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ORIGINAL CHICAGO BLACKHAWK AUTOGRAPHS CANDID PHOTOS VINTAGE ALBUM HOCKEY:
$1243.55
Album of Chicago Blackhawks Snapshots with Autographs. 1970s. Album of over 60 color snapshots (3 ½ x 3 ½”) with 41 trimmed autographs mounted beside the images. Signatures include Tony Esposito, Dennis Hull, Bobby Hull, Doug Mohns, Gerry Desjardins, Chris Bordeleau, Bryan Campbell, Pat Stapleton, Dan Maloney, Chico Maki, Michel Dumas, Stan Mikita, Pit Martin, Doug Jarrett, Keith Magnuson, Phil Russell, Darcy Rota, Lou Varga (trainer), and others. Neatly mounted in a cloth Blackhawks History1926 – Present / National Hockey League
Team History1926 – Present / Chicago Blackhawks
NicknameBlackhawks – World War I veteran and coffee tycoon Frederic McLaughlin was Chicago’s owner when it entered the NHL in 1926. McLaughlin named the team after the 86th Infantry Division in which he served. The “Black Hawk Division,” was named after Chief Black Hawk of the Sauk American Indian tribe, who fought the Illinois militia in 1832. The nickname was officially changed from Black Hawks to Blackhawks in 1986.
ChampionshipStanley Cup 62015, 2013, 2010, 1961, 1938, 1934
Arena1995 – Present / United Center1926 – 1994 / Chicago Coliseum
Owner2007 – Present / William R. “Rocky” Wirtz1966 – 2007 / Bill Wirtz1952 – 1966 / James D. Norris and Arthur Wirtz1946 – 1952 / James E. Norris and Bill Tobin1944 – 1946 / Estate of Frederic McLaughlin1926 – 1944 / Frederic McLaughlin
BlackhawksProfessional ice hockey came to Chicago in 1926 when Major Frederick McLaughlin, a local coffee millionaire, purchased the Western Canadian Hockey League's Portland (Oregon) Rosebuds and moved the team to Chicago, renaming them the Blackhawks after his former army division. The Blackhawks played at Chicago Coliseum, 16th and Wabash, before moving into Chicago Stadium in 1929.
The Blackhawks won Stanley Cups in 1934 and 1938. Because McLaughlin was obsessed with the idea of an all-American team, many of the Blackhawks' players during the 1930s were Americans from Minnesota, which outraged some Canadians. Bill Stewart, who coached the team to the 1938 Stanley Cup, was the first American-born manager to accomplish the feat.
Despite the presence of many talented players, the 1940s and 1950s were dismal years for the Blackhawks, who finished in last place nearly every season and made the playoffs only once. As part of a rebuilding effort, team ownership brought General Manager Tommy Ivan to Chicago from the Detroit Red Wings in the 1950s. Ivan developed a productive system of farm teams that supplied the Blackhawks with fresh, new talent.
The Blackhawks developed into a formidable force during the 1960s, winning the Stanley Cup in 1961, finishing first in 1967, and reaching the Stanley Cup finals in 1961–62 and 1964–65. Forwards Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, as well as goaltender Glenn Hall, were among the NHL's best players.
Led by longtime coach Billy Reay, the Blackhawks enjoyed first-place finishes in 1969–70 and 1970–71 and made it to the Stanley Cup finals in 1970–71 and 1972–73. After a gradual rebuilding process during the 1980s, the team enjoyed a resurgence during the 1990s, reaching the Stanley Cup finals in 1991–92 and finishing first in the NHL in 1992–93. It also was during the 1990s that the Blackhawks moved into the United Center.
The Chicago Blackhawks (spelled Black Hawks until 1986, and known colloquially as the Hawks) are a professional ice hockey team based in Chicago, Illinois. They are members of the Central Division of the Western Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). They have won six Stanley Cup championships since their founding in 1926. The Blackhawks are one of the "Original Six" NHL teams along with the Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins and New York Rangers. Since 1994, the club's home rink is the United Center, which they share with the National Basketball Association's Chicago Bulls. The club had previously played for 65 years at Chicago Stadium.[3]
The club's original owner was Frederic McLaughlin, who owned the club until his death in 1944. Under McLaughlin, a "hands-on" owner who fired many coaches during his ownership, the club won two Stanley Cup titles. The club was then owned by the Norris family, who as owners of the Chicago Stadium were the club's landlord, and owned stakes in several of the NHL teams. At first, the Norris ownership was as part of a syndicate fronted by long-time executive Bill Tobin, and the team languished in favor of the Norris-owned Detroit Red Wings. After the senior James E. Norris died in 1952, the Norris assets were spread among family members and James D. Norris became owner. Norris Jr. took an active interest in the team and under his ownership, the club won one Stanley Cup title in 1961.
After James D. Norris died in 1966, the Wirtz family became owners of the franchise. In 2007, the club came under the control of Rocky Wirtz, who is credited with turning around the organization, which had lost fan interest and competitiveness. Under Rocky Wirtz, the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup three times between 2010 and 2015.Contents1 Franchise history1.1 Founding1.2 The McLaughlin era (1926–1944)1.3 The Norris era (1944–1966)1.4 The Arthur Wirtz era (1966–1983)1.5 The Bill Wirtz era (1983–2007)1.6 The Rocky Wirtz era (2007–present)2 Team information2.1 Jerseys2.2 Logo2.3 Mascot2.4 Fight and goal songs2.5 National anthem2.6 Practice facility2.7 Circus trip3 Media and announcers4 Season-by-season record5 Players5.1 Current roster5.2 Retired numbers5.3 Hall of Famers5.4 Team captains5.5 Franchise scoring leaders6 See also7 References7.1 Further reading8 External linksFranchise historyFoundingOn May 1, 1926, the NHL awarded an expansion franchise for Chicago to a syndicate headed by former football star Huntington Hardwick of Boston. At the same meeting, Hardwick arranged the purchase of the players of the Portland Rosebuds of the Western Hockey League for $100,000 from WHL president Frank Patrick in a deal brokered by Boston Bruins' owner Charles Adams.[4] However, only one month later, Hardwick's group sold out to Chicago coffee tycoon Frederic McLaughlin.[5]
McLaughlin had been a commander with the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion of the 86th Infantry Division during World War I.[6] This division was nicknamed the "Blackhawk Division" after a Native American of the Sauk nation, Black Hawk, who was a prominent figure in the history of Illinois.[6] McLaughlin named the new hockey team in honor of the military unit, making it one of many sports team names using Native Americans as icons. However, unlike the military division, the team's name was spelled in two words as the "Black Hawks" until 1986, when the club officially became the "Blackhawks," based on the spelling found in the original franchise documents.[7]
The Black Hawks began play in the 1926–27 season, along with fellow expansion franchises the Detroit Cougars (now the Detroit Red Wings) and New York Rangers. The team had to face immediate competition in Chicago from Eddie Livingstone's rival Chicago Cardinals, which played in the same building. McLaughlin took a very active role in running the team despite having no background in the sport; he hired Bill Tobin, a former goaltender who had played in the Western League, as his assistant, but directed the team himself. He was also very interested in promoting American hockey players, then very rare in professional hockey. Several of them, including Doc Romnes, Taffy Abel, Alex Levinsky, Mike Karakas, and Cully Dahlstrom, become staples with the club, and under McLaughlin, the Black Hawks were the first NHL team with an all-American-born lineup.[6]
The McLaughlin era (1926–1944)
The club played their first game on November 17, 1926 at the Chicago Coliseum.The Black Hawks played their first game on November 17, 1926, against the Toronto St. Patricks in the Chicago Coliseum. The Black Hawks won their first game 4–1, in front of a crowd of over 7,000.[5] The Hawks' first season was a moderate success; they finished the season in third place with a record of 19–22–3. However, they lost the 1927 first-round playoff series to the Boston Bruins.
Following the series, McLaughlin fired head coach Pete Muldoon. According to Jim Coleman, sportswriter for the Toronto-based The Globe and Mail, McLaughlin felt the Hawks were good enough to finish first. Muldoon disagreed, and in a fit of pique, McLaughlin fired him. According to Coleman, Muldoon responded by yelling, "Fire me, Major, and you'll never finish first. I'll put a curse on this team that will hoodoo it until the end of time." The Curse of Muldoon was born – although Coleman admitted years after the fact that he had fabricated the whole incident[8] – and became one of the first widely-known sports "curses." While the team would go on to win three Stanley Cups in its first 39 years of existence, it did so without ever having finished in first place, either in a single- or multi-division format. The Black Hawks proceeded to have the worst record in the league in 1927–28, winning only seven of 44 games.Interior of Chicago Stadium in February 1930, prior to a game with the Hawks and the Montreal Canadiens. The team moved into the arena in the 1929–30 season.For the 1928–29 season, the Black Hawks were originally slated to play in the new Chicago Stadium, but due to construction delays and a dispute between McLaughlin and Chicago Stadium promoter Paddy Harmon, they instead divided their time between the Coliseum, the Detroit Olympia, and the Peace Bridge Arena in Fort Erie, Ontario. They moved to Chicago Stadium the following season.
By 1931, with goal-scorer Johnny Gottselig, Cy Wentworth on defense, and Charlie Gardiner in goal, the Hawks reached their first Stanley Cup Final, but fizzled in the final two games against the Montreal Canadiens. Chicago had another stellar season in 1932, but that did not translate into playoff success. However, two years later, Gardiner led his team to victory by shutting out the Detroit Red Wings in the final game of the Stanley Cup Finals; Mush March scored the winning goal in double-overtime as the Hawks beat Detroit 1-0.
In 1938, the Black Hawks had a record of 14–25–9, almost missing the playoffs. They stunned the Canadiens and New York Americans on overtime goals in the deciding games of both semi-final series, advancing to the 1938 Stanley Cup Finals against the Toronto Maple Leafs. Black Hawks goaltender Mike Karakas was injured and could not play, forcing a desperate Chicago team to pull minor-leaguer Alfie Moore out of a Toronto bar and onto the ice. Moore played one game and won it. Toronto refused to let Moore play the next, so Chicago used Paul Goodman in Game 2 and lost. However, for the third and fourth games, Karakas was fitted with a special skate to protect his injured toe, and the team won both games. It was too late for Toronto, as the Hawks won their second championship. As of 2014, the 1938 Black Hawks possess the poorest regular-season record of any Stanley Cup champion.
The Black Hawks next returned to the Finals in 1944 behind Doug Bentley's 38 goals, with Bentley's linemate Clint Smith leading the team in assists. After upsetting the Red Wings in the semi-finals, they were promptly dispatched by the dominant Canadiens in four games.
The Norris era (1944–1966)Owner and founder Frederic McLaughlin died in December 1944. His estate sold the team to a syndicate headed by long-time team president Bill Tobin. However, Tobin was only a puppet for James E. Norris, who owned the rival Detroit Red Wings. Norris had also been the Black Hawks' landlord since his 1936 purchase of Chicago Stadium. For the next eight years, the Norris-Tobin ownership, as a rule, paid almost no attention to the Black Hawks. Nearly every trade made between Detroit and Chicago ended up being Red Wing heists. As a result, for the next several years, Chicago was the model of futility in the NHL. Between 1945 and 1958, they only made the playoffs twice.
Upon Norris' death, his eldest son, James D. Norris, and Red Wings minority owner Arthur Wirtz (the senior Norris' original partner in buying the Red Wings 23 years earlier) took over the floundering club. They guided it through financial reverses, and rebuilt the team from there. One of their first moves was to hire former Detroit coach and general manager Tommy Ivan as general manager.Signed as prospects in the late-1950s, Bobby Hull (left), Stan Mikita (center), and Pierre Pilote (right), eventually rose to become preeminent stars in Chicago.In the late 1950s, the Hawks struck gold, acquiring three young prospects (forwards Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita and defenseman Pierre Pilote), as well as obtaining both star goaltender Glenn Hall and veteran forward Ted Lindsay (who had just had a career season with 30 goals and 55 assists) from Detroit. Hull, Mikita, Pilote and Hall became preeminent stars in Chicago, and all four would eventually be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
After two first-round exits at the hands of the eventual champions from Montreal in 1959 and 1960, it was expected the Canadiens would once again defeat the Hawks when they met in the semi-finals in 1961. A defensive plan that completely wore down Montreal's superstars worked, however, as Chicago won the series in six games. They then bested the Wings to win their third Stanley Cup championship.Ron Murphy and Eric Nesterenko battle in front of the Toronto net.The Hawks made the Cup Finals twice more in the 1960s, losing to the Leafs in 1962 and the Canadiens in 1965. They remained a force to be reckoned with throughout the decade, with Hull enjoying four 50-goal seasons, Mikita winning back-to-back scoring titles and MVP accolades, Pilote winning three consecutive Norris Trophies, and Hall being named the First or Second All-Star goaltender eight out of nine seasons. Hull and Mikita especially were widely regarded as the most feared one-two punch in the league. However, despite a strong supporting cast which included Bill Hay, Ken Wharram, Phil Esposito, Moose Vasko, Doug Mohns and Pat Stapleton, the Hawks never quite put it all together.
In 1966–67, the last season of the six-team NHL, the Black Hawks finished first, breaking the supposed "Curse of Muldoon", 23 years after the death of Frederic McLaughlin. However, they lost in the semi-finals to Toronto, who went on to win their last Stanley Cup to date. Afterward, Coleman, who first printed the story of the curse in 1943, admitted that he made the story up to break a writer's block he had as a column deadline approached.
The Arthur Wirtz era (1966–1983)James D. Norris died in 1966. One of his last moves in the NHL was to arrange an expansion franchise in St. Louis, where he owned the St. Louis Arena. Tobin died in 1963, a club vice-president until his death. Ownership now passed to Norris' longtime partner, Arthur Wirtz, and his son Bill Wirtz. The Wirtz–Norris partnership dated over three decades; Arthur Wirtz had been a minority partner in the syndicate the senior Norris put together to buy the Red Wings in 1932.
Goaltender Glenn Hall was drafted by the expansion St. Louis Blues for the 1967–68 season, while Pierre Pilote was traded to the Maple Leafs in exchange for Jim Pappin in 1968. In the 1968–69 season, despite Bobby Hull breaking his own previous record of 54 goals in a season with 58, the Black Hawks missed the playoffs for the first time since 1958, and the last time before 1997–98.
In 1967, the Black Hawks made a trade with the Boston Bruins that turned out to be one of the most one-sided in the history of the sport. Chicago sent young forwards Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge and Fred Stanfield to Boston in exchange for Pit Martin, Jack Norris and Gilles Marotte. While Martin would star for the Hawks for many seasons, Esposito, Hodge and Stanfield would lead the Bruins to the top of the NHL for several years and capture two Stanley Cups. In Boston, Esposito set numerous scoring records en route to a career as one of the NHL's all-time greats.Goaltender Tony Esposito tallied a franchise-high 418 wins between 1969 and 1983.Nonetheless, in the 1970–71 season, life was made easier for Chicago, as in an attempt to better balance the divisions, the expansion Buffalo Sabres and Vancouver Canucks were both placed in the East Division while the Hawks moved into the West Division. They became the class of the West overnight, rampaging to a 46–17–15 record and an easy first-place finish. With second-year goalie Tony Esposito (Phil's younger brother and winner of the Calder Memorial Trophy for Rookie of the Year the previous season), Hull, his younger brother Dennis, Mikita and sterling defensemen Stapleton, Keith Magnuson and Bill White, the Hawks reached the Stanley Cup Final, losing to the Canadiens.
A critical blow to the franchise came in 1972–73, though, with the start of the World Hockey Association (WHA). Long dissatisfied with how little he was paid as the NHL's marquee star, Bobby Hull jumped to the upstart Winnipeg Jets for a million-dollar contract. Former Philadelphia Flyers star Andre Lacroix, who received very little ice time in his single season in Chicago, joined Hull, and the pair became two of the WHA's great stars. However, the Hawks repeated their appearance in the Stanley Cup Final that year, again losing to Montreal. Stapleton also left for the WHA after that year, depleting the team further.
While the team led or was second in the West Division for four straight seasons, for the rest of the 1970s, the Black Hawks made the playoffs each year—winning seven division championships in the decade in all—but were never a successful Stanley Cup contender, losing 16-straight playoff games at one point. The team acquired legendary blueliner Bobby Orr from the Boston Bruins in 1976, but ill health forced him to sit out for most of the season, and he eventually retired in 1979, having played only 26 games for the Hawks. Stan Mikita did the same the following year after playing 22 years in Chicago, the third-longest career for a single team in league history.
By 1982, the Black Hawks squeaked into the playoffs as the fourth seed in the Norris Division (at the time the top four teams in each division automatically made the playoffs), and were one of the NHL's Cinderella teams that year. Led by second-year Denis Savard's 32 goals and 119 points and Doug Wilson's 39 goals, the Hawks stunned the Minnesota North Stars and St. Louis Blues in the playoffs before losing to another surprise team, the Vancouver Canucks, who made the Stanley Cup Finals. Chicago proved they were no fluke the next season, also making the third round before losing to the eventual runner-up Edmonton Oilers. After an off-year in 1984, the Hawks again faced a now fresh-off-a-ring Edmonton offensive juggernaut of a team and lost in the third round in 1985.
The Bill Wirtz era (1983–2007)In 1983, Arthur Wirtz died and the club came under the sole control of Bill Wirtz. Although the Black Hawks continued to make the playoffs each season, the club began a slow decline, punctuated with an appearance in the 1992 Stanley Cup Finals.
During the 1985 playoff series against Edmonton, the Black Hawks and their fans started a tradition of cheering during the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner".[9]
Moreover, prior to the 1986–87 season, while going through the team's records, someone discovered the team's original NHL contract and found that the name "Blackhawks" was printed as a compound word as opposed to two separate words, "Black Hawks", which was the way most sources had been printing it for 60 years and as the team had always officially listed it. The name officially became "Chicago Blackhawks" from that point on.
In the late 1980s, Chicago still made the playoffs on an annual basis but made early-round exits each time.
In 1988–89, after three-straight first-round defeats, and despite a fourth-place finish in their division in the regular season, Chicago made it to the Conference Final in the rookie seasons of both goalie Ed Belfour and center Jeremy Roenick. However, once again they would fail to make the Stanley Cup Final, losing to the eventual champions Calgary Flames.
The following season, the Hawks did prove they were late-round playoff material, running away with the Norris Division title, but, yet again, the third round continued to stymie them, this time against the eventual champion Oilers, despite 1970s Soviet star goaltender Vladislav Tretiak coming to Chicago to become the Blackhawks' goaltender coach.
In 1990–91, Chicago was poised to fare even better in the playoffs, winning the Presidents' Trophy for best regular-season record, but the Minnesota North Stars stunned them in six games in the first round en route to an improbable Stanley Cup Final appearance.
In 1991–92 the Blackhawks – with Roenick scoring 53 goals, Steve Larmer scoring 29 goals, Chris Chelios (acquired from Montreal two years previously) on defense, and Belfour in goal – finally reached the Final after 19 years out of such status. The Blackhawks won 11 consecutive playoff games that year, which set an NHL record. However, they were swept four games to none by the Mario Lemieux-led defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins (who, in sweeping the Blackhawks, tied the record Chicago had set only days before). Although the 4–0 sweep indicates Pittsburgh's dominance in won games, it was actually a close series that could have gone either way. Game 1 saw the Blackhawks squander leads of 3–0 and 4–1, and would eventually be beaten 5–4 after a Lemieux power-play goal with 9 seconds remaining in regulation. The Blackhawks most lackluster game was game two, losing 3–1. A frustrating loss of 1–0 followed in game three, and a natural hat trick from Dirk Graham and stellar play from Dominik Hasek (who showed indications of the goaltender he would later become) could not secure a win in game four, which ended in 6–5 final in favor of Pittsburgh. The defending NBA champion Chicago Bulls were in their finals in 1992, but won their championship in six. Although this was the only year the city of Chicago would host a concurrent NBA/NHL finals in the same year, Blackhawks head coach Mike Keenan would see this again in New York when he coached the Rangers to their first Stanley Cup in 54 years in 1994.
Belfour posted a 40-win season in 1992–93 as the Hawks looked to go deep yet again, and Chelios accumulated career-high penalty time with 282 minutes in the box, but St. Louis stunned Chicago with a first-round sweep to continue Chicago's playoff losing streak.The Blackhawks moved to the United Center (pictured in 2006) during the 1994–95 season.Although they finished near .500 in 1994, the Blackhawks again qualified for the playoffs. They were eliminated by eventual Western Conference finalist Toronto, but broke their playoff losing streak at 10 games with a game three win. It wasn't enough, however, and the Blackhawks fell in six games. The 1993–94 season also marked the Blackhawks' last at the old Chicago Stadium, and the team moved into the new United Center in the lockout-shortened 1995 season. Bernie Nicholls and Joe Murphy both scored 20 goals over 48 games, and Chicago once again made it to the Western Conference Final, losing to the rival Detroit Red Wings. Also in 1994, management fired Wayne Messmer, popular singer of "The Star-Spangled Banner".
Roenick, Belfour and Chelios were all traded away as the Blackhawks faltered through the late 1990s until they missed the playoffs by five points in 1998 for the first time in 29 years, one season short of tying the Boston Bruins' record for the longest such streak in North American professional sports history. Chicago would also miss the playoffs for a second consecutive season in 1999, and would later miss the playoffs in 2000 and 2001.
The millennium started with disappointment for the Blackhawks. Éric Daze, Alexei Zhamnov and Tony Amonte emerged as some of the team's leading stars by this time. However, aside from a quick first-round exit in 2002 (where they lost to the St. Louis Blues in five games after winning Game 1 of the series), the 'Hawks were consistently out of the playoffs from the 1997–98 season until the 2008–09 season, in most years finishing well out of contention, despite finishing in third place in the Central Division six times. Amonte left for the Phoenix Coyotes in the summer of 2002.
During the 2002–03 season, the Blackhawks finished third in the Central Division with 79 points, but would finish ninth in the Western Conference, which would make them miss the playoffs by 13 points.
A somber note was struck in February 2004 when ESPN named the Blackhawks the worst franchise in professional sports.[10] Indeed, the Blackhawks were viewed with much indifference by Chicagoans for much of the 1990s and early 2000s due to anger over several policies instituted by then-owner Bill Wirtz, who was derisively known as "Dollar Bill". For example, Wirtz did not allow home games to be televised in the Chicago area, claiming it was unfair to the team's season ticket holders. He also raised ticket prices to an average of $50, among the most expensive in the NHL. The Chicago Wolves, an American Hockey League (AHL) team based in Rosemont, Illinois, mocked the Blackhawks' struggle by creating a marketing slogan, "We Play Hockey The Old-Fashioned Way: We Actually Win."[11]
Following the lockout of the 2004–05 season, new general manager Dale Tallon set about restructuring the team in the hopes of making a playoff run. Tallon made several moves in the summer of 2005, most notably the signing of Tampa Bay Lightning Stanley Cup-winning goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin and All-Star defenseman Adrian Aucoin. However, injuries plagued Khabibulin and Aucoin, among others, and the Blackhawks again finished well out of the playoffs with a 26–43–13 record – next-to-last in the Western Conference and the second-worst in the NHL.
The Blackhawks reached another low point on May 16, 2006, when they announced that popular TV/radio play-by-play announcer Pat Foley was not going to be brought back after 25 years with the team, a move unpopular amongst most Blackhawks fans. Foley then became the television/radio voice of the Chicago Wolves.
With the third overall pick in the 2006 NHL Entry Draft, the team selected Jonathan Toews, who led the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux hockey team to the 2006 NCAA Frozen Four.
The Blackhawks were eager to make a splash in the free-agent market and offered big money to many of the top free agents. However, they were denied, only being able to acquire two backup goaltenders in Patrick Lalime and Sebastien Caron. Chicago was one of the biggest buyers in the trade market, acquiring a future franchise player in left-winger Martin Havlat, as well as center Bryan Smolinski from the Ottawa Senators in a three-way trade that also involved the San Jose Sharks. The 'Hawks dealt forward Mark Bell to the Sharks, Michal Barinka and a 2008 second-round draft pick to the Senators, while Ottawa also received defenseman Tom Preissing and center Josh Hennessy from San Jose. Havlat gave the Blackhawks the talented, first-line caliber game breaker they so desperately needed. The Havlat trade was soon followed by another major trade – winger and key Blackhawk player Kyle Calder was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for grinding defensive center Michal Handzus. The move caused a stir in Chicago; Calder had won an increase in his contract through arbitration, which was accepted by the Hawks, but rather than ink their leading scorer, the Blackhawks decided to address their need for a proven center by acquiring Handzus. Injuries to both Havlat and Handzus hurt the Blackhawks, and Smolinski was eventually traded at the trade deadline to the Vancouver Canucks. On November 26, 2006, Blackhawks general manager Dale Tallon fired head coach Trent Yawney and appointed assistant coach Denis Savard as the head coach. Savard had been the assistant coach of the Blackhawks since 1997, the year after he retired as one of the most popular and successful Blackhawks players of all time. The Blackhawks continued to struggle, and finished last in the Central Division, 12 points out of the playoffs.
They finished with the fourth worst record in the NHL, and in the Draft Lottery, won the opportunity to select first overall in the draft, whereas the team had never had a draft pick higher than third overall. They used the pick to draft right wing Patrick Kane from the London Knights of the Ontario Hockey League (OHL).
