CHICAGO is in many ways the nation's last great city.
Sarah Bernhardt called it "the pulse of America" and, though long
eclipsed by Los Angeles as the nation's second most populous city
after New York, Chicago really does have it all, with less of the
hassle and infrastructural problems of its coastal rivals.
Founded in the early 1800s, Chicago grew up with the country,
serving as the main connection between the established east coast
cities and the wide open Wild West frontier. This position on the
sharp edge between civilization and wilderness made the city into a
crucible of innovation. Many aspects of modern life, from
skyscrapers to suburbia, had their start, and perhaps their finest
expression, here on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Despite burning to the ground in the legendary fire of 1871,
Chicago boomed thereafter, doubling in population every decade and
reaching two million around 1900, swollen by Irish and
eastern European immigrants (Chicago still has the largest
Polish population in the world outside Warsaw). In the early years
of the twentieth century, it cemented a reputation as a place of
apparently limitless opportunity, with jobs aplenty for those
willing to work. : from 1900 to 1920 African Americans poured in,
with more than 75,000 arriving during the war years of 1916-18
alone. Long hours, poor pay and squalid working conditions were the
catalysts that made Chicago the cradle of American trade
unions . By around 1900 most workers were organized under the
American Federation of Labor, and the 1894 Pullman strike saw
workers unite for almost the first time in the US. As hostilities
intensified, the city's workers became the driving force behind the
left-wing "Wobblies." Chicago has also long been an important
center for black organization both the Reverend Jesse Jackson's
Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and the more
militant Nation of Islam , founded by Elijah Mohammed in the
1940s, have their national headquarters on the city's South
Side.
During the Roaring Twenties, Chicago's self-image as a
no-holds-barred free market was pushed to the limit by a new breed
of entrepreneur. Criminal syndicates, ruthlessly and brazenly run
by the likes of gangsters like Al Capone and Bugsy Moran,
took advantage of Prohibition to sell bootleg alcohol. Shootouts in
the street between sharp-suited, Tommy-gun-wielding mobsters were
not as common as legend would have it, but the backroom dealing and
iron-handed control they pioneered was later perfected by
politicians such as former mayor Richard Daley father of the
present mayor who ran Chicago single-handedly from the 1950s until
his death in 1976. His brutal handling of antiwar demonstrators at
the 1968 Democratic convention remains notorious. These
days, the tourist authorities play down the mobster era; few traces
of the hoodlum years exist, and those that do owe more to Hollywood
than contemporary Chicago.
Today, Chicago's towering skyline the city has one of the
world's best collections of modern architecture , from Frank
Lloyd Wright houses to the 110-story Sears Tower dominates
the pancake-flat prairies for hundreds of miles around. Chicago's
status as the cultural and financial heart of middle America is
beyond question. The Loop downtown holds the head offices of
many major US companies and some of the nation's most important
commodity markets , which together handle the buying and
selling of one-third of the world's agricultural and industrial
products.
For visitors, Chicago offers the Art Institute of Chicago
and a wide range of excellent museums (many of which have
one day of free admission per week), restaurants, sports and
highbrow cultural activities. However, its strongest suit is
live music , with a phenomenal array of jazz and
blues clubs packed into the back rooms of its amiable bars
and cafs. The rock scene is also one of the healthiest in
the country with a prolific number of bands having come out of the
city in the 1990s, including Smashing Pumpkins, Material Issue,
Veruca Salt and Wilco. And almost everything is noticeably less
expensive than in other US cities eating out , for example,
costs much less than in New York or LA, but is every bit as good.
Though locals might deny it, the city has a surprisingly low-key
and generally welcoming population Chicagoans on the whole are
proud of their city and usually keen to point out its best
features. Two great ways to get a real feel for the city are to
head out to ivy-covered Wrigley Field on a sunny summer
afternoon to catch baseball's Cubs in action, or take a cruise boat
under the bridges of the Chicago River at sunset.