Chicago is a major city in the U.S. state of Illinois. The city is the largest in the Midwest, and with a population of nearly three million people, Chicago is the third-most populous city in the United States. The Chicago Metropolitan area, informally known as Chicagoland, has a population of over 9.4 million in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana making it the third largest in the United States.Chicago is located along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan and is a major centre of transportation, industry, politics, culture, finance, medicine and higher education. Chicago is informally called the "Second City," the "Windy City," and the "City of Big Shoulders" (from Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago). ******************************** Today, Chicago is the financial, business, and cultural capital of the Midwest, and is recognized worldwide as an Alpha Global City. Chicago was founded in 1833 as a town to link the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system. It soon became a transportation hub of the Northwest Territory, with major connections by steamboats, canals and (by 1855), railroads. By 1890, it was one of the ten most influential world cities. ************************************* During the mid-18th century the Chicago area was inhabited primarily by Potawatomis, who took the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox people. The first non-native settler in Chicago, Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, was Haitian and arrived in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi woman, and founded the area's first trading post. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Fort Dearborn Massacre. The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi later ceded the land to the United States in the Treaty of St. Louis of 1816. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of 350, and within seven years it grew to a population of over 4,000. The City of Chicago was incorporated on March 4, 1837. ********************** Chicago in its first century was one of the fastest growing cities in the world, heavily promoted by Yankee entrepreneurs and land speculators. It reached 1 million people by 1890. ******************************************* Starting in 1848, the city became an important transportation link between the eastern and western United States with the opening of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, Chicago's first railway, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect through Chicago to the Mississippi River. With a flourishing economy that brought many new residents from rural communities and German American, Irish American, Polish American, Swedish American and numerous other immigrants, Chicago grew from a city of 299,000 to nearly 1.7 million between 1870 and 1900. The city's manufacturing and retail sectors dominated the Midwest and greatly influenced the American economy, with the Union Stock Yards' dominating the meat packing trade. ******************************************** After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Chicago experienced rapid rebuilding and growth.During Chicago's rebuilding period, the first skyscraper was constructed in 1885 using steel-skeleton construction. In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition on former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park. The World's Columbian Exposition drew 27.5 million visitors, and is considered among the most influential world's fairs in history. The University of Chicago was founded one year earlier in 1892 on the same location. 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 & connects Washington & Jackson parks. ********************** The city was the site of labour conflicts and unrest during this period, which included the Haymarket Riot on May 4, 1886. Concern for social problems among Chicago's lower classes led to the founding of Hull House in 1889, of which Jane Addams was a co-founder. The city also invested in many large, finely-landscaped municipal parks, which also included public sanitation facilities. **************Lake Michigan - the primary source of fresh water for the city - was already highly polluted from population growth and the rapidly growing industries in and around Chicago. The city responded by embarking on several large public works projects, including a large excavation project which built tunnels below Lake Michigan to newly built water cribs which were two miles (3 km) off the lakeshore. However, the cribs failed to bring enough clean water since spring rains would wash the polluted water from the Chicago River into them. Beginning in 1855, Chicago constructed the first comprehensive sewer system in the U.S. In 1900, the problem of sewage was solved by reversing the direction of the River's flow with the construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal leading to the Illinois River.**************The 1920s brought international notoriety to Chicago as gangsters such as Al Capone battled each other and the law during the Prohibition era. Nevertheless, the 1920s also saw a large increase in Chicago industry as well as the first arrivals of the Great Migration that would lead thousands of mostly Southern blacks to Chicago and other Northern cities. On 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.