The Rocky Wirtz era (2007–present)2007–2009: RebuildingOn September 26, 2007, Bill Wirtz, the longtime owner of the Blackhawks, died after a brief battle with cancer.[12] He was succeeded by his son, Rocky, who drastically altered his father's long-standing policies.[13]
Midway into the 2007–08 NHL season, the franchise experimented with a partnership with Comcast SportsNet Chicago and WGN-TV by airing selected Blackhawks home games on television.[14] During the next season, Comcast and WGN began airing all of the team's regular season games.[14] Rocky also named John McDonough, formerly the president of Major League Baseball's Chicago Cubs, as the franchise's new president.[15] Since taking over the position, McDonough has been an instrumental figure in the Blackhawks current marketing success.[16] Wirtz was also able to bring back former Blackhawks greats Tony Esposito, Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull as the franchise's "hockey ambassadors".[17]Jonathan Toews during the 2008–09 season. Named captain before the season started, he became the youngest player to captain the Hawks at age 20.In addition to the changes in the team's policies and front office, the younger Wirtz also made a concerted effort to rebuild the team.[18] The Blackhawks roster was bolstered by the addition of Patrick Kane, the first overall selection in the 2007 NHL Entry Draft, who led all rookies in points.[19] Kane and Jonathan Toews were finalists for the Calder Memorial Trophy, awarded to the NHL's best rookie. Kane ultimately beat his teammate for the award.[20] Kane finished the 2007–08 season with 21 goals and 51 assists in 82 games. The Blackhawks finished with a record of 40–34–8, missing the playoffs by three points. The 2007–08 season marked the first time in six years that the team finished above .500.[21]
Prior to the 2008–09 season opener, the Blackhawks named Toews, at 20 years and 79 days, as the new captain, succeeding the traded Lapointe and making him the third-youngest captain at the time of appointment. In addition to a new captain, the Blackhawks made several major roster changes before the 2008–09 NHL season. The team traded Tuomo Ruutu, their longest tenured player, to the Carolina Hurricanes in exchange for forward Andrew Ladd on February 26, 2008.[22] Later that day, the Blackhawks traded captain Martin Lapointe to the Ottawa Senators in exchange for a sixth-round draft pick in the 2008 NHL Entry Draft.[22] On the first day of free agency, July 1, the team signed goaltender Cristobal Huet to a four-year, US$22.5 million contract, and later signed defenseman Brian Campbell to an eight-year, $56.8 million contract.[23] The team also added former coaches Joel Quenneville and Scotty Bowman to their organization.[24][25][26]The Blackhawks hosted the Detroit Red Wings at the 2009 NHL Winter Classic at Wrigley Field.On February 13, 2008, the Blackhawks announced they would hold their first fan convention. On July 16, 2008, the team announced that they would host the 2009 NHL Winter Classic on a temporary ice rink at Wrigley Field on New Year's Day against fellow "Original Six" members the Detroit Red Wings.[27] The Red Wings defeated Chicago 6–4. On June 16, Pat Foley returned as the Blackhawks' TV play-by-play man, replacing Dan Kelly. Foley called Blackhawk games from 1981 to 2006 and spent the next two years broadcasting for the Chicago Wolves. Foley was partnered with Eddie Olczyk to broadcast all of the Blackhawks' games.[28][29] On October 16, 2008, the Blackhawks relieved Denis Savard of his head coaching duties and replaced him with Joel Quenneville.[30] Savard has since been brought back to the organization as an ambassador.
The Blackhawks finished the 2008–09 regular season in second place in their division with a record of 46–24–12, putting them in fourth place in the Western Conference with 104 points. The Blackhawks clinched a playoff berth for the first time since the 2001–02 season with a 3–1 win over Nashville on April 3. On April 8, with a shootout loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Blackhawks clinched their first 100-point season in 17 years. The Blackhawks defeated the fifth-seeded Calgary Flames in six games to advance to the Western Conference Semifinals for the first time since 1996.[31] The team proceeded to defeat the third-seeded Vancouver Canucks in six games.[32] The Blackhawks played the then-Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings for the Western Conference Championship, losing the series in five games.[33]
During the 2008–09 season, the team led the NHL in home attendance with a total of 912,155 spectators, averaging 22,247 per game.[34] This figure includes the 40,818 fans from the Winter Classic at Wrigley Field. Therefore, the total attendance for games hosted at the United Center is 871,337, good for an average of 21,783 which still led the NHL over Montreal's 21,273 average. The Blackhawks welcomed their one millionth fan of the season at the United Center before Game 6 of the Western Conference Semifinals on May 11, 2009.[35]
2009–10: The Stanley Cup returns to Chicago
Chicago skyline with the CNA Center showing the Blackhawks logo, the Smurfit-Stone Building saying "Go Hawks" and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower saying "Hawks win" the night after the 2009–10 Chicago Blackhawks won the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, viewed from the Petrillo Music Shell lawn in Grant ParkPrior to the 2009–10 NHL season, the Blackhawks made another major free agent purchase, signing Marian Hossa to a 12-year, US$62.8 million contract.[36] The team also acquired Tomas Kopecky, John Madden and Richard Petiot.[36][37] In early July, general manager Dale Tallon and the Blackhawks management came under fire when the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA) claimed the team did not submit offers to their restricted free agents before the deadline.[38] In the worst-case scenario, the team's unsigned restricted free agents at the time, including Calder Memorial Trophy finalist Kris Versteeg, would have become unrestricted free agents.[38] Despite the ordeal, the Blackhawks were able to sign Versteeg and all of their restricted free agents before the NHLPA could take further action.[38] On July 14, 2009, the Blackhawks demoted Tallon to the position of senior adviser. Stan Bowman, son of Scotty Bowman, was promoted to general manager.[39] The Blackhawks continued to sell-out games, with the best average attendance of 21,356 over Montreal's 21,273 in the NHL, and had a total of 854,267, excluding the playoffs. The Blackhawks reached the one million mark in Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals against the San Jose Sharks.Patrick Kane hoisting the Stanley Cup and Jonathan Toews holding the Conn Smythe Trophy during the Blackhawks victory parade.
U.S. President Barack Obama with members of the Blackhawks after a ceremony to honor their 2010 Stanley Cup victory at the White House.The Blackhawks re-signed Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews to contract extensions worth $31.5 million over five years, and Duncan Keith to a 13-year extension worth $72 million on December 1, 2009. On April 6, 2010, the Hawks won their 50th game of the 2009–10 season against the Dallas Stars, setting a new franchise record for wins in a season. The next night, April 7, the Hawks notched their 109th point of the season against the St. Louis Blues, setting another franchise record.
The Blackhawks made the playoffs for the second consecutive season with a regular-season record of 52–22–8. They defeated the Nashville Predators in six games in the first round, before defeating the third-seeded Vancouver Canucks for the second straight year, again in six games. The Blackhawks then swept the top-seeded San Jose Sharks in the Western Conference Finals. The team advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1992, where they played the Philadelphia Flyers. The Blackhawks prevailed in six games to secure their fourth Stanley Cup in franchise history. The victory also ended the team's 49-year championship drought.[40]
2010–2012The Blackhawks immediately faced salary cap constraints prior to the 2010–11 NHL season. The team was forced to trade many players who played an integral role to their 2009–10 Stanley Cup victory, including Dustin Byfuglien, Andrew Ladd, Kris Versteeg, Brent Sopel, Ben Eager and Colin Fraser.[41] The team was also unable to agree to terms with starting goaltender Antti Niemi, who left as restricted free agent to the San Jose Sharks.[42] The Blackhawks signed journeyman Marty Turco as his replacement, but eventfully turned to rookie Corey Crawford to become their full-time starting goaltender.[43] The Blackhawks also made a mid-season trade to acquire winger Michael Frolik from the Florida Panthers in exchange for Jack Skille, Hugh Jessiman and David Pacan.[44]
Amidst the roster turnaround, the Blackhawks finished the season with a 44–29–9 record and placed third in the Central Division and eighth in the Western Conference. The team's playoff fate was determined on the final day of regular season.[45] The Blackhawks lost their regular season finale to the Detroit Red Wings, but received the final seed in the Western Conference after the Minnesota Wild defeated the Dallas Stars.[45] In the first round of the 2011 playoffs, the Blackhawks faced the top-seeded Vancouver Canucks, which marked the third consecutive post-season the two teams faced each other.[46] The Canucks built a three-game lead in the series before the Blackhawks were able to win three games in a row.[46] Alex Burrows won Game 7 for the Canucks in overtime, 2–1.[46]
Before the 2011–12 season, the Blackhawks continued to make roster moves to optimize their salary cap situation. The team traded Troy Brouwer to the Washington Capitals in exchange for the 26th overall pick in the 2011 NHL Entry Draft (used to select Phillip Danault). The Blackhawks also traded defenseman Brian Campbell, who had one of the richest contracts in the franchise's history, to the Florida Panthers.[47] The team bolstered their forward depth by signing veterans Daniel Carcillo, Jamal Mayers and Andrew Brunette,[48] while also acquiring goaltender Ray Emery to back-up Corey Crawford.[49] The Blackhawks called-up prospects Brandon Saad, Andrew Shaw, Nick Leddy and Marcus Kruger, who became regular starters.[50]
The Blackhawks placed fourth in Central Division with 45–26–11 and qualified for the playoffs for a fourth consecutive season.[51] They faced the Phoenix Coyotes in the opening round, who eliminated the Blackhawks in six games. The series saw five of the six games going to overtime, with Bryan Bickell (Game 2) and Jonathan Toews (Game 5) scoring the only Blackhawk overtime winners of the series.[52]
2012–13: Presidents' Trophy and fifth Stanley CupThe Blackhawks started the lockout-shortened 2012–13 season with much success by establishing several new franchise and NHL records. On January 27, 2013, the Blackhawks set a new franchise record for starting the season 6–0–0 after a win against the Detroit Red Wings.[53] On February 19, the Blackhawks tied the NHL record previously set by the Anaheim Ducks in the 2006–07 season for earning points in the first 16 consecutive games of a season, and beat the Ducks record (28 points) by one point.[54] On March 6, the Blackhawks extended the NHL record to 24 games with a record of 21–0–3, and the franchise record for most consecutive wins to 11 games.[55] However, The Blackhawks lost 6–2 to the Colorado Avalanche on March 8.[55] It was their first loss in regulation and ended their 24-game streak in which they earned at least one point, an NHL record to start a season.[55] The point streak was the third-longest in NHL history.[56][57][58]The 2013 Stanley Cup champion Blackhawks meet President Obama at the White House.The United Center also recorded its 200th consecutive combined regular season and playoff Blackhawks sell-out on March 1 against the Columbus Blue Jackets, which began during the 2007–08 season with the game on March 30, 2008, against the Blue Jackets.[59] The Blackhawks won the 2012–13 Presidents' Trophy for the best regular season record in the NHL and clinched home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs.[60] After dispatching the Minnesota Wild in the first round, the Blackhawks faced the Detroit Red Wings in the Western Conference Semifinals. The Blackhawks won the series opener but lost the next three games and faced elimination. However, the Blackhawks clawed back into the series, eventually winning the series on a goal by Brent Seabrook in overtime of Game 7.[61] The team then defeated the Los Angeles Kings in five games to secure a second Stanley Cup Final appearance in four seasons.[62]
The Blackhawks faced the Boston Bruins, another Original Six team, in the 2013 Stanley Cup Finals.[63] It was the first time since 1979 that two Original Six teams have made the Stanley Cup Finals and the first time since 1945 that the last four teams to win the Stanley Cup were in the Conference Finals.[63] The Bruins made their second appearance in the Finals in three years (winning in 2011) and were making a similar resurgence as the Blackhawks. On June 24, the Blackhawks defeated the Bruins in the sixth game of the series to win the Stanley Cup, having overcome a 2–1 deficit with just over a minute remaining in the game.[60] Bryan Bickell and Dave Bolland scored goals with 1:16 and 0:58.3 remaining in the game, just 17 seconds apart, to win 3–2.[60]
2013–14
The Blackhawks played the Pittsburgh Penguins at Soldier Field for game four of the 2014 NHL Stadium Series.The Blackhawks began the 2013–14 season in hopes of becoming the first team to win consecutive Stanley Cups since the Detroit Red Wings in 1997 and 1998.[64] The team was dramatically altered in the off-season to remain under the salary cap.[65] The team traded Dave Bolland, Daniel Carcillo and Michael Frolik in exchange for future draft picks, while parting ways with Ray Emery and Viktor Stalberg.[66] Despite these changes, the Blackhawks tallied a 28–7–7 record going into January 2014. The team played their second outdoor game in franchise history against the Pittsburgh Penguins at Soldier Field as part of the 2014 NHL Stadium Series. The Blackhawks defeated the Penguins 5–1 in front of 62,921 fans.[67]
The franchise recorded its 2,500th regular season win, while head coach Joel Quenneville won 693 wins as a coach, the third most in the history of the NHL.[68][69] The Blackhawks finished the season with a 46–21–15 record, good for third in the Central Division. They opened the playoffs by losing two games to the St. Louis Blues. The Blackhawks surged back with four straight games to win the series.[70] The team then defeated the Minnesota Wild for the second consecutive year. However, the Los Angeles Kings defeated the Blackhawks in seven games and would ultimately go on to win the Stanley Cup.[71] After the season's conclusion, Duncan Keith won the James Norris Memorial Trophy for the second time in his career, and Jonathan Toews was named a finalist for the Frank J. Selke Trophy.[72][73]
2014–15: Sixth Stanley Cup
The Hawks faced the Washington Capitals at Nationals Park for the 2015 NHL Winter Classic.The Blackhawks' roster remained largely intact following the 2013–14 season. The team signed veteran center Brad Richards and rookie goaltender Scott Darling to one-year contracts, and traded defenseman Nick Leddy to the New York Islanders in exchange for three prospects.[74][75][76] For the first half of the season, Patrick Kane led the team in scoring and points. The Blackhawks mustered a 30–15–2 record going into the All-Star break.[77] The Blackhawks sent six players to the All-Star Game, including Kane, Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and Corey Crawford.[78] The team also played in the 2015 NHL Winter Classic at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., where they lost 3–2 to the Washington Capitals.[79]
However, in late February, Kane suffered a shoulder injury that was expected to sideline him for the remainder of the regular season and much of the playoffs.[80] The team called-up rookie Teuvo Teravainen from the AHL and traded their first-round pick in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft to acquire center Antoine Vermette from the Arizona Coyotes.[81] The Blackhawks also acquired veteran defenseman Kimmo Timonen from the Philadelphia Flyers for second round picks in 2015 and 2016,[82] and Andrew Desjardins from the San Jose Sharks in exchange for Ben Smith.[83] The Blackhawks finished the season with a 48–28–6 record, placing third in their division. The team allowed the fewest goals in the NHL.[84]
File:The President Welcomes the Chicago Blackhawks, 2015 Stanley Cup Champions.webmPresident Obama welcomes the Blackhawks to the White House for a third time to commemorate the team's 2015 Stanley Cup victory.Kane recovered quicker than projected and was ready for the start of the playoffs.[85] The Blackhawks dispatched the Nashville Predators in six games and swept the Minnesota Wild to advance to the Western Conference Finals for the fifth time in seven years.[86] The top-seeded Anaheim Ducks held a 3–2 lead in the series, but the Blackhawks rallied back in the series to win games six and seven. The team then defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2015 Stanley Cup Finals to secure their third Stanley Cup in six seasons.[87]
2015–presentThe Blackhawks' roster experienced another dramatic reconstruction before the 2015–16 season. The team was unable to come to terms with pending free agent Brandon Saad, who had played a pivotal role in the 2015 playoffs.[88] The Blackhawks traded Saad's negotiation rights (along with prospects Alex Broadhurst and Michael Paliotta) to the Columbus Blue Jackets in exchange for Artem Anisimov, Marko Dano, Corey Tropp, Jeremy Morin and a fourth-round draft pick in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft.[89] The Blackhawks were unable to re-sign unrestricted free agents Brad Richards, Antoine Vermette and Johnny Oduya due to salary cap constraints.[90] The team then traded long-time veteran and fan-favorite Patrick Sharp (along with Stephen Johns) to the Dallas Stars in exchange for Trevor Daley and forward Ryan Garbutt in order to stay under the salary cap.[91] Amidst the roster turnover, the Blackhawks signed free agent Artemi Panarin from the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) to an entry-level contract.[92]
The Blackhawks offense was led by Patrick Kane, who scored an NHL-best 106 points in 2015–16 and also won the season's Hart Memorial Trophy's as league MVP.[93] Panarin, who skated on Kane's line, won the Calder Memorial Trophy, awarded to the NHL's best first year player.[94] Midway through the season, the Blackhawks attempted to supplement their roster by making several trades. The Blackhawks dealt Jeremy Morin to the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for Richard Panik.[95] The team then reacquired Andrew Ladd from the Winnipeg Jets in exchange for their first round selection in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft and Marko Dano.[96] The team then traded Phillip Danault and their 2018 second round pick to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for forwards Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann.[97] The team finished with a 46-26-9 record, good for 103 points and third place in their division. The Blackhawks were defeated by the St. Louis Blues in a seven-game series in the first round of the 2016 playoffs.[98] The loss marked the Blackhawks earliest playoff exit since 2012.[99]
Salary cap constraints forced the Blackhawks to make additional trades before the 2016–17 season. The team traded pending free-agent Andrew Shaw to Montreal in exchange for two second-round 2016 draft picks.[100] The Blackhawks also traded Bryan Bickell and Teuvo Teravaainen to the Carolina Hurricanes in exchange for another 2016 second-round pick in order to free additional salary cap space.[101] The Blackhawks signed veteran Brian Campbell and KHL stand-out Michal Kempny during free agency.[102][103] The team then turned to their farm system to replenish their depth. The Blackhawks promoted rookies Ryan Hartman, Gustav Forsling, Tyler Motte, Nick Schmaltz and Vinnie Hinostroza to their starting line-up to fill the vacancies left by Shaw, Bickell and Teravainen.[104]
Patrick Kane spearheaded the Blackhawks offense with 34 goals and 55 assists, tying for second in scoring during the regular season among all skaters.[105] He was aided by his linemate, Panarin, who scored 31 goals and 43 assists.[105] In addition to Kane and Panarin, Jonathan Toews, Marian Hossa, Artem Anisimov and Richard Panik all scored at least 20 goals.[106] Toews, Kane, Duncan Keith and Corey Crawford were also selected to play in the All-Star Game.[107] The Blackhawks finished the season with 109 points, placing first in the Central Division and earning the top-seed in the Western Conference for the 2017 playoffs.[105] However, they were swept in the first round by the eighth-seeded Nashville Predators in one of the biggest upsets in NHL playoff history; this was the first time that an eighth seed swept a playoff series against the top team in the conference.[108] Goaltender Pekka Rinne and the Predators' defense marginalized the Blackhawks' offense, limiting the team to only three total goals in the series, including a pair of shutouts in Game 1 (1–0) and Game 2 (5–0) at the United Center to begin the series.[109]
Prior to the 2017–18 season, the Blackhawks revealed Marian Hossa would miss the entire 2017–18 season due to a progressive skin disorder.[110][111] The team made two major trades before the 2017 NHL Entry Draft; veteran defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson was dealt to the Arizona Coyotes in exchange for Connor Murphy and Laurent Dauphin, while Artemi Panarin was traded to the Columbus Blue Jackets to reacquire Brandon Saad in a four-player deal.[112] Both Hjalmarsson and Hossa were core members of the Blackhawks roster that won three Stanley Cups in 2010, 2013 and 2015.[112] The team also traded goaltender Scott Darling to the Carolina Hurricanes and center Marcus Kruger to the Vegas Golden Knights, while also lost defensemen Trevor van Riemsdyk to the Golden Knights in the 2017 NHL Expansion Draft and Brian Campbell, who retired.[113] The Blackhawks acquired wingers Patrick Sharp, Tommy Wingels and Lance Bouma in free agency.[113]
The Blackhawks opened the 2017–18 season with a resounding 10–1 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins.[114] The Blackhawks were four games above .500 with an 18–14–6 record at the end of December 2017, and only four points out of a playoff spot.[115] However, goaltender Corey Crawford missed much of 2018 due to an upper-body injury.[116] Inconsistent defense and goaltending, coupled with limited offense, resulted in the team falling to the bottom of the Central Division.[117][118] The Blackhawks were eliminated from playoff contention on March 20, 2018, marking the first time in nine years that the team failed to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs.[118] The team finished the season with a 33–39–10 record and 76 points in the standings.[119]
The Blackhawks made modest acquisitions during the opening day of free agency by acquiring veterans Cam Ward, Chris Kunitz and Brandon Manning.[120] The team made their biggest move of the offseason by offloading Hossa's contract onto the Arizona Coyotes by trading Vinnie Hinostroza, Jordan Oesterle and third-round draft pick in the 2019 NHL Draft in exchange for Marcus Kruger, MacKenzie Entwistle, Jordan Maletta, Andrew Campbell and a fifth-round draft pick in the 2019 NHL Draft.[121] Quenneville named Ward the team's starting goaltender as Crawford missed the first five games of the 2018–19 season with concussion-like symptoms. The Blackhawks opened the season with a promising 6–2–2 start despite Crawford's initial absence.[122] However, after losing their next five games,[122] head coach Quenneville (as well as assistant coaches Kevin Dineen and Ulf Samuelsson) were fired on November 6, 2018. Jeremy Colliton, previously the head coach of the Blackhawks' AHL affiliate, the Rockford IceHogs, was named the 38th head coach in franchise history.[123]
Team informationJerseysThe Blackhawks wear predominantly red jerseys featuring three sets of black and white stripes along the sleeves and waist.[124][125] The team's logo is displayed on the front of each jersey, along with a 'C', representing 'Chicago', on each shoulder with two crossed tomahawks.[124] The Blackhawks debuted this design in 1955, and have since only made minor modifications to the jersey.[124][125] In 2007, The Blackhawks along with all other NHL teams, made minute changes to their uniforms by adding larger logo, a new collar with the NHL logo and a 'baseball-style cut along the bottom.[126] The team previously donned alternate third jersey that was primarily black with red and white stripes between 1996 and 2007.[125][127] The Blackhawks brought this design back in 2008, before making their 2009 Winter Classic jerseys their alternates between 2009-11. The team has not used an alternate jersey home jersey since 2011.[124][125]
The Blackhawks' uniform was voted one of the 25 best in professional sports by Paul Lukas of GQ in November 2004.[128] The Hockey News voted the team's jersey as the best in the NHL.[129] Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo! Sports listed the Blackhawks home jerseys as the second best NHL jersey in the history of the NHL in 2017.[130] The Blackhawks were voted to have the best uniform in the history of the NHL in a fan-vote conducted by the NHL in 2017.[131]The Blackhawks have donned CamouFlage practice jerseys for Veterans Day to show support for servicemen since 2009.Since 2009, the Blackhawks have worn special camouFlage jerseys on Veterans Day during their pregame warm-ups. The jerseys are later sold in sales to raise money for the USO of Illinois.[132]
The Blackhawks wore jerseys based on the design worn in the 1936–37 season for the 2009 NHL Winter Classic. The jersey is predominantly black with a large beige stripe across the chest (also on the sleeves), with a red border, and an old-style circular Black Hawks logo.[133] The Blackhawks used this Winter Classic design as their third jersey for the 2009–10 season until they retired after the 2010–11 season, with the only change in the design was by adding the familiar "C" with crossed tomahawks on the shoulders.
For the 2014 NHL Stadium Series, the Blackhawks wore a black uniform similar to the alternates they wore from 1996 to 2009, but the stripes around the waist are no longer straight, they are jagged around the sides in order to follow the shape of the bottom of the jersey. Keeping with stripes, the ones on the arms simply stop halfway round; angled numbers are above these sleeve half-stripes. On one shoulder is the familiar "C" with crossed tomahawks logo and the Chicago 2014 Stadium Series logo on the other. Each 2014 NHL Stadium Series jerseys features chrome-treated logo designs inspired by the NHL shield. The chrome crest was developed using new technology that fuses print and embroidery and allows logos to be displayed as a high-resolution image incorporated into the crest. As a result, the design reduces the weight of the crest, creating in a lighter jersey. Numbering on the back of the jersey is enlarged and sleeve numbers are angled to improve visibility in outdoor venues.[134]
On December 21, 2014, the Blackhawks debuted a special decal on their helmets in remembrance of the passing of assistant equipment manager Clinton "Clint" Reif who died during the season for the remainder of the 2014–15 season.[135] On the home jerseys, the helmet is black, so the patch was black with the letters "CR" being in white, On the away jerseys, the helmet is white, so the patch was white with the letters "CR" being black.
