity, such as Greektown, Little Italy, Pilsen, Ukrainian Village and Chinatown. Due to relocation to the suburbs, the population of Chicago itself, with some exceptions, has declined since 1950.

The settlement has traditionally been strongly segregated, with different ethnic groups living in different districts. The most fashionable district is the North Side, especially along the coast of Lake Michigan which is often called the "Gold Coast". Most white people live here. Many Irish-Americans reside in the more industrialized South Side. The West Side has a predominantly African-American population as well as many Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

Economy

The Chicago area has the U.S.'s third-largest economy with about $ 670.5 billion a year (2017 estimate). The city is the nation's second largest financial and business area, including the Chicago Stock Exchange (Stock Exchange) and the Chicago Stock Options Exchange (CBOE) stock exchange. In 2007, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) merged with CME Group, the world leader in derivatives and futures sales. Chicago's economy is considered one of the most balanced in the United States, partly because it is distributed among many players. The region has the nation's third largest concentration of labor with about 4.63 million employees (2018).

Food processing (grain, meat and other agricultural products) is of great importance because of the city's central location as a reception and distribution center, but previously large slaughterhouses have been closed. Nevertheless, meat packaging is still of great importance and Chicago is still of great importance as a transportation and distribution center. The city is the headquarters of several food producers, such as Kraft Heinz, McDonald's, Mondelez International, Quaker Oats and U.S. Foods.

Other companies headquartered in Chicago include aerospace manufacturer Boeing and pharmaceutical and health companies Abbott Laboratories, General Electric 's health products division and Walgreens Boots Alliance (pharmacy). There is a significant production of chemical, pharmaceutical and medical products. The steel industry has been consolidated following a sharp decline in the 1970s and is still among the largest in the United States. There are also other metal and electronic industries as well as large production of machinery and machine tools, car parts, radio and television sets, petroleum products and transport equipment. The printing industry is extensive with many large publishing houses and printing companies.

Chicago is an important conference center. McCormick Place is the world's third largest and North America's largest convention center, and Chicago is the U.S's third largest conference city after Las Vegas and Orlando in terms of annual conference events.

Tourism is of great importance. Chicago was the second most visited city in 2018 (after New York) with about 57.6 million visitors.

Transport and Communications

Chicago is the world's third largest transportation hub and the United States' largest road, rail and air hub. One of the city's three airports, Chicago O'Hare International Airport 25 miles northwest of downtown, is America's second busiest airport. The city is the headquarters of United Airlines, the world's third largest airline.

Chicago is America's premier rail hub. The city has an extensive local transport network of metro (subway) and bus lines. Two of Chicago's subway lines are in operation 24 hours a day. Chicago has many bike paths that are separate from other traffic. Until the 1950s, the city had the world's most extensive tram system, and there were also tram lines between Chicago and other cities.

Chicago, with its two ports, is one of the major inland ports of the Great Lakes, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway (completed in 1959) opened the port for offshore traffic. The 45-mile Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal canal system links the waterways between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin.

Culture

Chicago has a number of universities and colleges. Among the most famous are the University of Chicago (founded 1890), Northwestern University, DePaul University, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, Chicago State University, Columbia College Chicago as well as Walter Payton College Preparatory High School and Northside College Preparatory High School.

At Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, core research is conducted.

Well-known museums are the Field Museum of National History (opened 1921), the John G. Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetary & Astronomy Museum, which have national significance and are close to each other in the Museum Campus (opened 1998). The Museum of Science and Industry is widely visited. Lincoln Park Zoo is located in Lincoln Park. Central art museums include the Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Mexican Art. The Art Institute of Chicago (founded in 1879) is one of America's foremost art museums. Chicago also has a lot of public art by modern figurative artists, including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Anish Kapoor. Chicago Cultural Center opened in 1897.

Lyric Opera of Chicago is based in The Civic Opera House. There are a large number of theaters, including Chicago Theater, Goodman Theater and Broadway in Chicago, and there are several ballet companies (including Joffrey Ballett and Chicago Festival Ballet) and dance companies (including Hubbard Street Dance and Chicago Dance Crash).

