I guess Chicago only became a city in 1833, which is amazing for me to find out how much of the city has been built in such a short amount of time. Most of it has been built since the 50's actually. There are a few photos from the 40's I found that show most of downtown being train yards. It seems almost impossible that the majority of the city has been built in just 50-60 or so. In just like 4 generations we've killed off and pushed out all of the native people. I'm sure most of the country's timeline is similar. Can you imagine us going to Europe from the US and in just 4 generations have Europe completely rebuilt and void of its current people? Incredible.
In 1833 we got rid of all the natives (Ottawa, Potawatami, Ojibwe, Miami, Fox, and Sauk) thru a treaty that displaced them. The name Chicago comes from the word Shikaakwa as the French perceived it. Which is the word for "wild onion" in Miami-Illinois (language). I was always told Chicago meant skunk because it was smelly. Maybe the onion thing is mistranslated on Wikipedia. If I find out otherwise I'll let you know. I mean they both can referencing smell.
I might come back to more of the early history later on, but I'm going to jump ahead. Chicago was built up quickly because of Lake Michigan and our relative position on the US map. The city grew because we could grow the food they were eating in the east and raise the pigs and cows and then ship it all to New York. It was also a hub for everything out west coming back to New York. Because of that we got our financial district, the Mercantile where all the commodities are exchanged. We obviously still use it today. We are still the hub of the country too. Then it was railroads which is why downtown was all railway yards in the 40s and today O'Hare is the second busiest airport in the world. We run so much shit thru the city we built a second international airport that is extremely busy too: Midway.
The Chicago fire wiped out 1/3 of the entire city in 1871 including the entire business/financial district. That fire was actually good for the city because instead of naturally growing to that size from the 200 people who started the first trading post, they could plan the entire downtown area to best function with the new population. During reconstruction (ours not the Civil War), we developed and completed the worlds first sky scraper in 1885, using steel for the first time. It is just a mile or so north of those people that died in the fire last week.
Then the "Heymarket Massacre" happened in 1886 when people were out supporting labor and someone threw a bomb at the police. I'm telling you that it is a very bad idea to fuck with the people of Chicago. It always has been. We've always been anti-business when it comes to social welfare. This is literally where the labor vs. big business started. THIS riot over 100 years ago started this struggle and we are still fighting today. Just last year after the election when the economy crashed a company that makes windows just put up signs when people were at work saying the were now out of business and they weren't to come back anymore. I don't know if you remember hearing about this, but none of the workers left work. They then started working in shifts to occupy the building and protect the company from liquidating the machines and inventory. They had that building conquered for a week or two before I think Dick Durbin came in and tried to get Bank of America to extend a new loan to the company. I know they are working now, but I think they build green stuff now. Anyhow, the point is, Chicago is a fucking nightmare for corporations.
Click here to see one of the memorials we built celebrating the labor position. The city literally sided and celebrated the strikers and made statues of a martyr. Then in the 1990's the city made the actual site where the event happened a city landmark. In the 90's the city was still siding with labor.
Then the most significant things that followed were the World's Fair and Prohibition, but they both get their own posts. We also developed the nuclear bomb at Chicago University (where Michelle Obama worked) in our role in the Manhattan Project. This is where we learned how to make a nuclear reaction and where the first one in the world was created. The photo above is the library at University of Chicago.
Sorry that I am getting out of order here. Chicago was a city in the North in the Civil War. I am going off the timeline in Wikipedia and there is no mention of it there. One of the places slaves went in the underground railroad was Chicago. It was called the great migration if you are a history buff. The underground railroad has less relevance in the city since they didn't have to hide here, but when I was living in Indianapolis I found out quickly that it was a giant deal there. Even where I live now there is a mansion called Wolfe Mansion and it is completely land locked, but has a widow's walk (I'm going to assume if you live on the coast you know what that is). In high school we all thought this place was haunted and the story was the man who build it used to sit up there and shoot slaves as they ran across his property. So the south side of Chicago became the black part of town and it still is today. Back to Michelle Obama, but her relatives are the people we are talking about. They likely had to escape the south this way.
During the civil war Chicago had Camp Douglas: The Civil War's Guantanamo. In 1862 we had established a camp for prisoners the north took from the confederacy and put them on the same spot of land that we built the University of Chicago on to develop the bomb and give Michelle Obama a job. Over 7,000 confederates died at the hands of Chicago. Most were attributed to disease because of our primitive pluming and stuff but several were "unaccounted for." Wikipedia says 1500 but in all honesty I've heard less. We sold their bodys, threw some in Lake Michigan, and threw the rest in the ground without a coffin. It is the largest mass grave in the western hemisphere..... Filled with traitor racist assholes.
The wikipedia article also does not list the World's Fair of 1893, which is a very big deal that is getting it's own post with tons of photos. It was the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival and Chicago stole the event from New York with dirty politics. We built hundreds of building and built a completely new city that was just incredibly magnificent. I mean really, this was on par with the great architecture in old world Europe. I think only one building still stands. It was called the White City where our best serial killer really did a number. He was an architect who help build the buildings and had secret rooms no one knew about and he killed all sorts of people, most of whom never went missing right away, because they were all tourists. There is a great book about it called The Devil in the White City. The photo above is the only surviving building, I believe.
The fair was after the industrial boom and was THE display of American Exceptionalism. It was our responsibility to show off to the world, because this is when we took the #1 spot in power. If you are a history buff than you know all about the late 1800's and the rise of big business and wealth in America. Chicago was America's phoenix that rose out of the ashes and became the leader in business, technology, and accomplishment. Wait till you see these photos... Do not look any of this up before my post, if you don't know about it already. You'll wish we still had this campus. This next part is from memory and I'm not seeing it in this text, but I'm pretty sure that it was the first display of electricity and we went with Tesla on alternating current instead of Edison's direct current..... I could be wrong, but I will have it right when I write the dedicated post. I'll also go into the politics too, because from what I know this was when we started building the reputation for corruption, although it has been going on for even longer.