The team wore a uniform which was inspired by their 1957–58 jersey for the 2015 NHL Winter Classic. This uniform is nearly identical to the road uniform that the Blackhawks currently wear. The main differences between this design and the current road design comes in the form of the lace up collar, the name/number block font (which is serifed), and the C-Tomahawk logo, which is mostly red, black, and white (with a tad bit of yellow) instead of being mostly red, yellow, green black and white.[136]
For the 2016 NHL Stadium Series, the Blackhawks wore a unique uniform for their game against the Minnesota Wild. This uniform is primarily white with black/red/black stripes on the sleeves and socks. The current logo is on the chest. Framed between the two black stripes and over the red stripe on the sleeve is the familiar "C" with crossed tomahawks. The collar of the uniform features two different colors. The four, six-pointed red stars from the Flag of Chicago is featured on the white portion of the collar, while the other side of the collar is black. Sleeve numbers have been shifted to the shoulders and enlarged. With the shoulders being black, the numbering is white. But, the numbering and lettering on the back is also enlarged and black in color.[137]
For the 2017 NHL Winter Classic, the Blackhawks wore uniforms very similar to what they wore at the 2015 NHL Winter Classic. These new uniforms however feature a few modifications that were made to them. The most notable changes are to the logo and the cross tomahawks. The logo this time is the appropriate logo that the franchise used in 1957-65. But, they removed the roundel and the lettering so that just the logo itself stands out. The placement of the familiar "C" with crossed tomahawks is featured in the same position with the same striping pattern on the sleeve as the 2015 NHL Winter Classic uniform had. The only differences between the tomahawks from the 2015 NHL Winter Classic uniform and the 2017 NHL Winter Classic uniform are where the colors are placed for the tomahawk. The 2017 NHL Winter Classic patch is featured on the right shoulder.[138]
To honor the NHL's centennial year, a special anniversary logo was designed for the remainder of the 2016–17 season, which started on January 1, 2017 for all thirty teams, featuring a banner wrapped around the number 100 with the current NHL shield in the foreground. Both the banner and the number 100 are in same silver colour as the NHL shield.[139] The Blackhawks wore this logo patch underneath the numbering on the right-sleeve on both the home and away jerseys. The Blackhawks debuted this patch on their home jerseys on January 5, 2017 and then they debuted the patch on the away jerseys on January 13, 2017. All home and away jerseys for all thirty teams will continue to have patches of the NHL's centennial emblem for the 2017–18 season, located above or below the numbers on their right sleeves, for at least up to the playing of the NHL 100 Classic on December 16, 2017.[140]
Adidas signed an agreement with the NHL to be the official outfitter of uniforms and licensed apparel for all teams, starting with the 2017–18 season, replacing Reebok.[141] The Reebok Edge template will now be retired in favor of the Adidas' ADIZERO template. The home and away uniforms that were debuted in the 2007-08 season remains nearly identical with the exception of the new Adidas ADIZERO template and the new collar. With the new collar, the NHL shield remains but is no longer placed on a lower layer with flaps nearby, as it's now front and center on a pentagon with a new "Chrome Flex" style.[142] The waist stripes are now curved instead of being straight across. The Adidas logo replaces the Reebok logo on the back collar.
For the entire 2018–19 season, on both the home and away uniforms, the Blackhawks are wearing memorial patches in remembrance of Stan Mikita, who died on August 7, 2018. The memorial patch features 21 in white on a black circle that is placed on the upper left corner on the front side of the uniform.[143][144]
For the 2019 NHL Winter Classic, the Blackhawks wore uniforms similar to what they wore from the 1926–27 season to the 1934–35 season. The black and white uniform features the black and white native american head logo on a black and white roundel with the wording "Blackhawks" arched on top and "Chicago" arched below. The native american head logo inside the roundel features the 1999–2000 native american head logo that they currently wear. The uniform has four white stripes on each of the shoulders, and five white stripes of varying thickness on each sleeve and around the waist. Inside the collar, we see several diagonal white lines, which is a nod to the end zone design used at Notre Dame Stadium. Mixed in between these white lines are the six years written in red, the six years the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. The Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup in 1934, 1938, 1961, 2010, 2013, and 2015.[145] After the 2019 NHL Winter Classic, the team announced that uniforms from the game would be worn in three home games of the 2018–19 season.[146]
LogoFurther information: Chicago Blackhawks name and logo controversy
This vintage logo was brought back in 1991 and 2008; it was their primary logo from the 1937–38 to 1954–55 seasons.McLaughlin's wife, Irene Castle, designed the original version of the team's logo, which featured a crudely-drawn black and white Native head in a circle.[147] This design went through several significant changes between 1926 and 1955. During this period, seven distinct versions of the primary logo were worn on the team's uniforms. At the beginning of the 1955–56 season, the outer circle was removed and the head began to resemble the team's current primary logo. This crest and uniform went through subtle changes until the 1964–65 season; the basic logo and jersey design have remained constant ever since. In 2008, The Hockey News' staff voted the team's main logo to be the best in the NHL.[148] In 2010, sports columnist Damien Cox called on the franchise to retire the "racially insensitive" logo, saying that, "Clearly, no right-thinking person would name a team after an aboriginal figure these days any more than they would use Muslims or Africans or Chinese or any ethnic group to depict a specific sporting notion."[149] Furthermore, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) believes that all Native-themed logos, including that of the Blackhawks, "continue to profit from harmful stereotypes originated during a time when white superiority and segregation were common place."[150]
The Blackhawks have worked with the American Indian Center to help educate their community and fan base by sharing Native American culture and history. Scott Sypolt, executive counsel for the American Indian Center, commented on the logo and name controversy: Joe Podlasek, the executive director of the American Indian Center of Chicago, commented on their relationship, stating, "[The Hawks] are far and away ahead of everyone else in forward-thinking. What they have done is engaged the community. In the other cities (organizations) want nothing to do with native people but yet they're trying to say they respect us."[151] However, this stance is markedly different from the one taken by the American Indian Center up until recent years. In 2010, Joe Podlasek stated that, "The stance is very clear. We want the Chicago Blackhawks logo to change. For us, that's one of our grandfathers. Would you do that with your grandfather's picture? Take it and throw it on a rug? Walk on it and dance on it?"[152] John Blackhawk, Chairman of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, has suggested that the change in position may be tied to contributions the team has recently begun making to the center: "We all do contributions, but we don't do it for the sake of wanting to be forgiven for something we've done that's offensive." [153]
MascotThe Blackhawks mascot is Tommy Hawk, an anthropomorphic black hawk who wears the Blackhawks' four feathers on his head, along with a Blackhawks jersey and hockey pants.[154] Tommy Hawk often participates in the T-shirt toss and puck chuck at the United Center.[154] He walks around the concourse greeting fans before and during the game.[154] The team introduced Tommy Hawk in the 2001–02 season.[155]
Fight and goal songs"Here Come the Hawks!" is the official fight song and introduction of the Chicago Blackhawks. The song was written by J. Swayzee, an avid Blackhawks fan, and produced by the Dick Marx Orchestra and Choir in 1968 and is heard quite often both in vocal and organ renditions during Blackhawks home games.[156] In late 2007 the song "Keys to the City" was released by Ministry & Co Conspirators as a gift to the Blackhawks organization.[157]
The Blackhawks were the first NHL team to sound a horn whenever they scored a goal at home.[158] Bill Wirtz donated his yacht's horn to Chicago Stadium.[158] The goal horn became a popular trend among other NHL teams after the Blackhawks played the Montreal Canadiens in the 1973 Stanley Cup Finals.[158] The Blackhawks began playing "Chelsea Dagger" by The Fratellis as their official goal song during the 2008-09 NHL season.[156][159] The Blackhawks also had dedicated goal songs for Patrick Kane ("Rock You Like a Hurricane" by The Scorpions), Jonathan Toews ("Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry), and Patrick Sharp ("Sharp Dressed Man" by ZZ Top).[160]
National anthem
Jim Cornelison sings the "Star Spangled Banner" at the United CenterIt is a tradition for Blackhawks fans to applaud and cheer loudly during the singing of the national anthem. This tradition originated during a 1985 Campbell Conference playoff game at Chicago Stadium versus the Edmonton Oilers.[161] Wayne Messmer, the Blackhawks home games national anthem singer from 1980 to 1994, was the anthem singer when this tradition began.[162] Jim Cornelison sings the national anthems for all home games and he is accompanied by organist Frank Pellico.[162] Before Game 2 of the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals at the United Center, the cheering during the anthem was registered between 116-122 decibels.[163]
Practice facilityThe Blackhawks practice facility, the MB Ice Arena, is located in Chicago's Near West Side. The 125,000 square-foot facility opened in 2017 and cost $65 million to construct.[164] The MB Ice Arena also serves as community center and hosts youth, high school, and adult hockey and ice skating programs.[165]
Circus tripThe Blackhawks and their arena mates, the Chicago Bulls, embarked on an annual two-week road trip in mid-November dating back to when both teams inhabited Chicago Stadium.[166] The Wirtz Family, who at one point owned the Blackhawks, Bulls, and Chicago Stadium, would lease the venue to circus acts and ice skating troupes.[167][168][169] The Blackhawks played between six and seven games in western Canada and California during this time.[166] In November 2016, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced they would not be returning to the United Center in 2017.[166] As a result, Disney On Ice performed its last two week show in 2017 before being condensed to one week in 2018.
Media and announcersMain article: List of Chicago Blackhawks broadcastersFor the first time in team history, all 82 games plus playoffs were broadcast on television during the 2008–09 season. At least 20 of them aired on WGN-TV (Channel 9), the first time the Blackhawks had been seen on local over-the-air television in 30 years. Games produced by WGN-TV through its WGN Sports department are not available in its superstation feed WGN America due to league broadcast rights restrictions. Other games not broadcast by WGN-TV are aired on regional sports network NBC Sports Chicago, the first time in at least 35 years that non-nationally broadcast home games were seen locally, either over-the-air or on cable. On February 15, 2011, it was announced that the team had renewed their broadcast contract with WGN-TV for the next five years, starting in the 2011–12 NHL season. The deal was further extended for three more years on May 15, 2014, keeping the team on Channel 9 until the end of the 2018–19 season.[170] On January 2, 2019, the Blackhawks (along with the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox) agreed to an exclusive multi-year deal with NBC Sports Chicago beginning with the 2019–20 season, ending the team's broadcasts on WGN-TV.[171]
Radio broadcasts since the 1970s and into the mid-2000s varied between WBBM (780) and WMAQ/WSCR (670), and often came into conflict with White Sox baseball by the start of April. On April 30, 2008, the team signed a three-year deal with WGN Radio (720 AM), with games airing alternately instead on WIND (560 AM) in scheduling conflict situations during the baseball season due to the Cubs having contractual preference to air on WGN; these moved to WGWG-LP (Channel 6/87.7 FM, an analog television station carrying an audio-only sports talk format using a quirk in the FM band) in mid-2014 when Tribune began a local marketing agreement with that station's owner. During the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, the Cubs agreed to allow the Blackhawks games to be broadcast on WGN and have the Cubs revert to WIND when there was a conflict. This allowed the Finals games to be heard over a larger area due to WGN's clear-channel signal. All Blackhawk games are also streamed live on wgnradio.com, regardless of whether the games are on WGN or WGWG-LP. WLUP-FM (97.9 FM) was also utilized as an alternate station.
Pat Foley – TV play-by-playEddie Olczyk – Lead TV analyst for NBC & TV analyst for BlackhawksJohn Wiedeman – Radio play-by-playTroy Murray – Radio analystGene Honda – Public Address Announcer #1Jon Hansen - Public Address Announcer #2Luke Stuckmeyer – Rinkside reporter for games on NBC Sports ChicagoSteve Konroyd – Co-Host of Intermission, pre-game & post-game reports, back-up TV analystPat Boyle – Host of Intermission, pre-game & post-game reports for games on NBC Sports ChicagoAdam Burish – Co-Host of Intermission, pre-game, post-game, and intermission for games on NBC Sports ChicagoBrian Campbell – Co-Host of Intermission, pre-game, post-game, and intermission for games on NBC Sports ChicagoJamal Mayers – Co-Host of Intermission, pre-game, post-game, and intermission for games on NBC Sports ChicagoDan Roan – Host of Intermission, pre-game & post-game reports for games on WGNChris Boden – Host of Intermission, pre-game & post-game reports for games on WGN RadioSeason-by-season recordThis is a partial list of the last five seasons completed by the Blackhawks. For the full season-by-season history, see List of Chicago Blackhawks seasons.
Note: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, OTL = Overtime losses, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against
Season GP W L OTL Pts GF GA Finish Playoffs2013–14 82 46 21 15 107 267 220 3rd, Central Lost in Conference Finals, 3–4 (Kings)2014–15 82 48 28 6 102 220 186 3rd, Central Stanley Cup Champions, 4–2 (Lightning)2015–16 82 47 26 9 103 235 209 3rd, Central Lost in First Round, 3–4 (Blues)2016–17 82 50 23 9 109 244 213 1st, Central Lost in First Round, 0–4 (Predators)2017–18 82 33 39 10 76 229 256 7th, Central Did not qualifyPlayersMain article: List of Chicago Blackhawks playersCurrent rosterviewtalkeditUpdated February 11, 2019[172][173]
# Nat Player Pos S/G Age Acquired Birthplace15 Russia Artem Anisimov C L 30 2015 Yaroslavl, Soviet Union91 Canada Drake Caggiula LW L 24 2018 Pickering, Ontario50 Canada Corey Crawford Injured Reserve G L 34 2003 Montreal, Quebec63 Sweden Carl Dahlstrom D L 24 2013 Stockholm, Sweden12 United States Alex DeBrincat RW R 21 2016 Farmington Hills, Michigan60 United States Collin Delia G L 24 2018 Rancho Cucamonga, California 42 Sweden Gustav Forsling D L 22 2016 Linköping, Sweden56 Sweden Erik Gustafsson D L 26 2015 Nynäshamn, Sweden40 United States John Hayden C R 23 2013 Chicago, Illinois64 Czech Republic David Kampf Injured Reserve C L 24 2017 Jirkov, Czech Republic24 Germany Dominik Kahun C L 23 2018 Plana, Czech Republic88 United States Patrick Kane RW L 30 2007 Buffalo, New York2 Canada Duncan Keith (A) D L 35 2002 Winnipeg, Manitoba68 Canada Slater Koekkoek D L 25 2019 North Dundas, Ontario16 Sweden Marcus Kruger C L 28 2018 Stockholm, Sweden14 Canada Chris Kunitz LW L 39 2018 Regina, Saskatchewan5 United States Connor Murphy D R 25 2017 Boston, Massachusetts11 Canada Brendan Perlini LW L 22 2018 Guildford, England20 United States Brandon Saad LW L 26 2017 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania7 Canada Brent Seabrook (A) D R 33 2003 Richmond, British Columbia95 Canada Dylan Sikura C L 23 2014 Aurora, Ontario17 Canada Dylan Strome C L 21 2018 Mississauga, Ontario19 Canada Jonathan Toews (C) C L 30 2006 Winnipeg, Manitoba30 Canada Cam Ward G L 34 2018 Saskatoon, SaskatchewanRetired numbers
The Blackhawks unveiled a sculpture honoring Glenn Hall, Tony Esposito, Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull and Denis Savard in 2000.Chicago Blackhawks retired numbersNo. Player Position Career No. retirement1 Glenn Hall G 1957–1967 November 20, 19883 Keith Magnuson 1 D 1969–1980 November 12, 2008Pierre Pilote 1 D 1955–1968 November 12, 20089 Bobby Hull LW 1957–1972 December 18, 198318 Denis Savard C 1980–19901995–1997 March 19, 199821 Stan Mikita C 1958–1980 October 19, 198035 Tony Esposito G 1969–1984 November 20, 1988Notes:
1 Both players who wore #3 were honored.The NHL retired Wayne Gretzky's No. 99 for all its member teams at the 2000 NHL All-Star Game.[174]Hall of FamersThe Chicago Blackhawks presently acknowledge an affiliation with a number of inductees to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Inductees affiliated with the Blackhawks include 39 former players and 10 builders of the sport.[175] The 10 individuals recognized as builders by the Hall of Fame includes former Blackhawks executives, general managers, head coaches, and owners. In addition to players and builders, the team recognizes an affiliation with three broadcasters who were awarded the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award from the Hockey Hall of Fame. Lloyd Pettit, a sportscaster, was the first Blackhawks broadcaster to receive the award, in 1986. Other Blackhawks broadcasters awarded the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award include Pat Foley (awarded in 2014), and Bob Verdi (awarded in 2016).[175]
Chicago Blackhawks Hall of FamersAffiliation with inductees based on team acknowledgementHall of Fame players[175]Sid AbelLionel ConacherTony EspositoGlenn HallTed LindsayBert OlmsteadAllan StanleyEd BelfourRoy ConacherPhil EspositoGeorge HayHarry LumleyBobby OrrJohn StewartDoug BentleyChris CheliosBill GadsbyBobby HullMickey MacKayPierre PiloteHarry WatsonMax BentleyPaul CoffeyCharlie GardinerDick IrvinStan MikitaDenis SavardGeorges BoucherArt CoulterDoug GilmourDuke KeatsHowie MorenzEarl SeibertFrank BrimsekBabe DyeMichel GouletHugh LehmanBill MosienkoClint SmithHall of Fame builders[175]Al ArbourRudy PilousThomas N. IvanBud PoileJohn MariucciArthur WirtzFrederic McLaughlinBill WirtzJames D. NorrisJames E. NorrisTeam captainsDick Irvin, 1926–1929Duke Dukowski, 1929–1930Ty Arbour, 1930–1931Cy Wentworth, 1931–1932Helge Bostrom, 1932–1933Charlie Gardiner, 1933–1934Johnny Gottselig, 1935–1940Earl Seibert, 1940–1942Doug Bentley, 1942–1944Clint Smith, 1944–1945John Mariucci, 1945–1946Red Hamill, 1946–1947John Mariucci, 1947–1948Gaye Stewart, 1948–1949Doug Bentley, 1949–1950Jack Stewart, 1950–1952Bill Gadsby, 1952–1954Gus Mortson, 1954–1957Ed Litzenberger, 1958–1961Pierre Pilote, 1961–1968Pat Stapleton, 1969–1970Pit Martin, 1975–1976Pit Martin; Stan Mikita; Keith Magnuson, 1976–1977Keith Magnuson, 1977–1979Terry Ruskowski, 1979–1982Darryl Sutter, 1982–1987Bob Murray, 1985–1986Denis Savard, 1988–1989Dirk Graham, 1989–1995Chris Chelios, 1995–1999Doug Gilmour, 1999–2000Tony Amonte, 2000–2002Alexei Zhamnov, 2002–2004Adrian Aucoin; 2005–2007Martin Lapointe; 2006Jonathan Toews, 2008–presentFranchise scoring leadersMain article: List of Chicago Blackhawks statistics and recordsSee also: List of Chicago Blackhawks recordsThese are the top-ten point-scorers in franchise history. Figures are updated after each completed NHL regular season.
* – current Blackhawks playerNote: Pos = Position; GP = Games played; G = Goals; A = Assists; Pts = Points; P/G = Points per gameStan Mikita is the Blackhawks all-time leading scorer with 1,467 career points.PointsPlayer Pos GP G A Pts P/GStan Mikita C 1,394 541 926 1,467 1.05Bobby Hull LW 1,036 604 549 1,153 1.11Denis Savard C 881 377 719 1,096 1.24Steve Larmer RW 891 406 517 923 1.04Patrick Kane* RW 822 312 516 828 1.01Doug Wilson D 938 225 554 779 .83Jonathan Toews* C 791 292 382 674 .85Dennis Hull LW 904 298 342 640 .71Pit Martin C 740 243 384 627 .85Jeremy Roenick C 524 267 329 596 1.14GoalsPlayer Pos GBobby Hull LW 604Stan Mikita C 541Steve Larmer RW 406Denis Savard C 377Patrick Kane* RW 312Dennis Hull LW 298Jonathan Toews* C 292Tony Amonte RW 268Jeremy Roenick C 267Bill Mosienko RW 258AssistsPlayer Pos AStan Mikita C 926Denis Savard C 719Doug Wilson D 554Bobby Hull LW 549Steve Larmer RW 517Patrick Kane* RW 516Duncan Keith* D 451Pierre Pilote D 400Chris Chelios D 395Pit Martin C 384
Chicago (/ʃɪˈkɑːɡoʊ/ (listen) shih-KAH-goh, locally also /ʃɪˈkɔːɡoʊ/ shih-KAW-goh;[6] Miami-Illinois: Shikaakwa; Ojibwe: Zhigaagong) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and the third-most populous in the United States after New York City and Los Angeles. With a population of 2,746,388 in the 2020 census,[7] it is also the most populous city in the Midwest. As the seat of Cook County, the second-most populous county in the U.S., Chicago is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area, the 39th-largest city in the world as of 2018.
On the shore of Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. It grew rapidly in the mid-19th century.[8][9] The Great Chicago Fire in 1871 destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless,[10] but Chicago's population continued to grow.[9] Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and architecture, such as the Chicago School, the development of the City Beautiful Movement, and the steel-framed skyscraper.[11][12]
Chicago is an international hub for finance, culture, commerce, industry, education, technology, telecommunications, and transportation. It is the financial center of the U.S. Midwest. It has the largest and most diverse derivatives market in the world, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures alone.[13] O'Hare International Airport is routinely ranked among the world's top six busiest airports.[14] The region is the nation's railroad hub.[15] The Chicago area has one of the highest gross domestic products (GDP) in the world, generating $689 billion in 2018.[16] Chicago's economy is diverse, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.[13]
Chicago is a major tourist destination. Chicago's culture has contributed much to the visual arts, literature, film, theater, comedy (especially improvisational comedy), food, dance, and music (particularly jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, gospel,[17] and electronic dance music, including house music). Chicago is home to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The Chicago area also hosts the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Chicago, among other institutions of learning. Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues, including two Major League Baseball teams.
Etymology and nicknamesMain article: Nicknames of ChicagoSee also: Windy City (nickname)The name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the indigenous Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa for a wild relative of the onion; it is known to botanists as Allium tricoccum and known more commonly as "ramps". The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as "Checagou" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir.[18] Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the eponymous wild "garlic" grew profusely in the area.[19] According to his diary of late September 1687:
... when we arrived at the said place called "Chicagou" which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region.[19]
The city has had several nicknames throughout its history, such as the Windy City, Chi-Town, Second City, and City of the Big Shoulders.[20]
HistoryMain article: History of ChicagoFor a chronological guide, see Timeline of Chicago history.Beginnings
Traditional Potawatomi regalia on display at the Field Museum of Natural HistoryIn the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by the Potawatomi, a Native American tribe who had succeeded the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples in this region.[21]An artist's rendering of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871
Home Insurance Building (1885)
Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893The first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African descent, perhaps born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and established the settlement in the 1780s. He is commonly known as the "Founder of Chicago".[22][23][24]
In 1795, following the victory of the new United States in the Northwest Indian War, an area that was to be part of Chicago was turned over to the US for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the U.S. Army constructed Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed during the War of 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn by the Potawatomi before being later rebuilt.[25]
After the War of 1812, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago and sent west of the Mississippi River as part of the federal policy of Indian removal.[26][27][28]
19th century
The location and course of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (completed 1848)0:50State and Madison Streets, once known as the busiest intersection in the world (1897)On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200.[28] Within seven years it grew to more than 6,000 people. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as Receiver of Public Monies. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837,[29] and for several decades was the world's fastest-growing city.[30]
As the site of the Chicago Portage,[31] the city became an important transportation hub between the Eastern and western United States. Chicago's first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848. The canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River.[32][33][34][35]
A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad. Manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy.[36] The Chicago Board of Trade (established 1848) listed the first-ever standardized "exchange-traded" forward contracts, which were called futures contracts.[37]
In the 1850s, Chicago gained national political prominence as the home of Senator Stephen Douglas, the champion of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the "popular sovereignty" approach to the issue of the spread of slavery.[38] These issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage. Lincoln was nominated in Chicago for US president at the 1860 Republican National Convention, which was held in a purpose-built auditorium called the Wigwam. He defeated Douglas in the general election, and this set the stage for the American Civil War.
To accommodate rapid population growth and demand for better sanitation, the city improved its infrastructure. In February 1856, Chicago's Common Council approved Chesbrough's plan to build the United States' first comprehensive sewerage system.[39] The project raised much of central Chicago to a new grade with the use of jackscrews for raising buildings.[40] While elevating Chicago, and at first improving the city's health, the untreated sewage and industrial waste now flowed into the Chicago River, and subsequently into Lake Michigan, polluting the city's primary freshwater source.
The city responded by tunneling two miles (3.2 km) out into Lake Michigan to newly built water cribs. In 1900, the problem of sewage contamination was largely resolved when the city completed a major engineering feat. It reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that the water flowed away from Lake Michigan rather than into it. This project began with the construction and improvement of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and was completed with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that connects to the Illinois River, which flows into the Mississippi River.[41][42][43]
In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed an area about 4 miles (6.4 km) long and 1-mile (1.6 km) wide, a large section of the city at the time.[44][45][46] Much of the city, including railroads and stockyards, survived intact,[47] and from the ruins of the previous wooden structures arose more modern constructions of steel and stone. These set a precedent for worldwide construction.[48][49] During its rebuilding period, Chicago constructed the world's first skyscraper in 1885, using steel-skeleton construction.[50][51]
The city grew significantly in size and population by incorporating many neighboring townships between 1851 and 1920, with the largest annexation happening in 1889, with five townships joining the city, including the Hyde Park Township, which now comprises most of the South Side of Chicago and the far southeast of Chicago, and the Jefferson Township, which now makes up most of Chicago's Northwest Side.[52] The desire to join the city was driven by municipal services that the city could provide its residents.