During the period around 1890-1925, Chicago experienced a rich cultural expression. The symphony orchestra was established in 1891 and the first opera house after the 1871 fire, the Audiorium Building, opened in 1889. Several well-known poets worked in Chicago during the Chicago Literary Renaissance, such as Edgar Lee Masters, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg. known for the poem "Chicago").

The city's musical heritage includes Chicago blues, Chicago soul, jazz, gospel and classical music. Chicago Chicago Style is a white jazz music that originated under African-American influence in Chicago in the 1920s; this is less improvised than New Orleans jazz. The Chicago style music sound is a mix of rock 'n roll and blues that originated in the mid-1950s. Chicago is the name of an American group that played jazz-inspired rock and was formed as the Chicago Transit Authority in 1968. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (established in 1891) is internationally renowned.

Many annual parades and festivals are organized. The Chicago Thanksgiving Parade in November is televised to the entire United States. The Chicago Blues Festival three days in June is one of the biggest blues festivals in the world. Pride Parade will also be held in June. Taste of Chicago, the world's largest food festival, is being held in Great Park over five days in July and the Chicago Air & Water Show, which is a flight and boat show, in August. The Chicago Jazz Festival is held in August and September.

Description

Chicago has a regular settlement right up, some up to 30 miles long, streets and square blocks. The Chicago River, with two branches from the west and flowing into one race to the east and with an outlet in Lake Michigan, divides the city into a northern, southern and western district.

Downtown is an eastern suburb characterized by Millennium Park, Burnham Park, Grant Park and a "skyline" of skyscrapers. A dense array of these extends along Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue. Downtown is the downtown Chicago shopping center. "The Loop" is a looped metro line around a rectangular area of ​​eight times four quarters. It goes above street level at the height of the second floor of buildings.

The North Side with Lincoln Park is a densely populated and somewhat exclusive residential area. From the Downtown boundary, the area follows the coast to the north along Lake Michigan.

The South Side follows the coast south from the Downtown boundary. The South Side is Chicago's largest neighborhood and was socio-economically disadvantaged, but has had a significant development in recent decades.

The West Side, which is partly characterized by decay, is the term for the area west of Downtown.

In Downtown, the cityscape is characterized by skyscrapers and other high-rise buildings. The world's first skyscraper was the 42-meter-high Home Insurance Building with ten floors. It was designed by William Le Baron Jenney and had steel instead of iron in the building's inner metal frame. The building was built in 1885 and demolished in 1931. The tallest of the current skyscrapers in Chicago is Willis Tower (named Sears Tower until 2009) with 110 floors and a height of 442 meters. Other skyscrapers include Trump International Hotel and Tower (423 meters high), Aon Center (346 meters high) and John Hancock Center (344 meters high). Other districts have lower settlements; among other things, a large area far west of Lake Michigan is called a bungalowbelts. World renowned architects such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have made their mark on Chicago's skyline.

About a third of Chicago's land is occupied by parks. The most significant are Milennium Park, Grant Park, Lincoln Park, Jackson Park and Washington Park.

History

The Chicago area was discovered by Frenchmen Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673 as they followed the nearly Y-shaped races of the Chicago River out to the mouth of Lake Michigan. The indigenous potawatomi had followed the Miami, Sauk and Fox natives and lived in the area when Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, the son of a French merchant and a black woman, settled permanently there in the 1780s. Sable is often called "Chicago's founder".

Following the victory of the Northwest Indian War in 1795, an area that is now part of Chicago was transferred to an approximately ten square mile U.S. military area. In 1803, the army built Fort Dearborn there. The fort was destroyed by British and their allies in 1812, and rebuilt in 1816. That same year, the Ottawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomi tribes left several lands to the United States. In 1825, the Erie Canal, connecting the U.S. Atlantic coast with the Great Lakes, was opened and Chicago grew into the most important western station to the west.

