Chicago

Chicago is the second largest city in the USA. Located on the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, Chicago became the main transshipment centre for the grain and livestock of the Midwest in the 19th century. In the 20th century it remained the leading transportation, commercial, and industrial centre of the north-central United States.

Since the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s Chicago has had the reputation of a “criminal city” associated with gangsterism, corruption, the names of Al Capone, John Dillinger, and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in the early 20th century.

Chicago arose from the ashes of its Great Fire in 1871 to develop the skyscraper as well as many of the other major innovations of modern architecture.

In the decades immediately following World War II, landmarks of Chicago's past were often sacrificed to to the needs of developing business.There were exceptions--notably, the Auditorium Building and the Newberry Library--but these were preserved through limited, private initiative. More recently, public awareness and effective legislation have fostered increased conservation efforts. This factor and the desire for more land on which to build new structures have aided in the southward and westward expansion of Chicago's downtown into formerly neglected areas, so that the city's striking skyline, containing some of the world's tallest buildings, rises along a continually widening strip.

Behind this impressive facade lies a sprawling industrial city, its monotony accentuated by the flat Midwestern landscape and by a dull pattern of streets broken only by the radial avenues that cover old Indian trails to the northwest and southwest and the great freeways and railroad lines that for many years have made the city a major hub of commerce. The whole mass reaches out over the former prairie, spilling over city limits into an irregular and continuously expanding belt of suburbs and industrial satellites.

The magnificent downtown lakeside strip nevertheless remains the focus of attention in the mind of resident, commuter, and visitor alike. A person strolling north on Michigan Avenue (in the downtown area) passes the green acres of Grant Park, with the neoclassical building of the Art Institute of Chicago and the well-hidden tracks of the former Illinois Central Gulf Railroad (now Metropolitan Rail); the Cultural Center of Chicago, with arched rooms and hallways decorated with fine mosaic work of a past era; and one of the world's greatest skyscraper complexes.

From the bridge that spans the Chicago River the stroller is confronted with what many people regard as one of the most beautiful and open urban spaces in the world, stretching along both sides of what once was the river's estuary. North of the river along Michigan Avenue is "the Magnificent Mile"--Chicago's answer to New York City's Fifth Avenue in commercial elegance--which includes the Old Water Tower, whose medieval-style stone turrets survived the conflagration of 1871.

Outside these areas of downtown Chicago, the stroller finds a complex city, a kaleidoscope of neighbourhoods mirroring the ethnic and racial diversity of U.S. life. Chicago remains essentially the "blue-collar" city characterized by the poet Carl Sandburg as the "city of big shoulders," heavily populated by the descendants of labourers from the streets and soils of 19th-century Europe and of former slaves from the Deep South. The latest influx--that of Spanish-speaking residents and of immigrants from Southeast Asia and eastern Europe--has added further to the complexity.

Chicago has the reputation as a major theatre centre, and its contemporary styles of architecture are imaginative and sometimes controversial. The willingness to try something new--illustrated by a huge abstract Picasso sculpture, a gift to the city from the artist himself--continues to entertain Chicagoans and the city's millions of tourists.