Chicago's flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Europe and migrants from the Eastern United States. Of the total population in 1900, more than 77% were either foreign-born or born in the United States of foreign parentage. Germans, Irish, Poles, Swedes, and Czechs made up nearly two-thirds of the foreign-born population (by 1900, whites were 98.1% of the city's population).[53][54]
Labor conflicts followed the industrial boom and the rapid expansion of the labor pool, including the Haymarket affair on May 4, 1886, and in 1894 the Pullman Strike. Anarchist and socialist groups played prominent roles in creating very large and highly organized labor actions. Concern for social problems among Chicago's immigrant poor led Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull House in 1889.[55] Programs that were developed there became a model for the new field of social work.[56]
During the 1870s and 1880s, Chicago attained national stature as the leader in the movement to improve public health. City laws and later, state laws that upgraded standards for the medical profession and fought urban epidemics of cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever were both passed and enforced. These laws became templates for public health reform in other cities and states.[57]
The city established many large, well-landscaped municipal parks, which also included public sanitation facilities. The chief advocate for improving public health in Chicago was John H. Rauch, M.D. Rauch established a plan for Chicago's park system in 1866. He created Lincoln Park by closing a cemetery filled with shallow graves, and in 1867, in response to an outbreak of cholera he helped establish a new Chicago Board of Health. Ten years later, he became the secretary and then the president of the first Illinois State Board of Health, which carried out most of its activities in Chicago.[58]
In the 1800s, Chicago became the nation's railroad hub, and by 1910 over 20 railroads operated passenger service out of six different downtown terminals.[59][60] In 1883, Chicago's railway managers needed a general time convention, so they developed the standardized system of North American time zones.[61] This system for telling time spread throughout the continent.
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition on former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park. The Exposition drew 27.5 million visitors, and is considered the most influential world's fair in history.[62][63] The University of Chicago, formerly at another location, moved to the same South Side location in 1892. The term "midway" for a fair or carnival referred originally to the Midway Plaisance, a strip of park land that still runs through the University of Chicago campus and connects the Washington and Jackson Parks.[64][65]
20th and 21st centuries
Men outside a soup kitchen during the Great Depression (1931)1900 to 1939Aerial motion film photography of Chicago in 1914 as filmed by A. Roy KnabenshueDuring World War I and the 1920s there was a major expansion in industry. The availability of jobs attracted African Americans from the Southern United States. Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population of Chicago increased dramatically, from 44,103 to 233,903.[66] This Great Migration had an immense cultural impact, called the Chicago Black Renaissance, part of the New Negro Movement, in art, literature, and music.[67] Continuing racial tensions and violence, such as the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, also occurred.[68]
The ratification of the 18th amendment to the Constitution in 1919 made the production and sale (including exportation) of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. This ushered in the beginning of what is known as the Gangster Era, a time that roughly spans from 1919 until 1933 when Prohibition was repealed. The 1920s saw gangsters, including Al Capone, Dion O'Banion, Bugs Moran and Tony Accardo battle law enforcement and each other on the streets of Chicago during the Prohibition era.[69] Chicago was the location of the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, when Al Capone sent men to gun down members of a rival gang, North Side, led by Bugs Moran.[70]
Chicago was the first American city to have a homosexual-rights organization. The organization, formed in 1924, was called the Society for Human Rights. It produced the first American publication for homosexuals, Friendship and Freedom. Police and political pressure caused the organization to disband.[71]
The Great Depression brought unprecedented suffering to Chicago, in no small part due to the city's heavy reliance on heavy industry. Notably, industrial areas on the south side and neighborhoods lining both branches of the Chicago River were devastated; by 1933 over 50% of industrial jobs in the city had been lost, and unemployment rates amongst blacks and Mexicans in the city were over 40%. The Republican political machine in Chicago was utterly destroyed by the economic crisis, and every mayor since 1931 has been a Democrat.[72]
From 1928 to 1933, the city witnessed a tax revolt, and the city was unable to meet payroll or provide relief efforts. The fiscal crisis was resolved by 1933, and at the same time, federal relief funding began to flow into Chicago.[72] Chicago was also a hotbed of labor activism, with Unemployed Councils contributing heavily in the early depression to create solidarity for the poor and demand relief, these organizations were created by socialist and communist groups. By 1935 the Workers Alliance of America begun organizing the poor, workers, the unemployed. In the spring of 1937 Republic Steel Works witnessed the Memorial Day massacre of 1937 in the neighborhood of East Side.
In 1933, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was fatally wounded in Miami, Florida, during a failed assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1933 and 1934, the city celebrated its centennial by hosting the Century of Progress International Exposition World's Fair.[73] The theme of the fair was technological innovation over the century since Chicago's founding.[74]
1940 to 1979
Boy from Chicago, 1941
The Chicago Picasso (1967) inspired a new era in urban public art.During World War II, the city of Chicago alone produced more steel than the United Kingdom every year from 1939 – 1945, and more than Nazi Germany from 1943 – 1945.[citation needed]Protesters in Grant Park outside the 1968 Democratic National ConventionThe Great Migration, which had been on pause due to the Depression, resumed at an even faster pace in the second wave, as hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South arrived in the city to work in the steel mills, railroads, and shipping yards.[75]
On December 2, 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi conducted the world's first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. This led to the creation of the atomic bomb by the United States, which it used in World War II in 1945.[76]
Mayor Richard J. Daley, a Democrat, was elected in 1955, in the era of machine politics. In 1956, the city conducted its last major expansion when it annexed the land under O'Hare airport, including a small portion of DuPage County.[77]
By the 1960s, white residents in several neighborhoods left the city for the suburban areas – in many American cities, a process known as white flight – as Blacks continued to move beyond the Black Belt.[78] While home loan discriminatory redlining against blacks continued, the real estate industry practiced what became known as blockbusting, completely changing the racial composition of whole neighborhoods.[79] Structural changes in industry, such as globalization and job outsourcing, caused heavy job losses for lower-skilled workers. At its peak during the 1960s, some 250,000 workers were employed in the steel industry in Chicago, but the steel crisis of the 1970s and 1980s reduced this number to just 28,000 in 2015. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Raby led the Chicago Freedom Movement, which culminated in agreements between Mayor Richard J. Daley and the movement leaders.[80]
Two years later, the city hosted the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention, which featured physical confrontations both inside and outside the convention hall, with anti-war protesters, journalists and bystanders being beaten by police.[81] Major construction projects, including the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower, which in 1974 became the world's tallest building), University of Illinois at Chicago, McCormick Place, and O'Hare International Airport, were undertaken during Richard J. Daley's tenure.[82] In 1979, Jane Byrne, the city's first female mayor, was elected. She was notable for temporarily moving into the crime-ridden Cabrini-Green housing project and for leading Chicago's school system out of a financial crisis.[83]
1980 to presentIn 1983, Harold Washington became the first black mayor of Chicago. Washington's first term in office directed attention to poor and previously neglected minority neighborhoods. He was re‑elected in 1987 but died of a heart attack soon after.[84] Washington was succeeded by 6th ward Alderman Eugene Sawyer, who was elected by the Chicago City Council and served until a special election.
Richard M. Daley, son of Richard J. Daley, was elected in 1989. His accomplishments included improvements to parks and creating incentives for sustainable development, as well as closing Meigs Field in the middle of the night and destroying the runways. After successfully running for re-election five times, and becoming Chicago's longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley declined to run for a seventh term.[85][86]
In 1992, a construction accident near the Kinzie Street Bridge produced a breach connecting the Chicago River to a tunnel below, which was part of an abandoned freight tunnel system extending throughout the downtown Loop district. The tunnels filled with 250 million US gallons (1,000,000 m3) of water, affecting buildings throughout the district and forcing a shutdown of electrical power.[87] The area was shut down for three days and some buildings did not reopen for weeks; losses were estimated at $1.95 billion.[87]
On February 23, 2011, former Illinois Congressman and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel won the mayoral election.[88] Emanuel was sworn in as mayor on May 16, 2011, and won re-election in 2015.[89] Lori Lightfoot, the city's first African American woman mayor and its first openly LGBTQ Mayor, was elected to succeed Emanuel as mayor in 2019.[90] All three city-wide elective offices were held by women (and women of color) for the first time in Chicago history: in addition to Lightfoot, the City Clerk was Anna Valencia and City Treasurer, Melissa Conyears-Ervin.[91]
On May 15th, 2023, Brandon Johnson assumed office as the 57th Mayor of Chicago.
GeographyMain article: Geography of Chicago
Chicago skyline at sunset in October 2020, from near Fullerton Avenue looking southTopography
Downtown and the North Side with beaches lining the waterfront
A satellite image of ChicagoChicago is located in northEastern Illinois on the southwestern shores of freshwater Lake Michigan. It is the principal city in the Chicago metropolitan area, situated in both the Midwestern United States and the Great Lakes region. The city rests on a continental divide at the site of the Chicago Portage, connecting the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes watersheds. In addition to it lying beside Lake Michigan, two rivers—the Chicago River in downtown and the Calumet River in the industrial far South Side—flow either entirely or partially through the city.[92][93]
Chicago's history and economy are closely tied to its proximity to Lake Michigan. While the Chicago River historically handled much of the region's waterborne cargo, today's huge lake freighters use the city's Lake Calumet Harbor on the South Side. The lake also provides another positive effect: moderating Chicago's climate, making waterfront neighborhoods slightly warmer in winter and cooler in summer.[94]
When Chicago was founded in 1837, most of the early building was around the mouth of the Chicago River, as can be seen on a map of the city's original 58 blocks.[95] The overall grade of the city's central, built-up areas is relatively consistent with the natural flatness of its overall natural geography, generally exhibiting only slight differentiation otherwise. The average land elevation is 579 ft (176.5 m) above sea level. While measurements vary somewhat,[96] the lowest points are along the lake shore at 578 ft (176.2 m), while the highest point, at 672 ft (205 m), is the morainal ridge of Blue Island in the city's far south side.[97]
While the Chicago Loop is the central business district, Chicago is also a city of neighborhoods. Lake Shore Drive runs adjacent to a large portion of Chicago's waterfront. Some of the parks along the waterfront include Lincoln Park, Grant Park, Burnham Park, and Jackson Park. There are 24 public beaches across 26 miles (42 km) of the waterfront.[98] Landfill extends into portions of the lake providing space for Navy Pier, Northerly Island, the Museum Campus, and large portions of the McCormick Place Convention Center. Most of the city's high-rise commercial and residential buildings are close to the waterfront.
An informal name for the entire Chicago metropolitan area is "Chicagoland", which generally means the city and all its suburbs, though different organizations have slightly different also: Community areas in Chicago and Neighborhoods in Chicago
Community areas of ChicagoMajor sections of the city include the central business district, called The Loop, and the North, South, and West Sides.[102] The three sides of the city are represented on the Flag of Chicago by three horizontal white stripes.[103] The North Side is the most-densely-populated residential section of the city, and many high-rises are located on this side of the city along the lakefront.[104] The South Side is the largest section of the city, encompassing roughly 60% of the city's land area. The South Side contains most of the facilities of the Port of Chicago.[105]
In the late-1920s, sociologists at the University of Chicago subdivided the city into 77 distinct community areas, which can further be subdivided into over 200 informally defined article: Roads and expressways in ChicagoChicago's streets were laid out in a street grid that grew from the city's original townsite plot, which was bounded by Lake Michigan on the east, North Avenue on the north, Wood Street on the west, and 22nd Street on the south.[108] Streets following the Public Land Survey System section lines later became arterial streets in outlying sections. As new additions to the city were platted, city ordinance required them to be laid out with eight streets to the mile in one direction and sixteen in the other direction, about one street per 200 meters in one direction and one street per 100 meters in the other direction. The grid's regularity provided an efficient means of developing new real estate property. A scattering of diagonal streets, many of them originally Native American trails, also cross the city (Elston, Milwaukee, Ogden, Lincoln, etc.). Many additional diagonal streets were recommended in the Plan of Chicago, but only the extension of Ogden Avenue was ever constructed.[109]
In 2016, Chicago was ranked the sixth-most walkable large city in the United States.[110] Many of the city's residential streets have a wide patch of grass or trees between the street and the sidewalk itself. This helps to keep pedestrians on the sidewalk further away from the street traffic. Chicago's Western Avenue is the longest continuous urban street in the world.[111] Other notable streets include Michigan Avenue, State Street, Oak, Rush, Clark Street, and Belmont Avenue. The City Beautiful movement inspired Chicago's boulevards and parkways.[112]
ArchitectureFurther information: Architecture of Chicago, List of tallest buildings in Chicago, and List of Chicago Landmarks
The Chicago Building (1904–05) is a prime example of the Chicago School, displaying both variations of the Chicago window.The destruction caused by the Great Chicago Fire led to the largest building boom in the history of the nation. In 1885, the first steel-framed high-rise building, the Home Insurance Building, rose in the city as Chicago ushered in the skyscraper era,[51] which would then be followed by many other cities around the world.[113] Today, Chicago's skyline is among the world's tallest and densest.[114]
Some of the United States' tallest towers are located in Chicago; Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) is the second tallest building in the Western Hemisphere after One World Trade Center, and Trump International Hotel and Tower is the third tallest in the country.[115] The Loop's historic buildings include the Chicago Board of Trade Building, the Fine Arts Building, 35 East Wacker, and the Chicago Building, 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments by Mies van der Rohe. Many other architects have left their impression on the Chicago skyline such as Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Charles B. Atwood, John Root, and Helmut Jahn.[116][117]
The Merchandise Mart, once first on the list of largest buildings in the world, currently listed as 44th-largest (as of 9 September 2013), had its own zip code until 2008, and stands near the junction of the North and South branches of the Chicago River.[118] Presently, the four tallest buildings in the city are Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower, also a building with its own zip code), Trump International Hotel and Tower, the Aon Center (previously the Standard Oil Building), and the John Hancock Center. Industrial districts, such as some areas on the South Side, the areas along the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and the Northwest Indiana area are clustered.[119]
Chicago gave its name to the Chicago School and was home to the Prairie School, two movements in architecture.[120] Multiple kinds and scales of houses, townhouses, condominiums, and apartment buildings can be found throughout Chicago. Large swaths of the city's residential areas away from the lake are characterized by brick bungalows built from the early 20th century through the end of World War II. Chicago is also a prominent center of the Polish Cathedral style of church architecture. The Chicago suburb of Oak Park was home to famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who had designed The Robie House located near the University of Chicago.[121][122]
A popular tourist activity is to take an architecture boat tour along the Chicago River.[123]
Monuments and public art
Replica of Daniel Chester French's Statue of The Republic at the site of the World's Columbian ExpositionMain article: List of public art in ChicagoChicago is famous for its outdoor public art with donors establishing funding for such art as far back as Benjamin Ferguson's 1905 trust.[124] A number of Chicago's public art works are by modern figurative artists. Among these are Chagall's Four Seasons; the Chicago Picasso; Miro's Chicago; Calder's Flamingo; Oldenburg's Batcolumn; Moore's Large Interior Form, 1953-54, Man Enters the Cosmos and Nuclear Energy; Dubuffet's Monument with Standing Beast, Abakanowicz's Agora; and, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate which has become an icon of the city. Some events which shaped the city's history have also been memorialized by art works, including the Great Northern Migration (Saar) and the centennial of statehood for Illinois. Finally, two fountains near the Loop also function as monumental works of art: Plensa's Crown Fountain as well as Burnham and Bennett's Buckingham Fountain.[citation needed]
ClimateMain article: Climate of ChicagoChicago, IllinoisClimate chart (explanation)JFMAMJJASOND 2.1 3218 1.9 3622 2.7 4731 3.6 5942 4.1 7052 4.1 8062 4 8568 4 8366 3.3 7558 3.2 6346 3.4 4935 2.6 3523█ Average max. and min. temperatures in °F█ Precipitation totals in inchesMetric conversion
The Chicago River during the January 2014 cold waveThe city lies within the typical hot-summer humid continental climate (Köppen: Dfa), and experiences four distinct seasons.[125][126][127] Summers are hot and humid, with frequent heat waves. The July daily average temperature is 75.9 °F (24.4 °C), with afternoon temperatures peaking at 85.0 °F (29.4 °C). In a normal summer, temperatures reach at least 90 °F (32 °C) on as many as 23 days, with lakefront locations staying cooler when winds blow off the lake. Winters are relatively cold and snowy. Blizzards do occur, such as in winter 2011.[128] There are many sunny but cold days. The normal winter high from December through March is about 36 °F (2 °C). January and February are the coldest months. A polar vortex in January 2019 nearly broke the city's cold record of −27 °F (−33 °C), which was set on January 20, 1985.[129][130][131] Measurable snowfall can continue through the first or second week of April.[132]
Spring and autumn are mild, short seasons, typically with low humidity. Dew point temperatures in the summer range from an average of 55.7 °F (13.2 °C) in June to 61.7 °F (16.5 °C) in July.[133] They can reach nearly 80 °F (27 °C), such as during the July 2019 heat wave. The city lies within USDA plant hardiness zone 6a, transitioning to 5b in the suburbs.[134]
According to the National Weather Service, Chicago's highest official temperature reading of 105 °F (41 °C) was recorded on July 24, 1934.[135] Midway Airport reached 109 °F (43 °C) one day prior and recorded a heat index of 125 °F (52 °C) during the 1995 heatwave.[136] The lowest official temperature of −27 °F (−33 °C) was recorded on January 20, 1985, at O'Hare Airport.[133][136] Most of the city's rainfall is brought by thunderstorms, averaging 38 a year. The region is prone to severe thunderstorms during the spring and summer which can produce large hail, damaging winds, and occasionally tornadoes.[137]
Like other major cities, Chicago experiences an urban heat island, making the city and its suburbs milder than surrounding rural areas, especially at night and in winter. The proximity to Lake Michigan tends to keep the Chicago lakefront somewhat cooler in summer and less brutally cold in winter than inland parts of the city and suburbs away from the lake.[138] Northeast winds from wintertime cyclones departing south of the region sometimes bring the city lake-effect snow.[139]
Climate data for Chicago (Midway Airport), 1991–2020 normals,[a] extremes 1928–presentMonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecYearRecord high °F (°C)67(19)75(24)86(30)92(33)102(39)107(42)109(43)104(40)102(39)94(34)81(27)72(22)109(43)Mean maximum °F (°C)53.4(11.9)57.9(14.4)72.0(22.2)81.5(27.5)89.2(31.8)93.9(34.4)96.0(35.6)94.2(34.6)90.8(32.7)82.8(28.2)68.0(20.0)57.5(14.2)97.1(36.2)Average high °F (°C)32.8(0.4)36.8(2.7)47.9(8.8)60.0(15.6)71.5(21.9)81.2(27.3)85.2(29.6)83.1(28.4)76.5(24.7)63.7(17.6)49.6(9.8)37.7(3.2)60.5(15.8)Daily mean °F (°C)26.2(−3.2)29.9(−1.2)39.9(4.4)50.9(10.5)61.9(16.6)71.9(22.2)76.7(24.8)75.0(23.9)67.8(19.9)55.3(12.9)42.4(5.8)31.5(−0.3)52.4(11.3)Average low °F (°C)19.5(−6.9)22.9(−5.1)32.0(0.0)41.7(5.4)52.4(11.3)62.7(17.1)68.1(20.1)66.9(19.4)59.2(15.1)46.8(8.2)35.2(1.8)25.3(−3.7)44.4(6.9)Mean minimum °F (°C)−3(−19)3.4(−15.9)14.1(−9.9)28.2(−2.1)39.1(3.9)49.3(9.6)58.6(14.8)57.6(14.2)45.0(7.2)31.8(−0.1)19.7(−6.8)5.3(−14.8)−6.5(−21.4)Record low °F (°C)−25(−32)−20(−29)−7(−22)10(−12)28(−2)35(2)46(8)43(6)29(−2)20(−7)−3(−19)−20(−29)−25(−32)Average precipitation inches (mm)2.30(58)2.12(54)2.66(68)4.15(105)4.75(121)4.53(115)4.02(102)4.10(104)3.33(85)3.86(98)2.73(69)2.33(59)40.88(1,038)Average snowfall inches (cm)12.5(32)10.1(26)5.7(14)1.0(2.5)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.1(0.25)1.5(3.8)7.9(20)38.8(99)Average precipitation days (≥ 0.01 in)11.59.411.112.012.411.110.09.38.410.810.210.8127.0Average snowy days (≥ 0.1 in)8.96.43.90.90.00.00.00.00.00.21.66.328.2Average ultraviolet index1246799864215Source 1: NOAA[140][133][136], WRCC[141]Source 2: Weather Atlas (UV)[142]Climate data for Chicago (O'Hare Int'l Airport), 1991–2020 normals,[a] extremes 1871–present[b]Sunshine data for ChicagoTime zoneAs in the rest of the state of Illinois, Chicago forms part of the Central Time Zone. The border with the Eastern Time Zone is located a short distance to the east, used in Michigan and certain parts of Indiana.
DemographicsMain article: Demographics of ChicagoHistorical populationCensusPop.Note%±18404,470—185029,963570.3%1860112,172274.4%1870298,977166.5%1880503,18568.3%18901,099,850118.6%19001,698,57554.4%19102,185,28328.7%19202,701,70523.6%19303,376,43825.0%19403,396,8080.6%19503,620,9626.6%19603,550,404−1.9%19703,366,957−5.2%19803,005,072−10.7%19902,783,726−7.4%20002,896,0164.0%20102,695,598−6.9%20202,746,3881.9%2021 (est.)2,696,555−1.8%United States Census Bureau[148]2010–2020[7]During its first hundred years, Chicago was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. When founded in 1833, fewer than 200 people had settled on what was then the American frontier. By the time of its first census, seven years later, the population had reached over 4,000. In the forty years from 1850 to 1890, the city's population grew from slightly under 30,000 to over 1 million. At the end of the 19th century, Chicago was the fifth-largest city in the world,[149] and the largest of the cities that did not exist at the dawn of the century. Within sixty years of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the population went from about 300,000 to over 3 million,[150] and reached its highest ever recorded population of 3.6 million for the 1950 census.
From the last two decades of the 19th century, Chicago was the destination of waves of immigrants from Ireland, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, including Italians, Jews, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Romanians, Turkish, Croatians, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Czechs.[151][152] To these ethnic groups, the basis of the city's industrial working class, were added an additional influx of African Americans from the American South—with Chicago's black population doubling between 1910 and 1920 and doubling again between 1920 and 1930.[151] Chicago has a significant Bosnian population, many of whom arrived in the 1990s and 2000s.[153]
In the 1920s and 1930s, the great majority of African Americans moving to Chicago settled in a so‑called "Black Belt" on the city's South Side.[151] A large number of blacks also settled on the West Side. By 1930, two-thirds of Chicago's black population lived in sections of the city which were 90% black in racial composition.[151] Chicago's South Side emerged as United States second-largest urban black concentration, following New York's Harlem. In 1990, Chicago's South Side and the adjoining south suburbs constituted the largest black majority region in the entire United States.[151]
Most of Chicago's foreign-born population were born in Mexico, Poland and India.[154]
Chicago's population declined in the latter half of the 20th century, from over 3.6 million in 1950 down to under 2.7 million by 2010. By the time of the official census count in 1990, it was overtaken by Los Angeles as the United States' second largest city.[155]
The city has seen a rise in population for the 2000 census and after a decrease in 2010, it rose again for the 2020 census.[156]
According to U.S. census estimates as of July 2019, Chicago's largest racial or ethnic group is non-Hispanic White at 32.8% of the population, Blacks at 30.1% and the Hispanic population at 29.0% of the composition2020[161]2010[162]1990[160]1970[160]1940[160]White (non-Hispanic)31.4%31.7%37.9%59.0%[c]91.2%Hispanic or Latino29.8%28.9%19.6%7.4%[c]0.5%Black or African American (non-Hispanic)28.7%32.3%39.1%32.7%8.2%Asian (non-Hispanic)6.9%5.4%3.7%0.9%0.1%Two or more races (non-Hispanic)2.6%1.3%n/an/an/a
Ethnic origins in Chicago
Map of racial distribution in Chicago, 2010 U.S. census. Each dot is 25 people: ⬤ White ⬤ Black ⬤ Asian ⬤ Hispanic ⬤ OtherChicago has the third-largest LGBT population in the United States. In 2018, the Chicago Department of Health, estimated 7.5% of the adult population, approximately 146,000 Chicagoans, were LGBTQ.[163] In 2015, roughly 4% of the population identified as LGBT.[164][165] Since the 2013 legalization of same-sex marriage in Illinois, over 10,000 same-sex couples have wed in Cook County, a majority of them in Chicago.[166][167]
Chicago became a "de jure" sanctuary city in 2012 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council passed the Welcoming City Ordinance.[168]
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey data estimates for 2008–2012, the median income for a household in the city was $47,408, and the median income for a family was $54,188. Male full-time workers had a median income of $47,074 versus $42,063 for females. About 18.3% of families and 22.1% of the population lived below the poverty line.[169] In 2018, Chicago ranked seventh globally for the highest number of ultra-high-net-worth residents with roughly 3,300 residents worth more than $30 million.[170]
According to the 2008–2012 American Community Survey, the ancestral groups having 10,000 or more persons in Chicago were:[171]
Ireland (137,799)Poland (134,032)Germany (120,328)Italy (77,967)China (66,978)American (37,118)UK (36,145)recent African (32,727)India (25,000)Russia (19,771)Arab (17,598)European (15,753)Sweden (15,151)Japan (15,142)Greece (15,129)France (except Basque) (11,410)Ukraine (11,104)West Indian (except Hispanic groups) (10,349)Persons identifying themselves in "Other groups" were classified at 1.72 million, and unclassified or not reported were approximately 153,000.[171]
ReligionReligion in Chicago (2014)[172][173]
Protestantism (35%) Roman Catholicism (34%) Eastern Orthodoxy (1%) Jehovah's Witness (1%) No religion (22%) Judaism (3%) Islam (2%) Buddhism (1%) Hinduism (1%)According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity is the most prevalently practiced religion in Chicago (71%),[173] with the city being the fourth-most religious metropolis in the United States after Dallas, Atlanta and Houston.[173] Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are the largest branches (34% and 35% respectively), followed by Eastern Orthodoxy and Jehovah's Witnesses with 1% each.[172] Chicago also has a sizable non-Christian population. Non-Christian groups include Irreligious (22%), Judaism (3%), Islam (2%), Buddhism (1%) and Hinduism (1%).[172]
Chicago is the headquarters of several religious denominations, including the Evangelical Covenant Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is the seat of several dioceses. The Fourth Presbyterian Church is one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in the United States based on memberships.[174] Since the 20th century Chicago has also been the headquarters of the Assyrian Church of the East.[175] In 2014 the Catholic Church was the largest individual Christian denomination (34%), with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago being the largest Catholic jurisdiction. Evangelical Protestantism form the largest theological Protestant branch (16%), followed by Mainline Protestants (11%), and historically Black churches (8%). Among denominational Protestant branches, Baptists formed the largest group in Chicago (10%); followed by Nondenominational (5%); Lutherans (4%); and Pentecostals (3%).[172]
Non-Christian faiths accounted for 7% of the religious population in 2014. Judaism has at least 261,000 adherents which is 3% of the population, making it the second largest religion.[176][172] A 2020 study estimated the total Jewish population of the Chicago metropolitan area, both religious and irreligious, at 319,600.[177]
The first two Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893 and 1993 were held in Chicago.[178] Many international religious leaders have visited Chicago, including Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama[179] and Pope John Paul II in 1979.[180]
EconomyMain article: Economy of ChicagoSee also: List of companies in the Chicago metropolitan area
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
The Chicago Board of Trade BuildingChicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $670.5 billion according to September 2017 estimates.[181] The city has also been rated as having the most balanced economy in the United States, due to its high level of diversification.[182] The Chicago metropolitan area has the third-largest science and engineering work force of any metropolitan area in the nation.[183] Chicago was the base of commercial operations for industrialists John Crerar, John Whitfield Bunn, Richard Teller Crane, Marshall Field, John Farwell, Julius Rosenwald and many other commercial visionaries who laid the foundation for Midwestern and global industry.