Chicago gained city status in 1837. The city then had 4200 residents and for decades was the world's fastest growing city. The importance that the main transport hub between the eastern and western states increased and both Chicago's first railway (Galeano and Chicago Union Railroad) and Illinois- and Illinois- and Michigan Canal, the connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river system, opened in 1848. A few more rail lines from the east reached the city in 1852. Four years later, Chicago had become the United States' largest rail hub. It was also built were local lanes to suburbs and other nearby areas.

Industry followed the canals and railway lines. The railways brought grain products and cattle, pigs and sheep to slaughterhouses and meat packing centers in a city that was growing rapidly. Chicago's growth was interrupted in 1871 by the big city fire that, among other things, destroyed the business district and 17,450 homes, took about 250 lives and made nearly 100,000 people homeless. But much of the city's infrastructure was preserved and Chicago was rebuilt quickly. It followed the same urban plan as before, but with more modern buildings, such as high-rise buildings of 12-16 floors in masonry and steel built in accordance with fire regulations, and with an increasing number of parks.

In 1880, the city had more than half a million residents, twelve times more than in 1850, and attracted both American and European immigrants. There were bitter labor struggles in the late 19th century. The Haymarket riots in 1886 occurred during striking workers' demonstration for eight hours working day at Haymarket Square.

In 1889, several inner suburbs were annexed, which greatly increased the urban area. Chicago hosted a world show in 1893. In 1897, The Loop, the highway line around downtown, opened. The census of 1890 and 1900 showed that more than three-quarters of the population consisted of foreigners and their children. By 1900, thirty years after the Great Fire, Chicago had become the world's fifth largest city.

The Chicago race riots in the summer of 1919 were escalating fights between gangs and mobs of African Americans and whites in the South Side. The riots took 38 lives (25 African-Americans and 13 whites), 537 people were injured and about a thousand African-American homes were lost.

During the First World War and in the 1920s, the city's industry and population increased greatly. In 1919, the production and sale of alcoholic beverages was banned, which began a gangster era with Al Capone, Tony Accordo, Dion O'Banian and Bugs Moran, between about 1919 and 1933. Al Capone's men shot and killed several members of it rival Bugs Moran's gang during the 1929 Valentine's Day massacre.

The Great Depression, an economic world crisis in the first half of the 1930s, led to the fact that in 1933, the same year as a World Exhibition was held in Chicago, more than half of industrial jobs were gone and unemployment became high. The economic crisis was resolved in part through the Burnham Plan by measures such as the extensive construction of roads and schools and the construction of parks. Following the stock market crash in 1929, the population grew slightly in the decade that followed, to about 3.4 million residents in 1940. In 1942, Enrico Fermi led the world's first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago to build the first U.S. nuclear bomb in 1945. The war industry, in particular, with large steel production, became important for Chicago's continued economic growth.

Since the 1960s, Chicago has been haunted by several typical metropolitan problems. The white middle class has moved out to the suburbs, while many unskilled colored and Spanish speakers have moved in. Between 1950 and 1990, Chicago lost 835,000 residents, most of them white immigrants. This led to a difficult public economy and racial problems. At the same time, the entire Chicago region has been marked by a decline in the traditional heavy industry.

Since the interwar years, the political apparatus, "the Machine," has been dominated by the Democrats, and especially under former Mayor Richard J. Daley (1955-1976), political life was characterized by corruption and abuse of power. In 1956, the last urban expansion occurred when the land area under O'Hare Airport and a small portion of DuPage County was annexed by Chicago.

Between 1973 and 1993, Sears Tower, now Willis Tower, was the tallest building in the world.

In 1979, Jane Byrne became Chicago's first female mayor, and in 1983 Harold Washington became the city's first colored mayor. Richard M. Daley, Richard J. Daly's son, was elected mayor in 1989, a position he held until 2011.

In 1998, Museum Campus, a four-acre park area on Lake Michigan, opened around the three main museums Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, Field Museum of Natural History and John G. Shedd Aquarium.

Lori Lightfoot became Chicago's mayor in 2019. She then became the United States' first African-American female mayor.

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