Chicago 1 Chicago Chicago City City of Chicago Clockwise from top: Downtown Chicago, the Chicago Theatre, the 'L', Navy Pier, Millennium Park, the Field Museum, and Willis Tower. Flag Seal Nickname(s): The Windy City, Chi-Town, Chi-City, Hog Butcher for the World, The City That Works, and others found at List of nicknames for Chicago Motto: Latin: Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden), I Will Location in the Chicago metropolitan area and Illinois Chicago 2 Location in the United States [1] [1] Coordinates: 41°52′55″N 087°37′40″W Coordinates: 41°52′55″N 087°37′40″W Country United States State Illinois Counties Cook, DuPage Settled 1770s Incorporated March 4, 1837 Named for Miami-Illinois: shikaakwa ("Wild onion") Government • Type Mayor–council • Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) • City Council 50 aldermen Area • City 234.0 sq mi (606.1 km2) • Land 227.2 sq mi (588 km2) • Water 6.9 sq mi (18 km2) 3.0% • Urban 2,122.8 sq mi (5,498 km2) • Metro 10,874 sq mi (28,160 km2) Elevation 597 ft (182 m) Population (2012 Estimate) • City 2,714,856 • Rank 3rd US • Density 11,864.4/sq mi (4,447.4/km2) • Urban 8,711,000 • Metro 9,461,105 Demonym Chicagoan Time zone CST (UTC−06:00) • Summer (DST) CDT (UTC−05:00) Area code(s) 312, 773, 872 [2] FIPS code 17-14000 [3] GNIS feature ID 428803 Chicago 3 [4] Website www.cityofchicago.org Chicago ( i/ʃɪˈkɑːɡoʊ/ or /ʃɪˈkɔːɡoʊ/) is the third most populous city in the United States. With 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in both the U.S. state of Illinois and the American Midwest. Its metropolitan area, sometimes called Chicagoland, is home to 9.5 million people and is the third-largest in the United States.[5] Chicago is the seat of Cook County, a small part of the city extends into DuPage County.[6] Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837, near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed, and experienced rapid growth in the middle nineteenth century. Today, the city is an international hub for finance, commerce, industry, telecommunications, and transportation, with O'Hare International Airport being the second-busiest airport in the world in terms of traffic movements. It has the fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP) among metropolitan areas in the world, ranking behind Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles, and ahead of London and Paris. Chicago is listed as an alpha+ global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and ranks seventh in the world in the 2012 Global Cities Index. In 2012[7], Chicago hosted 46.2 million international and domestic visitors. Chicago's culture includes contributions to the visual arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy, and music, particularly blues and soul. The city has many nicknames, which reflect the impressions and opinions about historical and contemporary Chicago. The best-known include "Windy City" and "Second City." Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. History The name "Chicago" is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, translated as "wild onion" or "wild garlic", from the Miami-Illinois language.[8] 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 written about the time.[9] Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called "chicagoua," grew abundantly in the area. During the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples. The 1780s saw the arrival of the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who was of African and European (French) descent.[10] In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, an area that was to be part of Chicago was turned over to the United States for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in the War of 1812, Battle of Fort Dearborn and later rebuilt.[11] The Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were eventually forcibly removed from their land following the Treaty of Chicago in 1833.[12] Chicago 4 Founding and 19th century On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of around 200. Within seven years it would grow to a population of over 4,000. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales commenced with Edmund Dick Taylor as U.S. receiver of public moneys. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837 and went on to become the fastest growing city in the world for several decades. As the site of the Chicago Portage,[13] the city emerged as an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicago's first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, opened in 1848, which also marked the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River.[14][15][16] A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants abroad. Manufacturing and retail and finance sectors State and Madison Streets, which was once became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago known as the busiest intersection in the world Board of Trade (established 1848) listed the first ever standardized (1897) 'exchange traded' forward contracts, which were called futures contracts. In the 1850s Chicago gained national political prominence as the home of Senator Stephen Douglas, the champion of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and "popular sovereignty" approach to the issue of the spread of slavery. These issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage. Lincoln was nominated in Chicago for the nation's presidency at the 1860 Republican National Convention and went on to defeat Douglas in the general election, setting the stage for the American Civil War. To accommodate rapid population growth and demand for better sanitation, the city implemented various infrastructural improvements. In February 1856, the Chesbrough plan for the building of the United States' first comprehensive sewerage system was approved by the Common Council. The project raised much of central Chicago to a new grade. While raising Chicago, and at first improving the health of the city, the untreated sewage and industrial waste now flowed into the Chicago River, then into Lake Michigan, polluting the primary source of fresh water for the city. The city responded by tunneling two miles (3 km) out into Lake Michigan to newly built water cribs. In 1900, the problem of sewage contamination was largely resolved when the city reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that it 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.[17][18][19] In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire broke out, destroying an area of about 4 miles long and 1 mile wide, a large section of the city at the time.[20][21] Much of the city, including railroads and stockyards, survived intact,[22] and from the ruins of the previous wooden structures arose more modern constructions of steel and stone which would set the precedent for worldwide construction.[23][24] During its rebuilding period, Chicago constructed the world's first skyscraper in 1885, using steel-skeleton construction.[25][26] An artist's rendering of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 Chicago 5 Chicago's flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Europe and migrants from the eastern states. Of the total population in 1900 no less than 77% were 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).[27] Labor conflicts followed the industrial boom and the rapid expansion of the labor pool, including the Haymarket affair on May 4, 1886. Concern for social problems among Chicago's immigrant poor led Jane Addams to co‑found Hull House in 1889. Programs developed there became a model for the new field of social work. During the 1870s and 1880s, Chicago attained national stature as the leader in the movement to improve public health. City, and later state laws, that upgraded standards for the medical profession and fought urban epidemics of cholera, small pox, and yellow fever were not only passed, but also enforced. These in turn became templates for public health reform in many other cities and states. The city invested in many large, well-landscaped municipal parks, which also included public sanitation facilities. The chief advocate and driving force for improving public health in Chicago was Dr. John H. Rauch, M.D., who established a plan for Chicago's park system in 1866, created Lincoln Park by closing a cemetery filled with festering, shallow graves, and helped establish a new Chicago Board of Health in 1867 in response to an outbreak of cholera. 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.