Chicago is a major world financial center, with the second-largest central business district in the United States.[184] The city is the seat of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Bank's Seventh District. The city has major financial and futures exchanges, including the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the "Merc"), which is owned, along with the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), by Chicago's CME Group. In 2017, Chicago exchanges traded 4.7 billion derivatives with a face value of over one quadrillion dollars. Chase Bank has its commercial and retail banking headquarters in Chicago's Chase Tower.[185] Academically, Chicago has been influential through the Chicago school of economics, which fielded some 12 Nobel Prize winners.
The city and its surrounding metropolitan area contain the third-largest labor pool in the United States with about 4.63 million workers.[186] Illinois is home to 66 Fortune 1000 companies, including those in Chicago.[187] The city of Chicago also hosts 12 Fortune Global 500 companies and 17 Financial Times 500 companies. The city claims three Dow 30 companies: aerospace giant Boeing, which moved its headquarters from Seattle to the Chicago Loop in 2001,[188] McDonald's and Walgreens Boots Alliance.[189] For six consecutive years from 2013 through 2018, Chicago was ranked the nation's top metropolitan area for corporate relocations.[190] However, three Fortune 500 companies left Chicago in 2022, leaving the city with 35, still second to New York City.[191]
Manufacturing, printing, publishing, and food processing also play major roles in the city's economy. Several medical products and services companies are headquartered in the Chicago area, including Baxter International, Boeing, Abbott Laboratories, and the Healthcare division of General Electric. Prominent food companies based in Chicago include the world headquarters of Conagra, Ferrara Candy Company, Kraft Heinz, McDonald's, Mondelez International, and Quaker Oats.[citation needed] Chicago has been a hub of the retail sector since its early development, with Montgomery Ward, Sears, and Marshall Field's. Today the Chicago metropolitan area is the headquarters of several retailers, including Walgreens, Sears, Ace Hardware, Claire's, ULTA Beauty and Crate & Barrel.[citation needed]
Late in the 19th century, Chicago was part of the bicycle craze, with the Western Wheel Company, which introduced stamping to the production process and significantly reduced costs,[192] while early in the 20th century, the city was part of the automobile revolution, hosting the Brass Era car builder Bugmobile, which was founded there in 1907.[193] Chicago was also the site of the Schwinn Bicycle Company.
Chicago is a major world convention destination. The city's main convention center is McCormick Place. With its four interconnected buildings, it is the largest convention center in the nation and third-largest in the world.[194] Chicago also ranks third in the U.S. (behind Las Vegas and Orlando) in number of conventions hosted annually.[195]
Chicago's minimum wage for non-tipped employees is one of the highest in the nation and reached $15 in 2021.[196][197]
Culture and contemporary lifeFurther information: Culture of Chicago, List of people from Chicago, and List of museums and cultural institutions in Chicago
The National Hellenic Museum in Greektown is one of several ethnic museums comprising the Chicago Cultural Alliance.
Andy's Jazz Club in River North, a staple of the Chicago jazz scene since the 1950sThe city's waterfront location and nightlife has attracted residents and tourists alike. Over a third of the city population is concentrated in the lakefront neighborhoods from Rogers Park in the north to South Shore in the south.[198] The city has many upscale dining establishments as well as many ethnic restaurant districts. These districts include the Mexican American neighborhoods, such as Pilsen along 18th street, and La Villita along 26th Street; the Puerto Rican enclave of Paseo Boricua in the Humboldt Park neighborhood; Greektown, along South Halsted Street, immediately west of downtown;[199] Little Italy, along Taylor Street; Chinatown in Armour Square; Polish Patches in West Town; Little Seoul in Albany Park around Lawrence Avenue; Little Vietnam near Broadway in Uptown; and the Desi area, along Devon Avenue in West Ridge.[200]
Downtown is the center of Chicago's financial, cultural, governmental and commercial institutions and the site of Grant Park and many of the city's skyscrapers. Many of the city's financial institutions, such as the CBOT and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, are located within a section of downtown called "The Loop", which is an eight-block by five-block area of city streets that is encircled by elevated rail tracks. The term "The Loop" is largely used by locals to refer to the entire downtown area as well. The central area includes the Near North Side, the Near South Side, and the Near West Side, as well as the Loop. These areas contribute famous skyscrapers, abundant restaurants, shopping, museums, a stadium for the Chicago Bears, convention facilities, parkland, and beaches.[citation needed]
Lincoln Park contains the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Lincoln Park Conservatory. The River North Gallery District features the nation's largest concentration of contemporary art galleries outside of New York City.[citation needed]
Lakeview is home to Boystown, the city's large LGBT nightlife and culture center. The Chicago Pride Parade, held the last Sunday in June, is one of the world's largest with over a million people in attendance.[201] North Halsted Street is the main thoroughfare of Boystown.[202]
The South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park is the home of former US President Barack Obama. It also contains the University of Chicago, ranked one of the world's top ten universities,[203] and the Museum of Science and Industry. The 6-mile (9.7 km) long Burnham Park stretches along the waterfront of the South Side. Two of the city's largest parks are also located on this side of the city: Jackson Park, bordering the waterfront, hosted the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, and is the site of the aforementioned museum; and slightly west sits Washington Park. The two parks themselves are connected by a wide strip of parkland called the Midway Plaisance, running adjacent to the University of Chicago. The South Side hosts one of the city's largest parades, the annual African American Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which travels through Bronzeville to Washington Park. Ford Motor Company has an automobile assembly plant on the South Side in Hegewisch, and most of the facilities of the Port of Chicago are also on the South Side.[citation needed]
The West Side holds the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the largest collections of tropical plants in any U.S. city. Prominent Latino cultural attractions found here include Humboldt Park's Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture and the annual Puerto Rican People's Parade, as well as the National Museum of Mexican Art and St. Adalbert's Church in Pilsen. The Near West Side holds the University of Illinois at Chicago and was once home to Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios, the site of which has been rebuilt as the global headquarters of McDonald's.[citation needed]
The city's distinctive accent, made famous by its use in classic films like The Blues Brothers and television programs like the Saturday Night Live skit "Bill Swerski's Superfans", is an advanced form of Inland Northern American English. This dialect can also be found in other cities bordering the Great Lakes such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Rochester, New York, and most prominently features a rearrangement of certain vowel sounds, such as the short 'a' sound as in "cat", which can sound more like "kyet" to outsiders. The accent remains well associated with the city.[204]
Entertainment and the artsSee also: Theater in Chicago, Visual arts of Chicago, and Music of Chicago
The Chicago Theatre
The spire of the Copernicus Center is modeled on the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
Jay Pritzker Pavilion at nightRenowned Chicago theater companies include the Goodman Theatre in the Loop; the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Victory Gardens Theater in Lincoln Park; and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier. Broadway In Chicago offers Broadway-style entertainment at five theaters: the Nederlander Theatre, CIBC Theatre, Cadillac Palace Theatre, Auditorium Building of Roosevelt University, and Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place. Polish language productions for Chicago's large Polish speaking population can be seen at the historic Gateway Theatre in Jefferson Park. Since 1968, the Joseph Jefferson Awards are given annually to acknowledge excellence in theater in the Chicago area. Chicago's theater community spawned modern improvisational theater, and includes the prominent groups The Second City and I.O. (formerly ImprovOlympic).[citation needed]
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) performs at Symphony Center, and is recognized as one of the best orchestras in the world.[205] Also performing regularly at Symphony Center is the Chicago Sinfonietta, a more diverse and multicultural counterpart to the CSO. In the summer, many outdoor concerts are given in Grant Park and Millennium Park. Ravinia Festival, located 25 miles (40 km) north of Chicago, is the summer home of the CSO, and is a favorite destination for many Chicagoans. The Civic Opera House is home to the Lyric Opera of Chicago.[citation needed] The Lithuanian Opera Company of Chicago was founded by Lithuanian Chicagoans in 1956,[206] and presents operas in Lithuanian.
The Joffrey Ballet and Chicago Festival Ballet perform in various venues, including the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Chicago has several other contemporary and jazz dance troupes, such as the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Chicago Dance Crash.[citation needed]
Other live-music genre which are part of the city's cultural heritage include Chicago blues, Chicago soul, jazz, and gospel. The city is the birthplace of house music (a popular form of electronic dance music) and industrial music, and is the site of an influential hip hop scene. In the 1980s and 90s, the city was the global center for house and industrial music, two forms of music created in Chicago, as well as being popular for alternative rock, punk, and new wave. The city has been a center for rave culture, since the 1980s. A flourishing independent rock music culture brought forth Chicago indie. Annual festivals feature various acts, such as Lollapalooza and the Pitchfork Music Festival.[citation needed] Lollapalooza originated in Chicago in 1991 and at first travelled to many cities, but as of 2005 its home has been Chicago.[207] A 2007 report on the Chicago music industry by the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center ranked Chicago third among metropolitan U.S. areas in "size of music industry" and fourth among all U.S. cities in "number of concerts and performances".[208]
Chicago has a distinctive fine art tradition. For much of the twentieth century, it nurtured a strong style of figurative surrealism, as in the works of Ivan Albright and Ed Paschke. In 1968 and 1969, members of the Chicago Imagists, such as Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Robert Lostutter, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi produced bizarre representational paintings. Henry Darger is one of the most celebrated figures of outsider art.[209]
TourismMain article: Tourism in Chicago
Ferries offer sightseeing tours and water-taxi transportation along the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.
Aerial view of Navy Pier at night
Magnificent Mile hosts numerous upscale stores and landmarks, including the Chicago Water Tower.In 2014, Chicago attracted 50.17 million domestic leisure travelers, 11.09 million domestic business travelers and 1.308 million overseas visitors.[210] These visitors contributed more than US$13.7 billion to Chicago's economy.[210] Upscale shopping along the Magnificent Mile and State Street, thousands of restaurants, as well as Chicago's eminent architecture, continue to draw tourists. The city is the United States' third-largest convention destination. A 2017 study by Walk Score ranked Chicago the sixth-most walkable of fifty largest cities in the United States.[211] Most conventions are held at McCormick Place, just south of Soldier Field. Navy Pier, located just east of Streeterville, is 3,000 ft (910 m) long and houses retail stores, restaurants, museums, exhibition halls and auditoriums. Chicago was the first city in the world to ever erect a ferris wheel. The Willis Tower (formerly named Sears Tower) is a popular destination for tourists.[212]
MuseumsAmong the city's museums are the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Shedd Aquarium. The Museum Campus joins the southern section of Grant Park, which includes the renowned Art Institute of Chicago. Buckingham Fountain anchors the downtown park along the lakefront. The University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa has an extensive collection of ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern archaeological artifacts. Other museums and galleries in Chicago include the Chicago History Museum, the Driehaus Museum, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Polish Museum of America, the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the Pritzker Military Library, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and the Museum of Science and Industry.[citation needed]
CuisineSee also: Culture of Chicago § Food and drink, Chicago farmers' markets, and List of Michelin starred restaurants in Chicago
Chicago-style deep-dish pizza
A Polish market in ChicagoChicago lays claim to a large number of regional specialties that reflect the city's ethnic and working-class roots. Included among these are its nationally renowned deep-dish pizza; this style is said to have originated at Pizzeria Uno.[213] The Chicago-style thin crust is also popular in the city.[214] Certain Chicago pizza favorites include Lou Malnati's and Giordano's.[215]
The Chicago-style hot dog, typically an all-beef hot dog, is loaded with an array of toppings that often includes pickle relish, yellow mustard, pickled sport peppers, tomato wedges, dill pickle spear and topped off with celery salt on a poppy seed bun.[216] Enthusiasts of the Chicago-style hot dog frown upon the use of ketchup as a garnish, but may prefer to add giardiniera.[217][218][219]
A distinctly Chicago sandwich, the Italian beef sandwich is thinly sliced beef simmered in au jus and served on an Italian roll with sweet peppers or spicy giardiniera. A popular modification is the Combo—an Italian beef sandwich with the addition of an Italian sausage. The Maxwell Street Polish is a grilled or deep-fried kielbasa—on a hot dog roll, topped with grilled onions, yellow mustard, and hot sport peppers.[220]
Chicken Vesuvio is roasted bone-in chicken cooked in oil and garlic next to garlicky oven-roasted potato wedges and a sprinkling of green peas. The Puerto Rican-influenced jibarito is a sandwich made with flattened, fried green plantains instead of bread. The mother-in-law is a tamale topped with chili and served on a hot dog bun.[221] The tradition of serving the Greek dish saganaki while aflame has its origins in Chicago's Greek community.[222] The appetizer, which consists of a square of fried cheese, is doused with Metaxa and flambéed table-side.[223] Chicago-style barbecue features hardwood smoked rib tips and hot links which were traditionally cooked in an aquarium smoker, a Chicago invention.[224] Annual festivals feature various Chicago signature dishes, such as Taste of Chicago and the Chicago Food Truck Festival.[225]
One of the world's most decorated restaurants and a recipient of three Michelin stars, Alinea is located in Chicago. Well-known chefs who have had restaurants in Chicago include: Charlie Trotter, Rick Tramonto, Grant Achatz, and Rick Bayless. In 2003, Robb Report named Chicago the country's "most exceptional dining destination".[226]
LiteratureFurther information: Chicago literature
Carl Sandburg's most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat / Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, / Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."Chicago literature finds its roots in the city's tradition of lucid, direct journalism, lending to a strong tradition of social realism. In the Encyclopedia of Chicago, Northwestern University Professor Bill Savage describes Chicago fiction as prose which tries to "capture the essence of the city, its spaces and its people". The challenge for early writers was that Chicago was a frontier outpost that transformed into a global metropolis in the span of two generations. Narrative fiction of that time, much of it in the style of "high-flown romance" and "genteel realism", needed a new approach to describe the urban social, political, and economic conditions of Chicago.[227] Nonetheless, Chicagoans worked hard to create a literary tradition that would stand the test of time,[228] and create a "city of feeling" out of concrete, steel, vast lake, and open prairie.[229] Much notable Chicago fiction focuses on the city itself, with social criticism keeping exultation in check.
At least three short periods in the history of Chicago have had a lasting influence on American literature.[230] These include from the time of the Great Chicago Fire to about 1900, what became known as the Chicago Literary Renaissance in the 1910s and early 1920s, and the period of the Great Depression through the 1940s.
What would become the influential Poetry magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, who was working as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune. The magazine discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, and John Ashbery.[231] T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", was first published by Poetry. Contributors have included Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg, among others. The magazine was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements. From the 1950s through 1970s, American poetry continued to evolve in Chicago.[232] In the 1980s, a modern form of poetry performance began in Chicago, the poetry slam.[233]
SportsMain article: Sports in ChicagoTop: Soldier Field; Bottom: Wrigley FieldTop: United Center; Bottom: Guaranteed Rate FieldThe city has two Major League Baseball (MLB) teams: the Chicago Cubs of the National League play in Wrigley Field on the North Side; and the Chicago White Sox of the American League play in Guaranteed Rate Field on the South Side. The two teams have faced each other in a World Series only once, in 1906.[citation needed]
The Cubs are the oldest Major League Baseball team to have never changed their city;[234] they have played in Chicago since 1871.[235] They had the dubious honor of having the longest championship drought in American professional sports, failing to win a World Series between 1908 and 2016. The White Sox have played on the South Side continuously since 1901. They have won three World Series titles (1906, 1917, 2005) and six American League pennants, including the first in 1901.
The Chicago Bears, one of the last two remaining charter members of the National Football League (NFL), have won nine NFL Championships, including the 1985 Super Bowl XX. The Bears play their home games at Soldier Field.
The Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association (NBA) is one of the most recognized basketball teams in the world.[236] During the 1990s, with Michael Jordan leading them, the Bulls won six NBA championships in eight seasons.[237][238]
The Chicago Blackhawks of the National Hockey League (NHL) began play in 1926, and are one of the "Original Six" teams of the NHL. The Blackhawks have won six Stanley Cups, including in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Both the Bulls and the Blackhawks play at the United Center.[citation needed]
Major league professional teams in Chicago (ranked by attendance)ClubLeagueSportVenueAttendanceFoundedChampionshipsChicago BearsNFLFootballSoldier Field61,14219199 Championships (1 Super Bowl)Chicago CubsMLBBaseballWrigley Field41,64918703 World SeriesChicago White SoxMLBBaseballGuaranteed Rate Field40,61519003 World SeriesChicago BlackhawksNHLIce hockeyUnited Center21,65319266 Stanley CupsChicago BullsNBABasketball20,77619666 NBA ChampionshipsChicago FireMLSSoccerSoldier Field17,38319971 MLS Cup, 1 Supporters ShieldChicago SkyWNBABasketballWintrust Arena10,38720061 WNBA Championships
Chicago Half Marathon on Lake Shore Drive on the South SideChicago Fire FC is a member of Major League Soccer (MLS) and plays at Soldier Field. The Fire have won one league title and four U.S. Open Cups, since their founding in 1997. In 1994, the United States hosted a successful FIFA World Cup with games played at Soldier Field.[citation needed]
The Chicago Sky is a professional basketball team playing in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). They play home games at the Wintrust Arena. The team was founded before the 2006 WNBA season began.[239]
The Chicago Marathon has been held each year since 1977 except for 1987, when a half marathon was run in its place. The Chicago Marathon is one of six World Marathon Majors.[240]
Five area colleges play in Division I conferences: two from major conferences—the DePaul Blue Demons (Big East Conference) and the Northwestern Wildcats (Big Ten Conference)—and three from other D1 conferences—the Chicago State Cougars (Western Athletic Conference); the Loyola Ramblers (Missouri Valley Conference); and the UIC Flames (Horizon League).[241]
Chicago has also entered into esports with the creation of the Chicago Huntsmen, a professional Call of Duty team that participates within the CDL.[citation needed]Parks and greenspaceMain articles: Parks in Chicago, Chicago Boulevard System, and Cook County Forest Preserves
Portage Park on the Northwest Side
Washington Square Park on the Near North SideWhen Chicago was incorporated in 1837, it chose the motto Urbs in Horto, a Latin phrase which means "City in a Garden". Today, the Chicago Park District consists of more than 570 parks with over 8,000 acres (3,200 ha) of municipal parkland. There are 31 sand beaches, a plethora of museums, two world-class conservatories, and 50 nature areas.[242] Lincoln Park, the largest of the city's parks, covers 1,200 acres (490 ha) and has over 20 million visitors each year, making it third in the number of visitors after Central Park in New York City, and the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, D.C.[243]
There is a historic boulevard system,[244] a network of wide, tree-lined boulevards which connect a number of Chicago parks.[245] The boulevards and the parks were authorized by the Illinois legislature in 1869.[246] A number of Chicago neighborhoods emerged along these roadways in the 19th century.[245] The building of the boulevard system continued intermittently until 1942. It includes nineteen boulevards, eight parks, and six squares, along twenty-six miles of interconnected streets.[247] The Chicago Park Boulevard System Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.[248][249]
With berths for more than 6,000 boats, the Chicago Park District operates the nation's largest municipal harbor system.[250] In addition to ongoing beautification and renewal projects for the existing parks, a number of new parks have been added in recent years, such as the Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown, DuSable Park on the Near North Side, and most notably, Millennium Park, which is in the northwestern corner of one of Chicago's oldest parks, Grant Park in the Chicago Loop.[citation needed]
The wealth of greenspace afforded by Chicago's parks is further augmented by the Cook County Forest Preserves, a network of open spaces containing forest, prairie, wetland, streams, and lakes that are set aside as natural areas which lie along the city's outskirts,[251] including both the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe and the Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield.[252] Washington Park is also one of the city's biggest parks; covering nearly 400 acres (160 ha). The park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places listings in South Side Chicago.[253]
Law and governmentGovernmentMain article: Government of Chicago
Daley Plaza with Picasso statue, City Hall in background. At right, the Daley Plaza Building contains the state law courts.The government of the City of Chicago is divided into executive and legislative branches. The mayor of Chicago is the chief executive, elected by general election for a term of four years, with no term limits. The current mayor is Brandon Johnson. The mayor appoints commissioners and other officials who oversee the various departments. As well as the mayor, Chicago's clerk and treasurer are also elected citywide. The City Council is the legislative branch and is made up of 50 aldermen, one elected from each ward in the city.[254] The council takes official action through the passage of ordinances and resolutions and approves the city budget.[255]
The Chicago Police Department provides law enforcement and the Chicago Fire Department provides fire suppression and emergency medical services for the city and its residents. Civil and criminal law cases are heard in the Cook County Circuit Court of the State of Illinois court system, or in the Northern District of Illinois, in the federal system. In the state court, the public prosecutor is the Illinois state's attorney; in the Federal court it is the United States attorney.
