Chicago: From Trading Post to Third Coast Colossus And What Comes Next

A concluding essay on the city that built itself from a swamp and has never stopped arguing about what it should become.

This series began at the mouth of the Chicago River and ended on the Northwest Side with a neighborhood named after a New Jersey suburb that a group of developers thought sounded respectable. 

What ties the 77 neighborhoods of Chicago together is not geography or demographics or architecture, though all of those things appear. What ties them together is Chicago itself, the particular force of a city that has always been growing, always absorbing, always converting the raw material of human migration into something new.

By the Numbers

A Century of Explosive Growth

The numbers that describe Chicago's rise in its first hundred years are genuinely difficult to absorb. In 1840, the city had fewer than 4,500 people. By 1890, fifty years later it had more than a million. By 1930 it had 3.3 million, making it the third-largest city in the world. No American city has ever grown faster, and few cities anywhere in the history of the world have matched the pace. Chicago built itself from a trading post at a swampy portage into a continental metropolis in less than a century, and it did so on the labor of successive waves of people who came from everywhere and stayed because there was work and because the city, for all its cruelties, was real in a way that a lot of places were not.

Chicago Population by Census Year

Source: U.S. Census Bureau decennial census data.

The City That Annexed Its Way to Greatness

Chicago did not simply grow in population. It grew in territory, absorbing surrounding townships and communities through a series of annexations that transformed a ten-square-mile river town into a 227-square-mile urban colossus. The process began almost immediately after incorporation and continued in waves through the early twentieth century, with the great annexation of 1889 (125 square miles and 225,000 people absorbed in a single election) standing as the most dramatic single territorial expansion in American municipal history.

Many of the neighborhoods covered in this series came into Chicago precisely through that 1889 annexation: Norwood Park, Jefferson Park, Montclare, Dunning, and others all voted to join the city in that year, lured by the promise of paved streets, running water, and sewers. What they got was those things, eventually, along with a place in the civic story of a city that was already becoming something the world had not quite seen before.

Chicago Geographic Growth by Era

The annexation process had a logic to it that the neighborhoods of this series illustrate precisely. Communities voted to join Chicago not out of civic sentimentality but out of practical need: for schools, for sewers, for fire protection, for water that did not come from a well. The city offered those things. In exchange, it got the tax base, the population, and the territory that made it what it became. The bargain was transactional, and both sides generally got what they wanted, at least at first.

Who Came — and Who Has Stayed

Chicago's demographic history is the history of American migration compressed into a single city. German and Irish immigrants came first, in the 1840s and 1850s. Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, Greeks, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans arrived in waves through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, filling the bungalow belts and the stockyard neighborhoods and the factory districts. African Americans came from the South in two great migrations, the first from roughly 1910 to 1940, the second from 1940 to 1970.  They came seeking industrial jobs and an escape from Jim Crow, finding both along with a new set of restrictions in the form of segregated housing, redlining, and the systematic exclusion that this series has documented neighborhood by neighborhood. Mexican and Puerto Rican communities grew through the mid-twentieth century and accelerated after immigration law changes in 1965. Asian communities, including Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian populations, have grown steadily since the 1970s.

Chicago Racial and Ethnic Composition, Selected Years

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Hispanic/Latino data not fully captured in earlier census years. Figures may exceed 100% due to rounding and racial category overlap in some census years.

The table above tells a compressed version of the story this series has told in detail, neighborhood by neighborhood. The white European immigrant communities that dominated Chicago through 1950 have dispersed to the suburbs over the following decades. The Black population that was systematically excluded from most of the city's neighborhoods has itself been declining since 1980, the result of deindustrialization, disinvestment, school closures, and the demolition of public housing that scattered communities built over generations. The Hispanic population has grown steadily and is now roughly equal to the Black and white populations alike. The Asian population, small but growing, reflects the continued pull of Chicago's economic and educational institutions.

The Fire That Remade Everything

No single event in Chicago's history shaped the city more completely than the Great Fire of October 8–10, 1871. The fire burned roughly 2,100 acres of the city, destroyed 17,450 buildings, killed an estimated 300 people, and left 100,000 homeless. It was one of the great urban disasters of the nineteenth century.

It was also, in retrospect, the event that made modern Chicago. The rebuilding that followed attracted architects, engineers, and capital from across the country, producing the first steel-frame skyscrapers in history and establishing Chicago as the world's laboratory for modern urban design. Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, John Root, and William Le Baron Jenney all did their defining work in the post-Fire city. The physical Chicago that visitors see today — the Loop's skyscraper canyons, the lakefront parks, the diagonal boulevards — is in large part the product of the rebuilding choices made in the decade after the disaster.

