6. Chicago

From its fur-trading origins and its location by the Great Lakes emerged Chicago, one of the great cities in the centre of America with its unrivalled agricultural hinterland, as described by Donald Miller:

“Here was the inland sea, silver-blue Lake Michigan… that opened Chicago to the lumber lands to the north, to the ports to the East and from them to the world. With its original portage, long since built over, between the Chicago River and the prairie River Des Plaines, that reached the Mississippi via the Illinois, this set the stage for Chicago, or as Louis Sullivan called it ‘offspring of the prairie, the lake and the portage’. ” *

With the great destruction of the Great Fire of 1871, more extraordinary than this destruction was the recovery of the city.

With the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and the first skyscraper, the city emerged driven by idealists, industrialists and architects to generate an urbanising centre with parks and boulevards, fresh water and sewerage orchestrated by the ‘Sanitary & Ship Canal’ that resourced and reorientated the city.

With its railroads and ‘Union Stock Yards’, grain elevators and facilities, the city was not just a distribution centre but also an active manufacturing centre.

And yet, the city has been through cycles, shaped by events in the two World Wars, as the dynamics and neighbourhoods have changed, Downtown and Lakeside, South Side and Hyde Park, the Magnificent Mile and Riverside, developments within the Loop and at Navy Pier.

With the John Hancock Centre and Willis Tower, Lake Shore Drive and it residential towers, the verticality of the city is emphasised by its modern architecture in the centre as the city radiates out westwards along its extenuating highways and links such as the Chicago Skyway.

From the early Burnham Plan to the 21st century, as the economic theory of land values declining with distance plays out, other nodal centres have been developing around the periphery and the outer metropolitanised area beyond O’Hare International Airport (ORD). For example, Aurora and Naperville, and Joliet to the west are growing suburban areas besides other lakeside communities to the north.

From its peak population of around 3.6 million in the 1950’s, the city population now is approx. 2.6 million with its decline due to out-migration seemingly arrested in the most recent years.

The city of Chicago remains the third largest US city for the present, with Houston and the sun-belt cities however close on its heels.

*Donald Miller – City of the Century – Simon & Schuster, 1996.