PoliticsMain article: Political history of ChicagoPresidential election results in Chicago[256]YearDemocraticRepublicanOthers202082.5% 944,73515.8% 181,2341.6% 18,772201682.9% 912,94512.3% 135,3204.8% 53,262During much of the last half of the 19th century, Chicago's politics were dominated by a growing Democratic Party organization. During the 1880s and 1890s, Chicago had a powerful radical tradition with large and highly organized socialist, anarchist and labor organizations.[257] For much of the 20th century, Chicago has been among the largest and most reliable Democratic strongholds in the United States; with Chicago's Democratic vote the state of Illinois has been "solid blue" in presidential elections since 1992. Even before then, it was not unheard of for Republican presidential candidates to win handily in downstate Illinois, only to lose statewide due to large Democratic margins in Chicago. The citizens of Chicago have not elected a Republican mayor since 1927, when William Thompson was voted into office. The strength of the party in the city is partly a consequence of Illinois state politics, where the Republicans have come to represent rural and farm concerns while the Democrats support urban issues such as Chicago's public school funding.[citation needed]
Chicago contains less than 25% of the state's population, but it is split between eight of Illinois' 17 districts in the United States House of Representatives. All eight of the city's representatives are Democrats; only two Republicans have represented a significant portion of the city since 1973, for one term each: Robert P. Hanrahan from 1973 to 1975, and Michael Patrick Flanagan from 1995 to 1997.[citation needed]
Machine politics persisted in Chicago after the decline of similar machines in other large U.S. cities.[258] During much of that time, the city administration found opposition mainly from a liberal "independent" faction of the Democratic Party. The independents finally gained control of city government in 1983 with the election of Harold Washington (in office 1983–1987). From 1989 until May 16, 2011, Chicago was under the leadership of its longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley, the son of Richard J. Daley. Because of the dominance of the Democratic Party in Chicago, the Democratic primary vote held in the spring is generally more significant than the general elections in November for U.S. House and Illinois State seats. The aldermanic, mayoral, and other city offices are filled through nonpartisan elections with runoffs as needed.[259]
The city is home of former United States President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama; Barack Obama was formerly a state legislator representing Chicago and later a US senator. The Obamas' residence is located near the University of Chicago in Kenwood on the city's south side.[260]
CrimeMain articles: Crime in Chicago and Timeline of organized crime in Chicago
Chicago Police Department SUV, 2011Chicago's crime rate in 2020 was 3,926 per 100,000 people.[261] Chicago experienced major rises in violent crime in the 1920s, in the late 1960s, and in the 2020s.[262][263] Chicago's biggest criminal justice challenges have changed little over the last 50 years, and statistically reside with homicide, armed robbery, gang violence, and aggravated battery. Chicago has attracted attention for a high murder rate and perceived crime rate compared to other major cities like New York and Los Angeles. However, while it has a large absolute number of crimes due to its size, Chicago is not among the top-25 most violent cities in the United States.[264][265]
Murder rates in Chicago vary greatly depending on the neighborhood in question.[266] The neighborhoods of Englewood on the South Side, and Austin on the West side, for example, have homicide rates that are ten times higher than other parts of the city.[267] Chicago has an estimated population of over 100,000 active gang members from nearly 60 factions.[268][269] According to reports in 2013, "most of Chicago's violent crime comes from gangs trying to maintain control of drug-selling territories",[270] and is specifically related to the activities of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is active in several American cities.[271] Violent crime rates vary significantly by area of the city, with more economically developed areas having low rates, but other sections have much higher rates of crime.[270] In 2013, the violent crime rate was 910 per 100,000 people;[272] the murder rate was 10.4 – while high crime districts saw 38.9, low crime districts saw 2.5 murders per 100,000.[273]
Chicago has a long history of public corruption that regularly draws the attention of federal law enforcement and federal prosecutors.[274] From 2012 to 2019, 33 Chicago aldermen were convicted on corruption charges, roughly one third of those elected in the time period. A report from the Office of the Legislative Inspector General noted that over half of Chicago's elected alderman took illegal campaign contributions in 2013.[275] Most corruption cases in Chicago are prosecuted by the US Attorney's office, as legal jurisdiction makes most offenses punishable as a federal crime.[276]
EducationMain article: Chicago Public Schools
When it was opened in 1991, the central Harold Washington Library appeared in Guinness World Records as the largest municipal public library building in the world.Schools and librariesChicago Public Schools (CPS) is the governing body of the school district that contains over 600 public elementary and high schools citywide, including several selective-admission magnet schools. There are eleven selective enrollment high schools in the Chicago Public Schools,[277] designed to meet the needs of Chicago's most academically advanced students. These schools offer a rigorous curriculum with mainly honors and Advanced Placement (AP) courses.[278] Walter Payton College Prep High School is ranked number one in the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois.[279]
Chicago high school rankings are determined by the average test scores on state achievement tests.[280] The district, with an enrollment exceeding 400,545 students (2013–2014 20th Day Enrollment), is the third-largest in the U.S.[281] On September 10, 2012, teachers for the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike for the first time since 1987 over pay, resources and other issues.[282] According to data compiled in 2014, Chicago's "choice system", where students who test or apply and may attend one of a number of public high schools (there are about 130), sorts students of different achievement levels into different schools (high performing, middle performing, and low performing schools).[283]
Chicago has a network of Lutheran schools,[284] and several private schools are run by other denominations and faiths, such as the Ida Crown Jewish Academy in West Ridge. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago operates Catholic schools, that include Jesuit preparatory schools and others. A number of private schools are completely secular. There are also the private Chicago Academy for the Arts, a high school focused on six different categories of the arts and the public Chicago High School for the Arts, a high school focused on five categories (visual arts, theatre, musical theatre, dance, and music) of the arts.[285]
The Chicago Public Library system operates 3 regional libraries and 77 neighbourhood branches, including the central library.[286]
Colleges and universitiesFor a more comprehensive list, see List of colleges and universities in Chicago.
The University of Chicago, as seen from the Midway PlaisanceSince the 1850s, Chicago has been a world center of higher education and research with several universities. These institutions consistently rank among the top "National Universities" in the United States, as determined by U.S. News & World Report.[citation needed] Highly regarded universities in Chicago and the surrounding area are: the University of Chicago; Northwestern University; Illinois Institute of Technology; Loyola University Chicago; DePaul University; Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago. Other notable schools include: Chicago State University; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; East–West University; National Louis University; North Park University; NorthEastern Illinois University; Robert Morris University Illinois; Roosevelt University; Saint Xavier University; Rush University; and Shimer College.[287]
William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, was instrumental in the creation of the junior college concept, establishing nearby Joliet Junior College as the first in the nation in 1901.[288] His legacy continues with the multiple community colleges in the Chicago proper, including the seven City Colleges of Chicago: Richard J. Daley College, Kennedy–King College, Malcolm X College, Olive–Harvey College, Truman College, Harold Washington College and Wilbur Wright College, in addition to the privately held MacCormac College.[citation needed]
Chicago also has a high concentration of post-baccalaureate institutions, graduate schools, seminaries, and theological schools, such as the Adler School of Professional Psychology, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, the Erikson Institute, The Institute for Clinical Social Work, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, the Catholic Theological Union, the Moody Bible Institute, the John Marshall Law School and the University of Chicago Divinity School.[citation needed]
MediaFurther information: Media in Chicago and Chicago International Film Festival
WGN began in the early days of radio and developed into a multi-platform broadcaster, including a cable television super-station.
Chicago was home of The Oprah Winfrey Show from 1986 until 2011 and other Harpo Production operations until 2015.TelevisionThe Chicago metropolitan area is the third-largest media market in North America, after New York City and Los Angeles and a major media hub.[289] Each of the big four U.S. television networks, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox, directly owns and operates a high-definition television station in Chicago (WBBM 2, WLS 7, WMAQ 5 and WFLD 32, respectively). Former CW affiliate WGN-TV 9, which was owned from its inception by Tribune Broadcasting (now owned by the Nexstar Media Group since 2019), is carried with some programming differences, as "WGN America" on cable and satellite TV nationwide and in parts of the Caribbean. WGN America eventually became NewsNation in 2021.
Chicago has also been the home of several prominent talk shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Steve Harvey Show, The Rosie Show, The Jerry Springer Show, The Phil Donahue Show, The Jenny Jones Show, and more. The city also has one PBS member station (its second: WYCC 20, removed its affiliation with PBS in 2017[290]): WTTW 11, producer of shows such as Sneak Previews, The Frugal Gourmet, Lamb Chop's Play-Along and The McLaughlin Group.
As of 2018, Windy City Live is Chicago's only daytime talk show, which is hosted by Val Warner and Ryan Chiaverini at ABC7 Studios with a live weekday audience. Since 1999, Judge Mathis also films his syndicated arbitration-based reality court show at the NBC Tower. Beginning in January 2019, Newsy began producing 12 of its 14 hours of live news programming per day from its new facility in Chicago.[citation needed]
NewspapersTwo major daily newspapers are published in Chicago: the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, with the Tribune having the larger circulation. There are also several regional and special-interest newspapers and magazines, such as Chicago, the Dziennik Związkowy (Polish Daily News), Draugas (the Lithuanian daily newspaper), the Chicago Reader, the SouthtownStar, the Chicago Defender, the Daily Herald, Newcity,[291][292] StreetWise and the Windy City Times. The entertainment and cultural magazine Time Out Chicago and GRAB magazine are also published in the city, as well as local music magazine Chicago Innerview. In addition, Chicago is the home of satirical national news outlet, The Onion, as well as its sister pop-culture publication, The A.V. Club.[293]
Movies and filmingMain articles: List of movies set in Chicago and List of television shows set in ChicagoRadio
This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)Chicago has five 50,000 watt AM radio stations: the CBS Radio-owned WBBM and WSCR; the Tribune Broadcasting-owned WGN; the Cumulus Media-owned WLS; and the ESPN Radio-owned WMVP. Chicago is also home to a number of national radio shows, including Beyond the Beltway with Bruce DuMont on Sunday evenings.[citation needed]
Chicago Public Radio produces nationally aired programs such as PRI's This American Life and NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!.[citation information: Transportation in Chicago
Aerial photo of the Jane Byrne Interchange (2022) after reconstruction, initially opened in the 1960sChicago is a major transportation hub in the United States. It is an important component in global distribution, as it is the third-largest inter-modal port in the world after Hong Kong and Singapore.[294]
The city of Chicago has a higher than average percentage of households without a car. In 2015, 26.5 percent of Chicago households were without a car, and increased slightly to 27.5 percent in 2016. The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Chicago averaged 1.12 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8.[295]
ExpresswaysFurther information: Roads and expressways in ChicagoSeven mainline and four auxiliary interstate highways (55, 57, 65 (only in Indiana), 80 (also in Indiana), 88, 90 (also in Indiana), 94 (also in Indiana), 190, 290, 294, and 355) run through Chicago and its suburbs. Segments that link to the city center are named after influential politicians, with three of them named after former U.S. Presidents (Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan) and one named after two-time Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson.
The Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways are the busiest state maintained routes in the entire state of Illinois.[296]
Transit systems
Chicago Union Station, opened in 1925, is the third-busiest passenger rail terminal in the United States.The Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) coordinates the operation of the three service boards: CTA, Metra, and Pace.
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) handles public transportation in the City of Chicago and a few adjacent suburbs outside of the Chicago city limits. The CTA operates an extensive network of buses and a rapid transit elevated and subway system known as the Chicago "L" or just "L" (short for "elevated"), with lines designated by colors. These rapid transit lines also serve both Midway and O'Hare Airports. The CTA's rail lines consist of the Red, Blue, Green, Orange, Brown, Purple, Pink, and Yellow lines. Both the Red and Blue lines offer 24‑hour service which makes Chicago one of a handful of cities around the world (and one of two in the United States, the other being New York City) to offer rail service 24 hours a day, every day of the year, within the city's limits.Metra, the nation's second-most used passenger regional rail network, operates an 11-line commuter rail service in Chicago and throughout the Chicago suburbs. The Metra Electric Line shares its trackage with Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District's South Shore Line, which provides commuter service between South Bend and Chicago.Pace provides bus and paratransit service in over 200 surrounding suburbs with some extensions into the city as well. A 2005 study found that one quarter of commuters used public transit.[297]Greyhound Lines provides inter-city bus service to and from the city, and Chicago is also the hub for the Midwest network of Megabus (North America).
Passenger rail
Amtrak train on the Empire Builder route departs Chicago from Union Station.Amtrak long distance and commuter rail services originate from Union Station.[298] Chicago is one of the largest hubs of passenger rail service in the nation.[299] The services terminate in the San Francisco area, Washington, D.C., New York City, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, Milwaukee, Quincy, St. Louis, Carbondale, Boston, Grand Rapids, Port Huron, Pontiac, Los Angeles, and San Antonio. Future services will terminate at Rockford and Moline. An attempt was made in the early 20th century to link Chicago with New York City via the Chicago – New York Electric Air Line Railroad. Parts of this were built, but it was never completed.
Bicycle and scooter sharing systemsIn July 2013, the bicycle-sharing system Divvy was launched with 750 bikes and 75 docking stations[300] It is operated by Lyft for the Chicago Department of Transportation.[301] As of July 2019, Divvy operated 5800 bicycles at 608 stations, covering almost all of the city, excluding Pullman, Rosedale, Beverly, Belmont Cragin and Edison Park.[302]
In May 2019, The City of Chicago announced its Chicago's Electric Shared Scooter Pilot Program, scheduled to run from June 15 to October 15.[303] The program started on June 15 with 10 different scooter companies, including scooter sharing market leaders Bird, Jump, Lime and Lyft.[304] Each company was allowed to bring 250 electric scooters, although both Bird and Lime claimed that they experienced a higher demand for their scooters.[305] The program ended on October 15, with nearly 800,000 rides taken.[306]
Freight railChicago is the largest hub in the railroad industry.[307] All five Class I railroads meet in Chicago. As of 2002, severe freight train congestion caused trains to take as long to get through the Chicago region as it took to get there from the West Coast of the country (about 2 days).[308] According to U.S. Department of Transportation, the volume of imported and exported goods transported via rail to, from, or through Chicago is forecast to increase nearly 150 percent between 2010 and 2040.[309] CREATE, the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program, comprises about 70 programs, including crossovers, overpasses and underpasses, that intend to significantly improve the speed of freight movements in the Chicago area.[310]
AirportsFurther information: Transportation in Chicago § Airports
O'Hare International AirportChicago is served by O'Hare International Airport, the world's busiest airport measured by airline operations,[311] on the far Northwest Side, and Midway International Airport on the Southwest Side. In 2005, O'Hare was the world's busiest airport by aircraft movements and the second-busiest by total passenger traffic.[312] Both O'Hare and Midway are owned and operated by the City of Chicago. Gary/Chicago International Airport and Chicago Rockford International Airport, located in Gary, Indiana and Rockford, Illinois, respectively, can serve as alternative Chicago area airports, however they do not offer as many commercial flights as O'Hare and Midway. In recent years the state of Illinois has been leaning towards building an entirely new airport in the Illinois suburbs of Chicago.[313] The City of Chicago is the world headquarters for United Airlines, the world's third-largest airline.
Port authorityMain article: Port of ChicagoThe Port of Chicago consists of several major port facilities within the city of Chicago operated by the Illinois International Port District (formerly known as the Chicago Regional Port District). The central element of the Port District, Calumet Harbor, is maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.[314]
Iroquois Landing Lakefront Terminal: at the mouth of the Calumet River, it includes 100 acres (0.40 km2) of warehouses and facilities on Lake Michigan with over 780,000 square meters (8,400,000 square feet) of storage.Lake Calumet terminal: located at the union of the Grand Calumet River and Little Calumet River 6 miles (9.7 km) inland from Lake Michigan. Includes three transit sheds totaling over 29,000 square meters (310,000 square feet) adjacent to over 900 linear meters (3,000 linear feet) of ship and barge berthing.Grain (14 million bushels) and bulk liquid (800,000 barrels) storage facilities along Lake Calumet.The Illinois International Port district also operates Foreign trade zone No. 22, which extends 60 miles (97 km) from Chicago's city limits.UtilitiesElectricity for most of northern Illinois is provided by Commonwealth Edison, also known as ComEd. Their service territory borders Iroquois County to the south, the Wisconsin border to the north, the Iowa border to the west and the Indiana border to the east. In northern Illinois, ComEd (a division of Exelon) operates the greatest number of nuclear generating plants in any US state. Because of this, ComEd reports indicate that Chicago receives about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power. Recently, the city began installing wind turbines on government buildings to promote renewable energy.[315][316][317]
Natural gas is provided by Peoples Gas, a subsidiary of Integrys Energy Group, which is headquartered in Chicago.
Domestic and industrial waste was once incinerated but it is now landfilled, mainly in the Calumet area. From 1995 to 2008, the city had a blue bag program to divert recyclable refuse from landfills.[318] Because of low participation in the blue bag programs, the city began a pilot program for blue bin recycling like other cities. This proved successful and blue bins were rolled out across the city.[319]
Health systems
Prentice Women's Hospital on the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Downtown CampusThe Illinois Medical District is on the Near West Side. It includes Rush University Medical Center, ranked as the second best hospital in the Chicago metropolitan area by U.S. News & World Report for 2014–16, the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago, Jesse Brown VA Hospital, and John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation.[320]
Two of the country's premier academic medical centers reside in Chicago, including Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the University of Chicago Medical Center. The Chicago campus of Northwestern University includes the Feinberg School of Medicine; Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which is ranked as the best hospital in the Chicago metropolitan area by U.S. News & World Report for 2017–18;[321] the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (formerly named the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago), which is ranked the best U.S. rehabilitation hospital by U.S. News & World Report;[322] the new Prentice Women's Hospital; and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.
The University of Illinois College of Medicine at UIC is the second largest medical school in the United States (2,600 students including those at campuses in Peoria, Rockford and Urbana–Champaign).[323]
In addition, the Chicago Medical School and Loyola University Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine are located in the suburbs of North Chicago and Maywood, respectively. The Midwestern University Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine is in Downers Grove.
The American Medical Association, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, American Osteopathic Association, American Dental Association, Academy of General Dentistry, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, American College of Surgeons, American Society for Clinical Pathology, American College of Healthcare Executives, the American Hospital Association and Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association are all based in Chicago.
Sister citiesMain article: List of sister cities of ChicagoSee alsoChicago area water qualityChicago WildernessGentrification of ChicagoList of cities with the most skyscrapersList of people from ChicagoList of fiction set in ChicagoNational Register of Historic Places listings in Central ChicagoNational Register of Historic Places listings in North Side ChicagoNational Register of Historic Places listings in West Side ChicagoUSS Chicago, 4 shipsChicago History
"It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago. She outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them." - Mark Twain, 1883
Chicago was only 46 years old when Mark Twain wrote those words, but it had already grown more than 100-fold, from a small trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River into one of the nation?s largest cities, and it wasn?t about to stop. Over the next 20 years, it would quadruple in population, amazing the rest of the world with its ability to repeatedly reinvent itself.
And it still hasn?t stopped.
Chicago continues to be a place that many people from diverse backgrounds call home. Before it was a city, it was the home to numerous indigenous peoples, a legacy which continues to frame our relationship with the city, the land, and the Environment.
Today, Chicago has become a global city, a thriving center of international trade and commerce, and a place where people of every nationality and background come to pursue the American dream.
Indigenous ChicagoChicago is the traditional homelands of Hooc?k (Winnebago/Ho?Chunk), Jiwere (Otoe), Nutachi (Missouria), and Baxoje (Iowas); Kiash Matchitiwuk (Menominee); Meshkwahkîha (Meskwaki); Asâkîwaki (Sauk); Myaamiaki (Miami), Waayaahtanwaki (Wea), and Peeyankih?iaki (Piankashaw); Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo); Inoka (Illini Confederacy); Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe), Odawak (Odawa), and Bodéwadmik (Potawatomi). Seated atop a continental divide, the Chicago region is located at the intersection of several great waterways, leading the area to become the site of travel and healing for many Tribes.
The City understands that Tribes are sovereign Nations and should have the first voice in acknowledging their historical and contemporary presence on this land. If your Tribe would like to see changes, please reach out to us for comments.
Early ChicagoChicago?s first permanent non-indigenous resident was a trader named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a free black man from Haiti whose father was a French sailor and whose mother was an African slave, he came here in the 1770s via the Mississippi River from New Orleans with his Native American wife, and their home stood at the mouth of the Chicago River. In 1803, the U.S. government built Fort Dearborn at what is now the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive (look for the bronze markers in the pavement). It was destroyed in 1812 following the Battle of Fort Dearborn, rebuilt in 1816, and permanently demolished in 1857.
A Trading CenterIncorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago was ideally situated to take advantage of the trading possibilities created by the nation?s westward expansion. The completion of the Illinois & Michigan Canal in 1848 created a water link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, but the canal was soon rendered obsolete by railroads. Today, 50 percent of U.S. rail freight continues to pass through Chicago, even as the city has become the nation?s busiest aviation center, thanks to O?Hare and Midway International airports.
The Great Fire of 1871As Chicago grew, its residents took heroic measures to keep pace. In the 1850s, they raised many of the streets five to eight feet to install a sewer system ? and then raised the buildings, as well. Unfortunately, the buildings, streets and sidewalks were made of wood, and most of them burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The Chicago Fire Department training academy at 558 W. DeKoven St. is on the site of the O?Leary property where the fire began. The Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station at Michigan and Chicago avenues are among the few buildings to have survived the fire.
"The White City"Chicago rebuilt quickly. Much of the debris was dumped into Lake Michigan as landfill, forming the underpinnings for what is now Grant Park, Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago. Only 22 years later, Chicago celebrated its comeback by holding the World?s Columbian Exposition of 1893, with its memorable ?White City.? One of the Exposition buildings was rebuilt to become the Museum of Science and Industry. Chicago refused to be discouraged even by the Great Depression. In 1933 and 1934, the city held an equally successful Century of Progress Exposition on Northerly Island.
Hull HouseIn the half-century following the Great Fire, waves of immigrants came to Chicago to take jobs in the factories and meatpacking plants. Many poor workers and their families found help in settlement houses operated by Jane Addams and her followers. Her Hull House Museum is located at 800 S. Halsted St.
Chicago FirstsThroughout their city?s history, Chicagoans have demonstrated their ingenuity in matters large and small:
The nation?s first skyscraper, the 10-story, steel-framed Home Insurance Building, was built in 1884 at LaSalle and Adams streets and demolished in 1931.
When residents were threatened by waterborne illnesses from sewage flowing into Lake Michigan, they reversed the Chicago River in 1900 to make it flow toward the Mississippi.
Start of the "Historic Route 66" which begins at Grant Park on Adams Street in the front of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Chicago was the birthplace of:
the refrigerated rail car (Swift)mail-order retailing (Sears and Montgomery Ward)the car radio (Motorola)the TV remote control (Zenith)The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, ushering in the Atomic Age, took place at the University of Chicago in 1942. The spot is marked by a Henry Moore sculpture on Ellis Avenue between 56th and 57th streets.The 1,451-foot Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower), completed in 1974, was the the tallest building in the world from 1974 to 1998.
Chicago has played a central role in American economic, cultural and political history. Since the 1850s Chicago has been one of the dominant metropolises in the Midwestern United States, and has been the largest city in the Midwest since the 1880 census. The area's recorded history begins with the arrival of French explorers, missionaries and fur traders in the late 17th century and their interaction with the local Pottawatomie Native Americans. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was the first permanent non-indigenous settler in the area, having a house at the mouth of the Chicago River in the late 18th century. There were small settlements and a U.S. Army fort, but the soldiers and settlers were all driven off in 1812. The modern city was incorporated in 1837 by Northern businessmen and grew rapidly from real estate speculation and the realization that it had a commanding position in the emerging inland transportation network, based on lake traffic and railroads, controlling access from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi River basin.
Despite a fire in 1871 that destroyed the Central Business District, the city grew exponentially, becoming the nation's rail center and the dominant Midwestern center for manufacturing, commerce, finance, higher education, religion, broadcasting, sports, jazz, and high culture. The city was a magnet for European immigrants?at first Germans, Irish and Scandinavians, then from the 1890s to 1914, Jews, Czechs, Poles and Italians. They were all absorbed in the city's powerful ward-based political machines. Many joined militant labor unions, and Chicago became notorious for its violent strikes, but respected for its high wages.
Large numbers of African Americans migrated from the South starting in the World War I era as part of the Great Migration. Mexicans started arriving after 1910, and Puerto Ricans after 1945. The Cook County suburbs grew rapidly after 1945, but the Democratic party machine kept both the city and suburbs under control, especially under mayor Richard J. Daley, who was chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party. Deindustrialization after 1970 closed the stockyards and most of the steel mills and factories, but the city retained its role as a financial and transportation hub. Increasingly it emphasized its service roles in medicine, higher education, and tourism. The city formed the political base for leaders such as Stephen A. Douglas in the 1850s, Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and Barack Obama in recent years.
Pre-1830Early native settlementsAt its first appearance in records by explorers, the Chicago area was inhabited by a number of Algonquian peoples, including the Mascouten and Miami. The name "Chicago" is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as "Checagou" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir.[1] Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called "chicagoua", grew abundantly in the area.[2] According to his diary of late September 1687:
when we arrived at the said place called Chicagou which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region.[2]
The tribe was part of the Miami Confederacy, which included the Illini and Kickapoo. In 1671, Potawatomi guides first took the French trader Nicolas Perrot to the Miami villages near the site of present-day Chicago.[3] Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix would write in 1721 that the Miami had a settlement in what is now Chicago around 1670. Chicago's location at a short canoe portage (the Chicago Portage) connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system attracted the attention of many French explorers, notably Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673. The Jesuit Relations indicate that by this time, the Iroquois tribes of New York had driven the Algonquian tribes entirely out of Lower Michigan and as far as this portage, during the later Beaver Wars.[4]
René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who traversed the Kankakee and Illinois Rivers south of Chicago in the winter of 1681?82, identified the Des Plaines River as the western boundary of the Miami. In 1683, La Salle built Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River. Almost two thousand Miami, including Weas and Piankeshaws, left the Chicago area to gather on the opposite shore at the Grand Village of the Illinois, seeking French protection from the Iroquois. In 1696, French Jesuits led by Jean-François Buisson de Saint-Cosme built the Mission of the Guardian Angel to Christianize the local Wea and Miami people.[5] Shortly thereafter, Augustin le Gardeur de Courtemanche visited the settlement on behalf of the French government, seeking peace between the Miami and Iroquois. Miami chief Chichikatalo accompanied de Courtemanche to Montreal.[4]
The Algonquian tribes began to retake the lost territory in the ensuing decades, and in 1701, the Iroquois formally abandoned their claim to their "hunting grounds" as far as the portage to England in the Nanfan Treaty, which was finally ratified in 1726. This was largely a political maneuver of little practicality, as the English then had no presence in the region whatsoever, the French and their Algonquian allies being the dominant force in the area. A writer in 1718 noted at the Was had a village in Chicago, but had recently fled due to concerns about approaching Ojibwes and Pottawatomis. The Iroquois and Meskwaki probably drove out all Miami from the Chicago area by the end of the 1720s. The Pottawatomi assumed control of the area, but probably did not have any major settlements in Chicago. French and allied use of the Chicago portage was mostly abandoned during the 1720s because of continual Native American raids during the Fox Wars.[6]
There was also a Michigamea chief named Chicago who may have lived in the region. In the 1680s, the Illinois River was called the Chicago River.[7]
Retrospective map showing how Chicago may have appeared in 1812 (right is north, published in 1884)Retrospective map showing how Chicago may have appeared in 1812 (right is north, published in 1884)
Chicago in 1820Chicago in 1820
First non-native settlements
Fort Dearborn depicted as in 1831, sketched 1850s although the accuracy of the sketch was debated soon after it appeared.The first settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a free black man,[8] who built a farm at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1790.[8][9] He left Chicago in 1800. In 1968, Point du Sable was honored at Pioneer Court as the city's founder and featured as a symbol.