***********Mayor Richard J. Daley was elected in 1955, in the era of so-called machine politics. Starting in the 1950s, many upper and middle-class citizens left the inner-city of Chicago for the suburbs and left many impoverished neighbourhoods in their wake. Nevertheless, the city hosted the 1968 Democratic National Convention and saw the construction of the Sears Tower (which became the world's tallest building), McCormick Place, and O'Hare Airport. In 1979 Jane Byrne, the city's first female mayor, was elected. She popularized the city as a movie location and tourist destination, but also failed to manage its finances well. In 1983 Harold Washington became the first African American to be elected to the office of mayor; during his time in office, Chicago spent the same amount of public funds in each of its wards for the first time in its history. Current mayor Richard M. Daley, son of Richard J. Daley, was first elected in 1989. New projects during the younger Daley's administration have made Chicago larger, more environmentally friendly, and more accessible.****************Since the early 1990s, Chicago has seen a turnaround with increased ethnic diversity and many formerly abandoned neighbourhoods starting to show new life. As a part of its environmentally friendly image, Chicago declared the peregrine falcon, a protected species that started to build its nests in Chicago skyscrapers, the official bird of the city in 1999.Under the current Mayor Daley, Chicago has seen considerable investment in infrastructure, revitalizing downtown theatres and retail districts, and improving lakefront and riverfront cityscapes. ***********The name "Chicago" is the French rendering of the Miami-Illinois name shikaakwa, meaning wild leek (an analogical extension of the original meaning of "skunk").**********************The origin of Chicago's nickname as "The Windy City" is debated. The most common explanation had been that the phrase was created by New York newspapers in the 1880s during a national debate over which city would host the 1893 World's Fair, making reference to the long-windedness of the city's supporters. However, "Windy City" was used as early as 1876 by Cincinnati papers. As a result, the name remains in common usage.****************The city’s streets are organized in a grid pattern. The pattern is modified by the shoreline, the three branches of the Chicago River, the system of active/inactive rail lines, several diagonal streets (including Lincoln, Milwaukee, Clybourn, Elston, Archer, Broadway, and Ogden Avenues), the expressways, and hundreds of bridges and viaducts. In addition, the baselines for numbering streets and buildings are State Street (for east-west numbering) and Madison (for north-south numbering). Street numbers begin at "1" at the baselines and run numerically in directions indicated to the city limits, with N, S, E, and W indicating directions. Even-numbered addresses are on the north and west sides of streets; odd-numbered addresses are on the south and east sides. Chicago is divided into one-mile sections which usually contain eight blocks to the mile, with the exception of the streets for three miles immediately south of Madison. Between Madison and Roosevelt (12th), twelve blocks are used per mile, between Roosevelt and Cermak (22nd Street), ten blocks make one mile, and between Cermak and 31st Street nine blocks make a mile. Madison Street, in addition to simply being an origin point for north-south numbering, also divides the city into two well-established areas, the North Side and the South Side. The rivalry between the North and South sides are distinct, etched from different ethnic origins and historical developments, as well as culminating in the contemporary rivalry between the two Chicago baseball teams - the Chicago Cubs are considered to be the representative team for the North Side, whereas the Chicago White Sox are considered to be the South Side's counterpart. Note that despite the primary focus on the North-South rivalry, there are other geographic designations for the city, most commonly being the West Side, which broadly encompasses the area west of both the north and south branches of Chicago River. The Northwest and Southwest sides of the city area also referenced with frequency, though they tend to be subsumed under one of the three aforementioned areas.******************Since the first steel-framed high-rise building of the world was constructed in the city in 1885, Chicago has been known for its skyscrapers. Chicago is world-renowned as a global capital of architecture. Today, many high-rise buildings are located in the downtown area, notably in the Loop and along the lakefront and the Chicago River. The three tallest buildings are the Sears Tower (also the tallest building in the United States), the Aon Centre, and the John Hancock Centre. The rest of the city consists of high-rise residential buildings near the Lake and more low-rise buildings and single-family homes as one gets farther from the Lake. There are clusters of industrialized areas, including the lakefront near the Indiana border, the area south of Midway Airport, and the banks of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. ******************************* Future building sites that will contribute to Chicago's skyline include Waterview Tower, the Chicago Spire, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The 60602 zip code was named by Forbes as the hottest zip code in the country with upscale buildings such as The Heritage at Millennium Park (130 N. Garland) leading the way for other buildings such at Waterview Tower, The Legacy and Momo. The median sale price for residential real estate was $710,000 in 2005 according to Forbes. *************************** Along Lake Shore Drive, parks line the lakefront. The most notable of these parks are Grant Park and Millennium Park, which border the east end of the Loop, Lincoln Park on the north side, and Jackson Park in the Hyde Park neighbourhood on the south side. Interspersed within this system of parks are 31 beaches, a zoo and several bird sanctuaries, McCormick Place Convention Centre, Navy Pier, Soldier Field, the Museum Campus, and a water treatment plant. Pushed along by the national real estate boom in recent years, Chicago has seen an unprecedented surge in skyscraper construction, most notably in the area directly south (South Loop) and north (River North) of the Loop.