The neighborhoods covered in this series survived the fire precisely because they were not yet part of Chicago when it burned. Norwood Park, Edison Park, Forest Glen, Mount Greenwood — all were outside the city limits in 1871 and were untouched. The Noble-Seymour-Crippen House in Norwood Park, the oldest building in Chicago, stands today because it stood beyond the reach of the flames. The fire drew the border between the old city and the new one, and many of Chicago's neighborhood communities began on the far side of that line.

The Deindustrialization Wound

The second great rupture in Chicago's history was the collapse of its industrial base in the 1970s and 1980s. The steel mills of the Southeast Side, which had employed tens of thousands of workers and anchored entire communities, closed one after another. Wisconsin Steel shut down on a Friday morning in 1980 with no warning, leaving 3,400 workers with bounced paychecks and no pensions. The South Works of U.S. Steel shuttered in 1992. The stockyards, which had made Chicago the world's meat-processing capital for a century, had already closed in 1971. The manufacturing jobs that had drawn successive waves of immigrants and migrants and given them a foothold in the middle class evaporated faster than any replacement could be found.

The population figures tell part of this story. Chicago's population peaked in 1950 at 3.62 million and has declined in most subsequent decades. The city today, at roughly 2.7 million, is about 26 percent smaller than it was at its peak. But raw population numbers obscure the geographic dimension: the decline has been highly concentrated in communities of color on the South and West Sides, many of which have lost 40 to 60 percent of their population since 1960, while neighborhoods on the North Side and in gentrifying areas closer to the lakefront have grown.

Chicago's Bright Future and the Honest Accounting It Requires

A city that has produced Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Muddy Waters, Benny Goodman, Barack Obama, and a thousand other figures who changed the country and the world is not a city whose prospects need to be inflated. Chicago's case for the future can be made on the facts as they are.

The region's economic output (the gross metropolitan product of the Chicago area) stands at roughly $800 billion, making it the third-largest metropolitan economy in the United States and among the dozen largest in the world. Chicago is the financial capital of the Midwest and the trading capital of North America, home to the CME Group and the CBOE, where a significant share of the world's futures and options contracts are priced every day. It is a center of manufacturing, logistics, and professional services, with one of the deepest concentrations of corporate headquarters in the country.

Its educational institutions — the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, DePaul, Loyola, Illinois Tech, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and dozens of others produce research, patents, and graduates that feed the city's economy and connect it to global networks of knowledge and capital. Its cultural institutions — the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera, the Steppenwolf Theatre are among the finest of their kind in the world.

The lakefront is 26 miles of publicly accessible shoreline from Edgewater to South Shore and remains one of the great civic achievements in American urban history, the product of Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago and the legal principle, enforced in the courts for more than a century, that the lakefront belongs to the people. No private development has been permitted to block the public from Lake Michigan, a restraint that most American cities with waterfront access have been unable or unwilling to exercise.

The challenges are equally real. Persistent population loss, particularly from communities of color on the South and West Sides. Structural fiscal problems rooted in pension obligations that have accumulated over decades of underfunding. Violent crime concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods that have been underserved by investment and overpoliced by aggressive tactics that have not produced safety. A public school system that performs unevenly across the city's geography in ways that track, with uncomfortable precision, the city's racial and economic segregation. A housing affordability crisis in desirable neighborhoods that displaces longtime residents while neighborhoods elsewhere struggle with vacancy and abandonment.

Chicago's problems are real and serious. They are also not the sum of the city. The neighborhoods of this series are full of people doing the daily work of maintaining communities that the city's larger failures have made more difficult than they should be.

These are Chicago's problems. They are not secrets, and they are not new. What is also not new is Chicago's capacity to absorb hard realities and continue working. The city that rebuilt itself from ash in 1871, that processed the trauma of deindustrialization in the 1980s, that has absorbed and integrated more waves of newcomers than almost any other American city, that city is still here. It is noisier and more contentious and more complicated than the version of it that exists in marketing materials, and it is more interesting and more worth paying attention to than that version could possibly be.

A Final Word

Chicago is not finished becoming itself. The bungalows are still occupied. The churches are still holding services in languages their founders never anticipated. The parks are still filling on summer weekends. The Metra trains are still running out to the last stop in the city before the suburbs begin. The city's 77 neighborhoods are all still there, all still working, all still telling a story that requires attention to hear.

Stay tuned. There is no shortage of Chicago left to cover.