In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, some Native Americans ceded the area of Chicago to the United States for a military post in the Treaty of Greenville. The US built Fort Dearborn in 1803 on the Chicago River. It was destroyed by Indian forces during the War of 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, and many of the inhabitants were killed or taken prisoner.[10] The fort had been ordered to evacuate. During the evacuation soldiers and civilians were overtaken near what is today Prairie Avenue. After the end of the war, the Potawatomi ceded the land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. (Today, this treaty is commemorated in Indian Boundary Park.) Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1818 and used until 1837.[11]:?25?
Growth of the city
1821 Survey of Chicago
Thompson's plat, the first official map of what would become the City of Chicago
Chicago in 1830, as depicted in 1884
Chicago in 1831, as depicted in 1893 by Rudolf Cronau
Chicago in 1832, as depicted in 1892
Chicago in 1836
Extensions to city limits through 1884In 1829, the Illinois legislature appointed commissioners to locate a canal and lay out the surrounding town. The commissioners employed James Thompson to survey and plat the town of Chicago, which at the time had a population of less than 100. Historians regard the August 4, 1830, filing of the plat as the official recognition of a location known as Chicago.[4]
Yankee entrepreneurs saw the potential of Chicago as a transportation hub in the 1830s and engaged in land speculation to obtain the choicest lots. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was incorporated with a population of 350.[12] On July 12, 1834, the Illinois from Sackets Harbor, New York, was the first commercial schooner to enter the harbor, a sign of the Great Lakes trade that would benefit both Chicago and New York state.[11]:?29? Chicago was granted a city charter by the State of Illinois on March 4, 1837;[13] it was part of the larger Cook County. By 1840 the boom town had a population of over 4,000.
After 1830, the rich farmlands of northern Illinois attracted Yankee settlers. Yankee real estate operators created a city overnight in the 1830s.[14] To open the surrounding farmlands to trade, the Cook County commissioners built roads south and west. The latter crossed the "dismal Nine-mile Swamp," the Des Plaines River, and went southwest to Walker's Grove, now the Village of Plainfield. The roads enabled hundreds of wagons per day of farm produce to arrive and so the entrepreneurs built grain elevators and docks to load ships bound for points east through the Great Lakes. Produce was shipped through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River to New York City; the growth of the Midwest farms expanded New York City as a port.
In 1837, Chicago held its first mayoral election and elected William B. Ogden as its inaugural mayor.
Emergence as a transportation hubFurther information: Transportation in Chicago
1853 Bird's eye view of Chicago
1857 Bird's eye view of ChicagoIn 1848, the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal allowed shipping from the Great Lakes through Chicago to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The first rail line to Chicago, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, was completed the same year. Chicago would go on to become the transportation hub of the United States, with its road, rail, water, and later air connections. Chicago also became home to national retailers offering catalog shopping such as Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company, which used the transportation lines to ship all over the nation.
By the 1850s, the construction of railroads made Chicago a major hub and over 30 lines entered the city. The main lines from the East ended in Chicago, and those oriented to the West began in Chicago and so by 1860, the city had become the nation's trans-shipment and warehousing center. Factories were created, most famously the harvester factory that was opened in 1847 by Cyrus Hall McCormick. It was a processing center for natural resource commodities extracted in the West. The Wisconsin forests supported the millwork and lumber business; the Illinois hinterland provided the wheat. Hundreds of thousands of hogs and cattle were shipped to Chicago for slaughter, preserved in salt, and transported to Eastern markets. By 1870, refrigerated cars allowed the shipping of fresh meat to cities in the East.[15]
The prairie bog nature of the area provided a fertile ground for disease-carrying insects. In springtime, Chicago was so muddy from the high water that horses could scarcely move. Comical signs proclaiming "Fastest route to China" or "No Bottom Here" were placed to warn people of the mud.
Travelers reported Chicago was the filthiest city in America. The city created a massive sewer system. In the first phase, sewage pipes were laid across the city above ground and used gravity to move the waste. The city was built in a low-lying area subject to flooding. In 1856, the city council decided that the entire city should be elevated four to five feet by using a newly available jacking-up process. In one instance, the five-story Brigg's Hotel, weighing 22,000 tons, was lifted while it continued to operate. Observing that such a thing could never have happened in Europe, the British historian Paul Johnson cites the astounding feat as a dramatic example of American determination and ingenuity based on the conviction that anything material is possible.[16]
Immigration and population in 19th centuryPortrait of John Jones, a prominent early African-American businessman in ChicagoPortrait of Mary Jane Richardson Jones, 1865Husband and wife John and Mary Jones were among the most prominent early African-American citizens of Chicago.
A bird's-eye view of Chicago in 1898. It became the second American city to reach a population of 1.6 million.0:29Chicago - State St at Madison Street, 1897Although originally settled by Yankees in the 1830s, the city in the 1840s had many Irish Catholics come as a result of the Great Famine. Later in the century, the railroads, stockyards, and other heavy industry of the late 19th century attracted a variety of skilled workers from Europe, especially Germans, English, Swedes, Norwegians, and Dutch.[17] A small African-American community formed, led by activist leaders like John Jones and Mary Richardson Jones, who established Chicago as a stop on the Underground Railroad.[18]
In 1840, Chicago was the 92nd city in the United States by population. Its population grew so rapidly that 20 years later, it was the ninth city. In the pivotal year of 1848, Chicago saw the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, its first steam locomotives, the introduction of steam-powered grain elevators, the arrival of the telegraph, and the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade.[19] By 1857, Chicago was the largest city in what was then called the Northwest. In 20 years, Chicago grew from 4,000 people to over 90,000. Chicago surpassed St. Louis and Cincinnati as the major city in the West and gained political notice as the home of Stephen Douglas, the 1860 presidential nominee of the Northern Democrats. The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated the home-state candidate Abraham Lincoln. The city's government and voluntary societies gave generous support to soldiers during the American Civil War.[20]
Many of the newcomers were Irish Catholic and German immigrants. Their neighborhood saloons, a center of male social life, were attacked in the mid-1850s by the local Know-Nothing Party, which drew its strength from evangelical Protestants. The new party was anti-immigration and anti-liquor and called for the purification of politics by reducing the power of the saloonkeepers. In 1855, the Know-Nothings elected Levi Boone mayor, who banned Sunday sales of liquor and beer. His aggressive law enforcement sparked the Lager Beer Riot of April 1855, which erupted outside a courthouse in which eight Germans were being tried for liquor ordinance violations. After 1865, saloons became community centers only for local ethnic men, as reformers saw them as places that incited riotous behavior and moral decay.[21] Salons were also sources of musical entertainment. Francis O'Neill, an Irish immigrant who later became police chief, published compendiums of Irish music that were largely collected from other newcomers playing in saloons.[22]
By 1870, Chicago had grown to become the nation's second-largest city and one of the largest cities in the world. Between 1870 and 1900, Chicago grew from a city of 299,000 to nearly 1.7 million and was the fastest-growing city in world history. Chicago's flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe, especially Jews, Poles, and Italians, along with many smaller groups. Many businesspeople and professionals arrived from the Eastern states. Relatively few new arrivals came from Chicago's rural hinterland. The exponential growth put increasing pollution on the Environment, as hazards to public health impacted everyone.[23]
Gilded AgeFurther information: Architecture of Chicago and Chicago railroad strike of 1877
The Chicago Water Tower, one of the few surviving buildings after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
A residential building in Chicago's Lincoln Park in 1885, when the city had dirt roadsMost of the city burned in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. The damage from the fire was immense since 300 people died, 18,000 buildings were destroyed, and nearly 100,000 of the city's 300,000 residents were left homeless. Several key factors exacerbated the spread of the fire. Most of Chicago's buildings and sidewalks were then constructed of wood. Also, the lack of attention to proper waste disposal practices, which was sometimes deliberate to favor certain industries, left an abundance of flammable pollutants in the Chicago River along which the fire spread from the south to the north.[24][25][circular reference][26] The fire led to the incorporation of stringent fire-safety codes, which included a strong preference for masonry construction.[27]
The Danish immigrant Jens Jensen arrived in 1886 and soon became a successful and celebrated landscape designer. Jensen's work was characterized by a democratic approach to landscaping, which was informed by his interest in social justice and conservation, and a rejection of antidemocratic formalism. Among Jensen's creations were four Chicago city parks, most famously Columbus Park. His work also included garden design for some of the region's most influential millionaires.
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was constructed on former wetlands at the present location of Jackson Park along Lake Michigan in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The land was reclaimed according to a design by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. The temporary pavilions, which followed a classical theme, were designed by a committee of the city's architects under the direction of Daniel Burnham. It was called the "White City" for the appearance of its buildings.[28]
The Exposition drew 27.5 million visitors; is considered among the most influential world's fairs in history; and affected art, architecture, and design throughout the nation.[29] The classical architectural style contributed to a revival of Beaux Arts architecture that borrowed from historical styles, but Chicago was also developing the original skyscraper and organic forms based in new technologies. The fair featured the first and until recently the largest Ferris wheel ever built.
The soft, swampy ground near the lake proved unstable ground for tall masonry buildings. That was an early constraint, but builders developed the innovative use of steel framing for support and invented the skyscraper in Chicago, which became a leader in modern architecture and set the model nationwide for achieving vertical city densities.[30]
Developers and citizens began immediate reconstruction on the existing Jeffersonian grid. The building boom that followed saved the city's status as the transportation and trade hub of the Midwest. Massive reconstruction using the newest materials and methods catapulted Chicago into its status as a city on par with New York and became the birthplace of modern architecture in the United States.[31]
Rise of industry and commerceFurther information: Economy of Chicago
1893 Bird's eye view of Chicago
The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the world's first skyscraper.Chicago became the center of the nation's advertising industry after New York City. Albert Lasker, known as the "father of modern advertising," made Chicago his base from 1898 to 1942. As head of the Lord and Thomas agency, Lasker devised a copywriting technique that appealed directly to the psychology of the consumer. Women, who seldom smoked cigarettes, were told that if they smoked Lucky Strikes, they could stay slender. Lasker's use of radio, particularly with his campaigns for Palmolive soap, Pepsodent toothpaste, Kotex products, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, not only revolutionized the advertising industry but also significantly changed popular culture.[32]
GamblingIn Chicago, like other rapidly growing industrial centers with large immigrant working-class neighborhoods, gambling was a major issue. The city's elite upper-class had private clubs and closely-supervised horse racing tracks. The middle-class reformers like Jane Addams focused on the workers, who discovered freedom and independence in gambling that were a world apart from their closely-supervised factory jobs and gambled to validate risk-taking aspect of masculinity, betting heavily on dice, card games, policy, and cock fights. By the 1850s, hundreds of saloons had offered gambling opportunities, including off-track betting on the horses.[33][34] The historian Mark Holler argues that organized crime provided upward mobility to ambitious ethnics. The high-income, high-visibility vice lords, and racketeers built their careers and profits in ghetto neighborhoods and often branched into local politics to protect their domains.[35] For example, in 1868 to 1888, Michael C. McDonald, "The Gambler King of Clark Street," kept numerous Democratic machine politicians in his city on expense account to protect his gambling empire and to keep the goo-goo reformers at bay.[36]
In large cities, illegal businesses like gambling and prostitution were typically contained in the geographically-segregated red light districts. The businessowners made regularly-scheduled payments to police and politicians, which they treated as licensing expenses. The informal rates became standardized. For example, in Chicago, they ranged from $20 a month for a cheap brothel to $1000 a month for luxurious operations in Chicago. Reform elements never accepted the segregated vice districts and wanted them all destroyed, but in large cities, the political machine was powerful enough to keep the reformers at bay. Finally, around 1900 to 1910, the reformers grew politically strong enough to shut down the system of vice segregation, and the survivors went underground.[37]
20th century
All Star Tournament, 18 Inch Balke Line, Chicago, May 7?14, 1906
Detail of lobby columns at the Ford Center for Performing Arts
Merchants' Hotel on left, looking North from State and Washington Streets, before 1868
Birds-eye view of Chicago in 1916
Loop street scene in 1900; colorized photographChicago's manufacturing and retail sectors, fostered by the expansion of railroads throughout the upper Midwest and East, grew rapidly and came to dominate the Midwest and greatly influence the nation's economy.[38] The Chicago Union Stock Yards dominated the packing trade. Chicago became the world's largest rail hub, and one of its busiest ports by shipping traffic on the Great Lakes. Commodity resources, such as lumber, iron and coal, were brought to Chicago and Ohio for processing, with products shipped both East and West to support new growth.[39]
Lake Michigan?the primary source of fresh water for the city?became polluted from the rapidly growing industries in and around Chicago; a new way of procuring clean water was needed. In 1885 the civil engineer Lyman Edgar Cooley proposed the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. He envisioned a deep waterway that would dilute and divert the city's sewage by funneling water from Lake Michigan into a canal, which would drain into the Mississippi River via the Illinois River. Beyond presenting a solution for Chicago's sewage problem, Cooley's proposal appealed to the economic need to link the Midwest with America's central waterways to compete with East Coast shipping and railroad industries.
Strong regional support for the project led the Illinois legislature to circumvent the federal government and complete the canal with state funding. The opening in January 1900 met with controversy and a lawsuit against Chicago's appropriation of water from Lake Michigan. By the 1920s the lawsuit was divided between the states of the Mississippi River Valley, who supported the development of deep waterways linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes states, which feared sinking water levels might harm shipping in the lakes. In 1929 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in support of Chicago's use of the canal to promote commerce, but ordered the city to discontinue its use for sewage disposal.[40]
New construction boomed in the 1920s, with notable landmarks such as the Merchandise Mart and art deco Chicago Board of Trade Building completed in 1930. The Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Depression and diversion of resources into World War II led to the suspension for years of new construction.
The Century of Progress International Exposition was the name of the World's Fair held on the Near South Side lakefront from 1933 to 1934 to celebrate the city's centennial.[41][42] The theme of the fair was technological innovation over the century since Chicago's founding. More than 40 million people visited the fair, which symbolized for many hope for Chicago and the nation, then in the midst of the Great Depression.[43]
The demographics of the city were changing in the early 20th century as black southern families migrated out of the south, but while cities like Chicago empathized with the condition of impoverished white children, black children were mostly excluded from the private and religious institutions that provided homes for such children. Those that did take in black dependent children were overcrowded and underfunded because of institutional racism. Between 1899 and 1945 many of the city's black children found themselves in the juvenile court system. The 1899 Juvenile Court Act, supported by Progressive reformers, created a class of dependants for orphans and other children lacking "proper parental care or guardianship" but the court's designations of "delinquency" and "dependency" were racialized[when defined as?] so black children were far more likely to be labeled as delinquents.[44][fact or opinion?]
Politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuriesFurther information: Political history of Chicago
Nicely dressed Jewish men and boys standing on a sidewalk in Chicago, 1903
Theodore Roosevelt in Chicago, 1915
Map of downtown Chicago in 1917.During the election of April 23, 1875, the voters of Chicago chose to operate under the Illinois Cities and Villages Act of 1872. Chicago still operates under this act, in lieu of a charter. The Cities and Villages Act has been revised several times since, and may be found in Chapter 65 of the Illinois Compiled Statutes.
Late-19th-century big city newspapers such as the Chicago Daily News - founded in 1875 by Melville Stone - ushered in an era of news reporting that was, unlike earlier periods, in tune with the particulars of community life in specific cities. Vigorous competition between older and newer-style city papers soon broke out, centered on civic activism and sensationalist reporting of urban political issues and the numerous problems associated with rapid urban growth. Competition was especially fierce between the Chicago Times (Democratic), the Chicago Tribune (Republican), and the Daily News (independent), with the latter becoming the city's most popular paper by the 1880s.[45] The city's boasting lobbyists and politicians earned Chicago the nickname "Windy City" in the New York press. The city adopted the nickname as its own.
Violence and crimePolarized attitudes of labor and business in Chicago prompted a strike by workers' lobbying for an eight-hour work day, later named the Haymarket affair. A peaceful demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket near the west side was interrupted by a bomb thrown at police; seven police officers were killed. Widespread violence broke out. A group of anarchists were tried for inciting the riot and convicted. Several were hanged and others were pardoned. The episode was a watershed moment in the labor movement, and its history was commemorated in the annual May Day celebrations.[46]
By 1900, Progressive Era political and legal reformers initiated far-ranging changes in the American criminal justice system, with Chicago taking the lead.[47]
The city became notorious worldwide for its rate of murders in the early 20th century, yet the courts failed to convict the killers. More than three-fourths of cases were not closed. Even when the police made arrests in cases where killers' identities were known, jurors typically exonerated or acquitted them. A blend of gender-, race-, and class-based notions of justice trumped the rule of law, producing low homicide conviction rates during a period of soaring violence.[48]
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rates of domestic murder tripled in Chicago. Domestic homicide was often a manifestation of strains in gender relations induced by urban and industrial change. At the core of such family murders were male attempts to preserve masculine authority. Yet, there were nuances in the motives for the murder of family members, and study of the patterns of domestic homicide among different ethnic groups reveals basic cultural differences. German male immigrants tended to murder over declining status and the failure to achieve economic prosperity. Italian men killed family members to save a gender-based ideal of respectability that entailed patriarchal control over women and family reputation. African American men, like the Germans, often murdered in response to economic conditions but not over desperation about the future. Like the Italians, the killers tended to be young, but family honor was not usually at stake. Instead, black men murdered to regain control of wives and lovers who resisted their patriarchal "rights".[49]
Progressive reformers in the business community created the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC) in 1919 after an investigation into a robbery at a factory showed the city's criminal justice system was deficient. The CCC initially served as a watchdog of the justice system. After its suggestion that the city's justice system begin collecting criminal records was rejected, the CCC assumed a more active role in fighting crime. The commission's role expanded further after Frank J. Loesch became president in 1928. Loesch recognized the need to eliminate the glamor that Chicago's media typically attributed to criminals. Determined to expose the violence of the crime world, Loesch drafted a list of "public enemies"; among them was Al Capone, whom he made a scapegoat for widespread social problems.[50]
After the passage of Prohibition, the 1920s brought international notoriety to Chicago. Bootleggers and smugglers bringing in liquor from Canada formed powerful gangs. They competed with each other for lucrative profits, and to evade the police, to bring liquor to speakeasies and private clients. The most notorious was Al Capone.[51][52]
Immigration and migration in the 20th centuryFurther information: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of ChicagoFrom 1890 to 1914, migrations swelled, attracting to the city of mostly unskilled Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italians, Greeks, Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Slovaks. World War I cut off immigration from Europe, which brought hundreds of thousands of southern blacks and whites into Northern cities to fill in the labor shortages. The Immigration Act of 1924 restricted populations from southern and Eastern Europe, apart from refugees after World War II. The heavy annual turnover of ethnic populations ended, and the groups stabilized, each favoring specific neighborhoods.[53][54]
While whites from rural areas arrived and generally settled in the suburban parts of the city, large numbers of blacks from the South arrived as well.[55] The near South Side of the city became the first Black residential area, as it had the oldest, less expensive housing. Although restricted by segregation and competing ethnic groups such as the Irish, gradually continued black migration caused this community to expand, as well as the black neighborhoods on the near West Side. These were de facto segregated areas (few blacks were tolerated in ethnic white neighborhoods); the Irish and ethnic groups who had been longer in the city began to move to outer areas and the suburbs. After World War II, the city built public housing for working-class families to upgrade residential quality. The high-rise design of such public housing proved a problem when industrial jobs left the city and poor families became concentrated in the facilities. After 1950, public housing high rises anchored poor black neighborhoods south and west of the Loop.
"Old stock" Americans who relocated to Chicago after 1900 preferred the outlying areas and suburbs, with their commutes eased by train lines, making Oak Park and Evanston enclaves of the upper middle class. In the 1910s, high-rise luxury apartments were constructed along the lakefront north of the Loop, continuing into the 21st century. They attracted wealthy residents but few families with children, as wealthier families moved to suburbs for the schools. There were problems in the public school system; mostly Catholic students attended schools in the large parochial system, which was of middling quality.[56] There were a few private schools. The Latin School, Francis Parker and later The Bateman School, all centrally located served those who could afford to pay.
The northern and western suburbs developed some of the best public schools in the nation, which were strongly supported by their wealthier residents. The suburban trend accelerated after 1945, with the construction of highways and train lines that made commuting easier. Middle-class Chicagoans headed to the outlying areas of the city, and then into the Cook County and Dupage County suburbs. As ethnic Jews and Irish rose in economic class, they left the city and headed north. Well-educated migrants from around the country moved to the far suburbs.
Chicago's Polonia sustained diverse political cultures in the early twentieth century, each with its own newspaper. In 1920 the community had a choice of five daily papers ? from the Socialist Dziennik Ludowy (People's Daily; 1907?1925) to the Polish Roman Catholic Union's Dziennik Zjednoczenia (Union Daily; 1921?1939). The decision to subscribe to a particular paper reaffirmed a particular ideology or institutional network based on ethnicity and class, which lent itself to different alliances and different strategies.[57]
In 1926, the city hosted the 28th International Eucharistic Congress, a major event for the Catholic community of Chicago.
As the First World War cut off immigration, tens of thousands of African Americans came north in the Great Migration out of the rural South. With new populations competing for limited housing and jobs, especially on the South Side, social tensions rose in the city. Postwar years were more difficult. Black veterans looked for more respect for having served their nation, and some whites resented it.
In 1919, the Chicago race riot erupted, in what became known as "Red Summer", when other major cities also suffered mass racial violence based in competition for jobs and housing as the country tried to absorb veterans in the postwar years. During the riot, thirty-eight people died (23 black and 15 white) and over five hundred were injured. Much of the violence against blacks in Chicago was led by members of ethnic Irish athletic clubs, who had much political power in the city and defended their "territory" against African Americans. As was typical in these occurrences, more blacks than whites died in the violence.
Concentrating the family resources to achieve home ownership was a common strategy in the ethnic European neighborhoods. It meant sacrificing current consumption, and pulling children out of school as soon as they could earn a wage. By 1900, working-class ethnic immigrants owned homes at higher rates than native-born people. After borrowing from friends and building associations, immigrants kept boarders, grew market gardens, and opened home-based commercial laundries, eroding home-work distinctions, while sending out women and children to work to repay loans. They sought not middle-class upward mobility but the security of home ownership. Many social workers wanted them to pursue upward job mobility (which required more education), but realtors asserted that houses were better than a bank for a poor man. With hindsight, and considering uninsured banks' precariousness, this appears to have been true. Chicago's workers made immense sacrifices for home ownership, contributing to Chicago's sprawling suburban geography and to modern myths about the American dream. The Jewish community, by contrast, rented apartments and maximized education and upward mobility for the next generation.[58]
Beginning in the 1940s, waves of Hispanic immigrants began to arrive. The largest numbers were from Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as Cuba during Fidel Castro's rise. During the 1980s, Hispanic immigrants were more likely to be from Central and South America.
After 1965 and the change in US immigration laws, numerous Asian immigrants came; the largest proportion were well-educated Indians and Chinese, who generally settled directly in the suburbs. By the 1970s gentrification began in the city, in some cases with people renovating housing in old inner city neighborhoods, and attracting singles and gay people.
State Street c. 1907State Street c. 1907
International Ballooning Contest, Aero Park, Chicago, July 4, 1908International Ballooning Contest, Aero Park, Chicago, July 4, 1908
Bird's eye view of Chicago in 1938Bird's eye view of Chicago in 1938
Oak Street Beach, 1925Oak Street Beach, 1925
1930sMain article: Chicago in the 1930sLabor unions
Chicago skyline from Northerly Island Taken sometime in 1941After 1900 Chicago was a heavily unionized city, apart from the factories (which were non-union until the 1930s). The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of 200 socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States. The Railroad brotherhoods were strong, as were the crafts unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The AFL unions operated through the Chicago Federation of Labor to minimize jurisdictional conflicts, which caused many strikes as two unions battled to control a work site.
The unionized teamsters in Chicago enjoyed an unusually strong bargaining position when they contended with employers around the city, or supported another union in a specific strike. Their wagons could easily be positioned to disrupt streetcars and block traffic. In addition, their families and neighborhood supporters often surrounded and attacked the wagons of nonunion teamsters who were strikebreaking. When the teamsters used their clout to engage in sympathy strikes, employers decided to coordinate their antiunion efforts, claiming that the teamsters held too much power over commerce in their control of the streets. The teamsters' strike in 1905 represented a clash both over labor issues and the public nature of the streets. To the employers, the streets were arteries for commerce, while to the teamsters, they remained public spaces integral to their neighborhoods.[59]
World War IIOn December 2, 1942, the world's first controlled nuclear reaction was conducted at the University of Chicago as part of the top secret Manhattan Project.
During World War II, the steel mills in the city of Chicago alone accounted for 20% of all steel production in the United States and 10% of global production. The city produced more steel than the United Kingdom during the war, and surpassed Nazi Germany's output in 1943 (after barely missing in 1942).
The city's diversified industrial base made it second only to Detroit in the value?$24 billion?of war goods produced. Over 1,400 companies produced everything from field rations to parachutes to torpedoes, while new aircraft plants employed 100,000 in the construction of engines, aluminum sheeting, bombsights, and other components. The Great Migration, which had been on pause due to the Depression, resumed at an even faster pace as the 1910 - 1930 period, as hundreds of thousands of black Americans arrived in the city to work in the steel mills, railroads, and shipping yards.[60]
PostwarReturning World War II veterans and immigrants from Europe (in particular displaced persons from Eastern Europe) created a postwar economic boom and led to the development of huge housing tracts on Chicago's Northwest and Southwest sides. The city was extensively photographed during the postwar years by street photographers such as Richard Nickel and Vivian Maier.
In the 1950s, the postwar desire for new and improved housing, aided by new highways and commuter train lines, caused many middle and higher income Americans to begin to move from the inner-city of Chicago to the suburbs. Changes in industry after 1950, with restructuring of the stockyards and steel industries, led to massive job losses in the city for working-class people. The city population shrank by nearly 700,000. The City Council devised "Plan 21" to improve neighborhoods and focused on creating "Suburbs within the city" near downtown and the lakefront. It built public housing to try to improve housing standards in the city. As a result, many poor were uprooted from newly created enclaves of Black, Latino, and poor people in neighborhoods such as Near North, Wicker Park, Lakeview, Uptown, Cabrini?Green, West Town and Lincoln Park. The passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s also affected Chicago and other northern cities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, many middle- and upper-class Americans continued to move from the city for better housing and schools in the suburbs.
Office building resumed in the 1960s. When completed in 1974, the Sears Tower, now known as the Willis Tower, was at 1451 feet the world's tallest building. It was designed by the famous Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed many of the city's other famous buildings.
House in Chicago's inner city, 1974. Photo by Danny Lyon.House in Chicago's inner city, 1974. Photo by Danny Lyon.
Chicago Picasso, a 1967 sculpture in Daley Plaza. Pablo Picasso refused the $100,000 fee and donated it to the people of Chicago.Chicago Picasso, a 1967 sculpture in Daley Plaza. Pablo Picasso refused the $100,000 fee and donated it to the people of Chicago.
Mayor Richard J. Daley served 1955?1976, dominating the city's machine politics by his control of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, which selected party nominees, who were usually elected in the Democratic stronghold. Daley took credit for building four major expressways focused on the Loop, and city-owned O'Hare Airport (which became the world's busiest airport, displacing Midway Airport's prior claims). Several neighborhoods near downtown and the lakefront were gentrified and transformed into "suburbs within the city".[61] He held office during the unrest of the 1960s, some of which was provoked by the police department's discriminatory practices. In the Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Wicker Park and Humboldt Park communities, the Young Lords under the leadership of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez marched and held sit ins to protest the displacement of Latinos and the poor. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, major riots of despair resulted in the burning down of sections of the black neighborhoods of the South and West sides. Protests against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago, resulted in street violence, with televised broadcasts of the Chicago police's beating of unarmed protesters.[62]
In 1979, Jane Byrne, the city's first woman mayor, was elected, winning the Democratic primary due to a citywide outrage about the ineffective snow removal across the city.[63] In 1983, Harold Washington became the first black mayor of Chicago. Richard M. Daley, son of Richard J. Daley, became mayor in 1989, and was repeatedly reelected until he declined to seek re-election in 2011. He sparked debate by demolishing many of the city's vast public housing projects, which had deteriorated and were holding too many poor and dysfunctional families. Concepts for new affordable and public housing have changed to include many new features to make them more viable: smaller scale, Environmental designs for public safety, mixed-rate housing, etc. New projects during Daley's administration have been designed to be Environmentally sound, more accessible and better for their occupants.
21st centuryIn September 2008, Chicago accepted a $2.52 billion offer on a 99-year lease of Midway International Airport to a group of private investors, but the deal fell through due to the collapse of credit markets during the 2008?2012 global recession[64][65] In 2008, as Chicago struggled to close a growing budget deficit, the city agreed to a 75-year, $1.16 billion deal to lease its parking meter system to an operating company created by Morgan Stanley. Daley said the "agreement is very good news for the taxpayers of Chicago because it will provide more than $1 billion in net proceeds that can be used during this very difficult economy." The agreement quadrupled rates, in the first year alone, while the hours which people have to pay for parking were broadened from 9 a.m. ? 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. ? 9 p.m., and from Monday through Saturday to every day of the week. Additionally, the city agreed to compensate the new owners for loss of revenue any time any road with parking meters is closed by the city for anything from maintenance work to street festivals.[66][67] In three years, the proceeds from the lease were all but spent. In his annual budget address on October 21, 2009, Daley projected a deficit for 2009 of more than $520 million. Daley proposed a 2010 budget totaling $6.14 billion, including spending $370 million from the $1.15 billion proceeds from the parking meter lease.[68] In his annual budget address on October 13, 2010, Daley projected a deficit for 2010 of $655 million, the largest in city history.[69] Daley proposed a 2011 budget totaling $6.15 billion, including spending all but $76 million of what remained of the parking meter lease proceeds, and received a standing ovation from aldermen.[70][71]
In 2011, Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago.[72] Chicago earned the title of "City of the Year" in 2008 from GQ for contributions in architecture and literature, its world of politics, and the downtown's starring role in the Batman movie The Dark Knight.[73] The city was rated by Moody's as having the most balanced economy in the United States due to its high level of diversification.[74]
FlagFour historical events are commemorated by the four red stars on Chicago's Flag: The United States' Fort Dearborn, established at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1803; the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed much of the city; the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, by which Chicago celebrated its recovery from the fire; and the Century of Progress World's Fair of 1933?1934, which celebrated the city's centennial. The Flag's two blue stripes symbolize the north and south branches of the Chicago River, which flows through the city's downtown. The three white stripes represent the North, West and South sides of the city, Lake Michigan being the east side.
Major disastersMain article: Timeline of Chicago historyThe most famous and serious disaster was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
On December 30, 1903, the "absolutely fireproof", five-week-old Iroquois Theater was engulfed by fire. The fire lasted less than thirty minutes; 602 people died as a result of being burned, asphyxiated, or trampled.[75]
The S.S. Eastland was a cruise ship based in Chicago and used for tours. On July 24, 1915?a calm, sunny day?the ship was taking on passengers when it rolled over while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew were killed. An investigation found that the Eastland had become too heavy with rescue gear that had been ordered by Congress in the wake of the Titanic disaster.[76]
On December 1, 1958, the Our Lady of the Angels School Fire occurred in the Humboldt Park area. The fire killed 92 students and three nuns; in response, fire safety improvements were made to public and private schools across the United States.[77]
April 13, 1992, billions of dollars in damage was caused by the Chicago Flood, when a hole was accidentally drilled into the long-abandoned (and mostly forgotten) Chicago Tunnel system, which was still connected to the basements of numerous buildings in the Loop. It flooded the central business district with 250 million US gallons (950,000 m3) of water from the Chicago River.[78][79]
A major Environmental disaster occurred in July 1995, when a week of record high heat and humidity caused 739 heat-related deaths, mostly among isolated elderly poor and others without air conditioning.[80]
See alsoAmerican urban historyBibliography of Chicago historyChicago in the 1930sEthnic groups in Chicago; the larger groups have articles such as Poles in Chicago and History of African Americans in ChicagoHistory of education in ChicagoPolitical history of ChicagoRoman Catholic Archdiocese of ChicagoTimeline of Chicago historyBefore the 19th century
As interpreted from the 1670 translation of the de Soto narrative into French by Pierre Richelet, the Chucagua River, was believed to be the Mississippi. La Salle named Checagou, the transliterated from Spanish, as the gateway to the River of de Soto.
Site of Chicagou on the lake, in Guillaume de L'Isle's map (Paris, 1718)1673: French-Canadian explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, on their way to Québec, pass through the area that will become Chicago.1677: Father Claude Allouez arrived to try to convert the natives to Christianity1682: French explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, passes through Chicago en route to the mouth of the Mississippi River.1696: Jesuit missionary Francois Pinet founds the Mission of the Guardian Angel. It is abandoned four years later.1705: Conflicts develop between French traders and the Fox tribe of Native Americans.1719: The Comanche Indian Tribe settle in the Great Plains and in the Midwest of the United States.1754: The Illinois Country becomes part of New France, days later The French and Indian War begins with the war against the British.1763: The Illinois Country falls to British Troops after the defeat of New France.1775: The Revolutionary War begins with America declaring independence from Britain.1778: The Illinois Campaign is born under the command of George Rogers Clark to lead the fight against major British outposts scattered across the country.1780s: Jean Baptiste Point du Sable establishes Chicago's first permanent settlement near the mouth of the Chicago River.1795: Six square miles (16 km2) of land at the mouth of the Chicago River are reserved by the Treaty of Greenville for use by the United States.1796: Kittahawa, du Sable's Potawatomi Indian wife, delivers Eulalia Point du Sable, Chicago's first recorded birth.
19th century1800s?1840s1803: The United States Army orders the construction of Fort Dearborn by Major John Whistler. It is built near the mouth of the Chicago River.1812June 17, Jean La Lime is killed by John Kinzie, making him the first recorded murder victim in Chicago.August 15, the Battle of Fort Dearborn.1816: The Treaty of St. Louis is signed in St. Louis, Missouri. Ft. Dearborn is rebuilt.1818: December 3, Illinois joins the Union and becomes a state.
1820 Chicago
1821 Survey of Chicago1830August 4, Chicago is surveyed and platted for the first time by James Thompson.Population: "Less than 100".[1]1833: Chicago incorporated as a town.[1]1837Chicago incorporated as a city.[1]C.D. Peacock jewelers was founded. It is the oldest Chicago business still operating today.Chicago receives its first charter.[2]Rush Medical College is founded two days before the city was chartered. It is the first medical school in the state of Illinois which is still operating.The remaining 450 Potawatomi left Chicago.1840July 10, Chicago's first legally executed criminal, John Stone was hanged for rape and murder.Population: 4,470.[3]1844: Lake Park designated.[4]1847: June 10, The first issue of the Chicago Tribune is published.1848Chicago Board of Trade opens on April 3 by 82 local businessmen.Illinois and Michigan Canal opens and traffic begins moving faster.Galena and Chicago Union Railroad enters operation becoming the first railroad in Chicago1849Wauconda is founded.
Merchants' Hotel on left, looking North from State and Washington Streets, before 1868
Chicago in 1830, as depicted in 1884
Chicago in 1832, as depicted in 1892
Chicago in 1836
1893 Bird's eye view of Chicago
Fort Dearborn depicted as in 1831, sketched 1850s although the accuracy of the sketch was debated soon after it appeared.1850s?1890s1850: Population: 29,963.[3]1851: Chicago's first institution of higher education, Northwestern University, is founded.1852: Mercy Hospital becomes the first hospital in Illinois.1853October: State Convention of the Colored Citizens held in city.[5]Union Park named.[4]1854: A cholera epidemic took the lives of 5.5% of the population of Chicago.[6]1855Chicago Theological Seminary founded.[1]April 21, Lager Beer riot.Population: 80,000.[4]1856: Chicago Historical Society founded.1857Iwan Ries & Co. Chicago's oldest family-owned business opens, still in operation today, the oldest family-owned Tobacco shop.Mathias A. Klein & Sons (Klein Tools Inc.), still family owned and run today by fifth and sixth generation Klein's.Cook County Hospital opens.[1]Hyde Park House built.[4]1859: McCormick Theological Seminary relocated.[1]1860September 8, the Lady Elgin Disaster.Population: 112,172.[3]Daprato Statuary Company (Currently Daprato Rigali Studios) founded by the Daprato brothers, Italian immigrants from Barga.1865Corporal punishment was abandoned in schools.[4]Population: 178,492.[4]1866: School of the Art Institute of Chicago founded.1867Construction began on the Water Tower designed by architect W. W. Boyington.Chicago Academy of Music founded.[4]1868Rand McNally is formed as a railway guide company.Lincoln Park Zoo founded.[4]1869Chicago Water Tower built.The first Illinois woman suffrage convention was held in ChicagoThe Chicago Club is established.Washington Square Park being developed.[4]1870St. Ignatius College founded, later Loyola UniversityPopulation: 298,977.[3]1871: October 8 ? 10, the Great Chicago Fire.[4][7]1872Montgomery Ward in business.Establishment of the first Black fire company in the city.
The original library, inside the old water tower on the site that is now the Rookery Building.
This former water tower was the site of the original public library, exterior view1873: Chicago Public Library established.[4]1875: Holy Name Cathedral dedicated.[4]1877: Railroad strike.[8]
Art Institute of Chicago As seen from Michigan Ave1878Art Institute of Chicago established.Conservator newspaper begins publication.[9][10]1879: Art Institute of Chicago founded.[1]1880: Polish National Alliance headquartered in city.1881: Unsightly beggar ordinance effected.[11]
Home Insurance Building
Field Museum in Chicago1885: Home Insurance Building building was the first skyscraper that stood in Chicago from 1885 to 1931. Originally ten stories and 138 ft (42.1 m) tall, it was designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1884[12][13] Two floors were added in 1891, bringing its now finished height to 180 feet (54.9 meters). It was the first tall building to be supported both inside and outside by a fireproof structural steel frame, though it also included reinforced concrete. A landmark lost to history and is considered the world's first skyscraper.
Chicago Water Tower and Chicago Avenue Pumping Station, circa 18861886May 4, the Haymarket riot.[14]Chicago Evening Post published (until 1932).[1]1887: Newberry Library established.1888: Dearborn Observatory rebuilt.1889Hull House founded.[1][15]Auditorium Building completed.[1]Auditorium Theatre opened.1890: The University of Chicago is founded by John D. Rockefeller.1891Chicago Symphony Orchestra founded by Theodore Thomas.[1]Provident Hospital founded.[1]1892June 6, The Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad, Chicago's first 'L' line, went into operation.Masonic Temple for two years, the tallest building in Chicago.Streetcar tunnels in Chicago (under the Chicago River) in use until 1906.[1]1893May 1 ? October 30, The World's Columbian Exposition (World's Fair); World's Parliament of Religions held.[16][1]October 28, Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr. was assassinated by Patrick Eugene Prendergast.[17]Sears, Roebuck and Company in business.First Ferris wheel built by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.Art Institute of Chicago building opens.[1]Monadnock Building completed.[1]Universal Peace Congress held.[18]Chicago Civic Federation founded.[17]1894May 11 ? August 2, the Pullman Strike.[14][1]?enské Listy women's magazine begins publication.[19][20]Field Museum of Natural History established.[1]1895: Marquette Building completed.[1]18961896 Democratic National Convention held; Bryan delivers Cross of Gold speech.[21]Campaign "to improve municipal service and politics" begun in 1896.[1]Abeny beauty shop[22] and Tonnesen Sisters photo studio[23] in business.1897March 12, The Chicago Elevator Protective Association of Chicago was formed. Later, on July 15, 1901, to become the International Union of Elevator Constructors Local 2.The Union Loop Elevated is completed.National union of meat packers formed.[1]1898: National peace jubilee was held.[1]1899Cook County juvenile court established.[24]Municipal Art League established.[1]Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building during construction
Chicago USA. Map of the business portion of Chicago. 1905 Source The New International Encyclopædia, v. 4, 1905, between pp. 610?11.1900Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal opens;[25] the Chicago River is completely reversed.Municipal Reference Library active (approximate date).[26]Labor strike of machinists.[8]Population: 1,698,575.[1]20th century
Construction of the Chicago Drainage Canal, 1900s1900s?1940sSee also: Chicago in the 1930s1902: Meatpacking strike.[8]1903December 30, Iroquois Theater FireCity Club of Chicago formed.1905The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in June[27]Teamsters' strike.[1]Chicago Defender newspaper begins publication.[28]City Hall rebuilding completed.[1]Chicago Federal Building completed.[1]1906Municipal court established.[24]The Chicago White Sox defeated the Chicago Cubs in the only all-Chicago World Series.Sinclair's fictional The Jungle published.[14]Chicago Tunnel Company operated a 2 ft. narrow-gauge railway freight tunnel network (until 1959).[1]1907: Adolph Kroch opens a bookstore which will evolve into Kroch's and Brentano's1908The Chicago Cubs win the World Series for the second year in a rowBinga Bank in business.[29]1909: Burnham's Plan of Chicago presented.[14]1910: Population: 2,185,283.[1][30]July 1: Comiskey Park opened (originally called White Sox Park).December 22: Chicago Union Stock Yards fire (1910)1911: Chicago and North Western Railway Terminal completed.[1]1912:Harriet Monroe starts Poetry, which will soon make Chicago a magnet for modern poets.1913Great Lakes Storm of 1913Wabash Avenue YMCA opens.[31]1914: Alpha Suffrage Club active.[32]April 23: Wrigley Field opened (originally called Weeghman Park).
All Star Tournament, 18 Inch Balke Line, Chicago, May 7?14, 1906
Jewish men and boys standing on a sidewalk in Chicago, 1903
Theodore Roosevelt in Chicago, 1915
During construction, 1915 (Chicago Daily News)1915July 24, the SS Eastland Disaster.[1]Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium founded.[30]1916Rebuilding of the American FortNavy Pier built. [30]1918Micheaux Film and Book Company in business.[33]The Spanish flu killed over 8,500 people in Chicago between September and November 1918.1919July 27, the Chicago race riot of 1919.Real estate broker Archibald Teller opened the first Fannie May candy store.1920: Population: 2,701,705.[30]1921Balaban and Katz Chicago Theatre built, (later the Chicago Theatre).Field Museum of Natural History relocates to Chicago Park District.[30]Street-widening and street-opening projects underway.[30]Medill School of Journalism opens.[30]1922: Chicago Council on Global Affairs established.[34]1924Murder trial and conviction of Leopold and Loeb.October 9: Soldier Field opened.1925Goodman Theatre established.Chicago railway station opened.[30]The Tribune Tower was completed on Michigan Avenue. The building's large Gothic entrance contains pieces of stone from other famous buildings: Westminster Abbey, Cologne Cathedral, the Alamo, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid, and the Arc de Triomphe.1926Nederlander Theatre opened.Granada Theatre opened.1927: Originally called the Chicago Municipal Airport, Chicago Midway International Airport opened. It was renamed in 1949 to honor the Battle of Midway in World War II.July 28: 27 people, mostly women and children, were killed in the Favorite Boat Disaster.1929February 14, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.[21][35]Oscar De Priest becomes U.S. representative for Illinois's 1st congressional district.[36][37]Civic Opera Building & Civic Opera House opened.1930March 6: 50,000 gather for International Unemployment Day, capping 10 days of protest against Great Depression conditions.May 12, Adler Planetarium opened, through a gift from local merchant Max Adler. It was the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere.[38]April 6, Twinkies are in Invented in Schiller Park.May 30, Shedd Aquarium opens.The Merchandise Mart was built for Marshall Field & Co. The $32 million, 4.2 million square foot (390,000 m2) building was the world's largest commercial building. It was sold it to Joseph P. Kennedy in 1945.1933Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) opened.March 6: Mayor Anton Cermak was killed while riding in a car with President-elect Roosevelt. The assassin was thought to have been aiming for Roosevelt.1933?34: Century of Progress World's Fair.1934May 19: Chicago Union Stock Yards fire (1934)July 1: Brookfield Zoo opened.July 22: John Dillinger was shot by the FBI in the alley next to the Biograph Theater.[21]1935January 19: Coopers Inc. sells the world's first briefs.Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago is awarded the very first Heisman Trophy1937: Labor strike of steelworkers.[8]1938: Community Factbook begins publication.[39]1944: Premiere of Williams' play The Glass Menagerie.1945: Ebony magazine begins publication.[40]1946: Construction of Thatcher Homes begins.1948: Chicago Daily Sun and Times newspaper begins publication.[9]1950s?1990s1950: Chess Records in business.[41]1954: Johnson Products Company in business.1955: The first McDonald's franchise restaurant, owned by Ray Kroc, opened in the suburb of Des Plaines.1958December 1, Our Lady of the Angels School Fire.The last streetcar ran in the city. At one time, Chicago had the largest streetcar system in the world.1959: Second City comedy troupe active.1960September 26: Nixon-Kennedy televised presidential debate held.[21]The first of the Playboy Clubs, featuring bunnies, opened in Chicago.1963 ? Donald Rumsfeld became U.S. representative for Illinois's 13th congressional district.[42]1965?66 ? The Chicago Freedom Movement, centering on the topic of open housing, paves the way for the 1968 Fair Housing Act.1966July 13?14: Chicago student nurse massacre1967January 26 ? 27, Major snowstorm deposits 23 inches of snow, closing the city for several days.[2]August 1: maiden voyage of UAC TurboTrain.1968:February 7: Mickelberry Sausage Company plant explosion kills nine and injured 70.August 26 ? 29, 1968 Democratic National Convention and its accompanying anti-Vietnam War protests.1969October: Weathermen's antiwar demonstration.[43]December 4: Black Panther Fred Hampton assassinated.The Chicago 8 trial opens.The 100-floor John Hancock Center was built.1970Soul Train television program begins broadcasting.Casa Aztlán (organization) founded.[44]1971: Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center founded.[45]1972: Vietnam Veterans Against the War headquartered in Chicago.1973: Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world for the next 25 years, was completed.1974: Steppenwolf Theatre Company founded.1977: Chicago Marathon begins.[41]1978: First BBS goes online on February 16.1979Heavy snowstorm and city's slow response lead to upset of incumbent mayor.May 25, the American Airlines Flight 191 crashes.Chicago's first female mayor, Jane M. Byrne, takes office.Woodstock Institute headquartered in city.[46]1981: Hill Street Blues television show premieres on January 15.1982September ? October: Chicago Tylenol murders1983Harold Washington became the first African American mayor.[47]Ordinance banning handguns takes effect.[35][48]1984The Chicago Cubs reach the postseason for the first time since 1945The Nike shoe Air Jordan is made for superstar basketball player of the Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan.Heartland Institute headquartered in city.[49]1986Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions, Inc. in business.The Chicago Bears win Super Bowl XXPresidential Towers complex completed1988Lights are installed in Wrigley FieldChristian Peacemaker Teams headquartered in city.[49]1990: Population: 2,783,726.[3]1991: May 28, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Sony proudly revealed that it was working with Nintendo to create a version of the Super NES with an in-built CD drive. The two Japanese companies had been working together in secret on the project, tentatively titled the Nintendo PlayStation, since 1989 and with the hype about CD-ROM reaching fever pitch, Sony?s announcement should have been a highlight of the trade show. Eventually leads to betrayal of the company Nintendo to Sony into Leading to the beginning of PlayStation Counsel.[50]1992: April 13, the Chicago Flood.1995The Chicago Heat Wave of 1995.Your Radio Playhouse begins broadcasting.Kroch's and Brentano's, once the largest privately owned bookstore chain in the US, closes.1996Chicago hosts the 1996 Democratic National Convention, sparking protests such as the one whereby Civil Rights Movement historian Randy Kryn and 10 others were arrested by the Federal Protective Service.[51]City website online (approximate date).[52][53]1998: The Chicago Bulls won their sixth NBA championship in eight years.21st century2001:9/11Chicago International Speedway is opened.Boeing moves its headquarters from Seattle to ChicagoA video game company called Bungie Launches Halo that would give Rise to Microsoft's Xbox counsels.2002: Lakeview Polar Bear Club founded (now known as the Chicago Polar Bear Club).2003Meigs Field closed after having large X-shaped gouges dug into the runway surface by bulldozers in the middle of the night.Chicago Film Archives founded.February 17: 2003 E2 nightclub stampedeJune 29: 2003 Chicago balcony collapse2004: Millennium Park opens.[54]2005The Chicago White Sox win their first World Series in 88 years.Regional Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning established.[55]2006May 1, the 2006 U.S. immigration reform protests draw over 400,000.Cloud Gate artwork installed in Millennium Park.2008: November 4, US President-elect Barack Obama makes his victory speech in Grant Park.
In 2009, an Amtrak Lake Shore Limited train backing into Chicago Union Station
Chicago Theater in 20112010June 28: US supreme court case McDonald v. City of Chicago decided; overturns city handgun ban.[48]Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup.City of Chicago Data Portal launched.[3]2011February 2: 900 cars abandoned on Lake Shore Drive due to Blizzard.March 30: Last of Cabrini Green towers torn down.Rahm Emanuel becomes mayor.Population: 8,707,120; metro 17,504,753.[56]201238th G8 summit and 2012 Chicago Summit are to take place in Chicago.The first of an ongoing franchise of NBC Chicago-set dramas, Chicago Fire, makes its world premiere on WMAQ2013Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup scoring 2 goals in 17 seconds to defeat the Boston BruinsRobin Kelly becomes U.S. representative for Illinois's 2nd congressional district.2014:January: ChiberiaAugust: Archer Daniels Midland completes its headquarters move from Decatur to the Loop.November 2: Wallenda performs high-wire stunt.[57]2015606 linear park opens.Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup yet again for the third time in six years, establishing a "puck dynasty" nationwide and arguably becoming the best team in the NHL.Video of the murder of Laquan McDonald is released by court order, and protests ensue.2016:June 16: McDonald's announces it will move its headquarters from Oak Brook to the West Loop by 2018.ConAgra completes its headquarters move from Omaha to the Merchandise Mart.November 2: Cubs win the world series.
Navy Pier in 20172017January 21: Women's protest against U.S. president Trump.[58]City approves public high school "post-graduation plan" graduation requirement (to be effected 2020).[59]2018: Walgreens announces the move of its headquarters from Deerfield, including 2,000 jobs, to the Old Chicago Main Post Office.
14th Street Coach Yard and Willis Tower, October 20182019May 20: Lori Lightfoot becomes the first female African-American mayor of Chicago.2020March 16: First Chicago death due to the COVID-19 pandemic; Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot issue a stay at home order. Over 7,700 people in Chicago died in the pandemic.May 28 ? June 1: George Floyd protests in Chicago2022May ? July: 2022-2023 abortion protests2023May 15: Brandon Johnson becomes mayor.See alsoHistory of ChicagoList of mayors of ChicagoNational Register of Historic Places listings in Chicago
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