Today is my Chicago day. I have free time and have decided to take the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC) River Cruise aboard the First Lady cruise ship. Seems like a fitting end to a river cruise vacation (as in Rhine River cruise). It’s widely considered the best of these tours since it’s the only one run with CAC-trained docents rather than generic tour guides. I really did get a good overview of the city history and architecture from this well-known 90-minute tour. And the very first thing I learned was that the name Chicago comes from the Native American word shikaakwa (Miami-Illinois language), referring to the wild garlic/leek plants that grew abundantly along the Chicago River. It’s often informally translated as “stinky onion” or “smelly onion place” since this was basically an uninhabited swamp for centuries.
I spent a lot of time in Chicago in the 80’s due to the fact that I set up and ran a futures trading business for my firm. It was during those days that I got to liking Chicago, but that was all due some updating.
Chicago’s history stretches back long before it became a city and is shaped by geography as much as by people. The area was long inhabited by Native peoples. French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette passed through the area in 1673 while mapping the Mississippi River system, recognizing the portage between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers as a strategic link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watershed. This portage became key to the area’s future importance. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Black (Haitian-French) trader, established the first permanent non-Native settlement at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s, building a trading post that became a hub for fur trading and commerce. He’s regarded today as the “Founder of Chicago” and the first bridge we go under carries his name. The U.S. built Fort Dearborn in 1803 to secure the area. Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833 and as a city in 1837, with a population of about 4,000. Its location at the base of Lake Michigan, linked via canal to the Mississippi system, made it a natural transportation hub.
The Erie Canal (completed 1825) was a major driver of Chicago’s growth. It opened a water route from the East Coast to the Great Lakes, connecting New York City to Lake Erie. This meant goods and people could travel from New York all the way to the Great Lakes by water, bypassing the slow, expensive overland routes through the Appalachians. That made Chicago a logical hub since it sat at the western edge of the Great Lakes system, close to the Mississippi/Illinois River watershed. It all drove migration and settlement with settlers from New England and New York could now reach the Midwest cheaply and relatively quickly, and many came through the Erie Canal route to settle in and around Chicago, fueling its population boom in the 1830s–1850s. It also fueled the grain and lumber trade of Midwestern wheat, corn, and lumber that could then move east via the Great Lakes and the canal to New York markets, and manufactured goods could move west in return. Chicago became the natural collection and shipping point for this trade, laying the groundwork for its rise as a commodities and railroad hub later in the 19th century. It also set the stage for railroads, the trade patterns and commercial infrastructure making Chicago the obvious place for railroads to converge starting in the 1850s, cementing its role as the nation’s transportation nexus.
The rapid arrival of railroads in the 1850s–60s turned Chicago into the country’s central hub for grain, lumber, and livestock, fueling meteoric growth. By 1871, Chicago had grown to roughly 300,000 people, but then the Great Chicago Fire destroyed much of the city, killing an estimated 300 people and leaving 100,000 homeless. The rebuilding that followed helped establish Chicago as a center of architectural innovation, including the rise of the skyscraper…hence the value of the river tour focused on architecture.
Chicago sat at the natural meeting point between the East, the Great Lakes, and the vast agricultural interior (Midwest and Great Plains). Once railroads arrived in the 1850s, it became cheaper and faster to route rail lines through Chicago than around it, and the city became the place where eastern and western rail networks physically met. Chicago had roughly 11 trunk lines and was the largest rail center in the world. Because so many separate rail lines terminated in Chicago rather than passing through, goods often had to be unloaded, stored, processed, and reloaded there. This gave rise to major industries built on that transfer function like grain elevators, the Union Stock Yards (meatpacking), and lumber yards, all since it was efficient to process raw materials in Chicago before shipping finished goods onward. This is why Chicago became home to the Board of Trade (commodities futures trading) and the world’s largest stockyards. This concentration of rail traffic attracted manufacturing (steel, agricultural equipment like McCormick’s reaper works, mail-order retail like Sears and Montgomery Ward) because factories could cheaply receive raw materials and ship finished products nationwide. Jobs in rail yards, stockyards, factories, and warehouses pulled in waves of migrants and immigrants, making Chicago one of the fastest-growing cities in the world in the second half of the 19th century. It was a labor city “of the people” and is still a bastion of liberal ideology.
We went past the Wrigley Building (some say chewing gum built this city) and the old Montgomery Wards warehouse. Aaron Montgomery Ward launched the first true mail-order catalog business, using Chicago’s rail hub status to ship goods nationwide especially to rural farmers who’d previously been at the mercy of local general stores’ high prices and limited selection. The catalog (“Ward’s”) let farmers order everything from clothing to farm equipment at lower prices, using the rail network radiating out from Chicago to deliver goods. Montgomery Ward’s success in Chicago drew Sears, Roebuck & Co. (founded 1893) to set up shop there too, and the two mail-order giants competed head-to-head for decades, reinforcing Chicago’s identity as the retail/mail-order capital of the country alongside its roles in rail, grain, and meatpacking Montgomery Ward also fought (and won) a long legal battle to preserve Chicago’s lakefront as public parkland rather than allow it to be developed commercially.My
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Today was not a windy day, but Chicago is known as “The Windy City” based on a couple of competing origin stories. The most repeated story is that New York newspaper editors coined it during Chicago’s bid to host the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, mocking Chicago boosters as “windbags” full of hot air and exaggerated boasting about their city. Chicago does get genuinely strong, gusty winds off Lake Michigan, especially downtown, where the lake breeze funnels between tall buildings (a real phenomenon sometimes called the “urban canyon” effect). So the name fits meteorologically too, even if it’s not actually windier than many other American cities on average. Nevertheless, it’s most likely a jab at Chicago’s bragging, self-promoting civic culture in the 19th century, reinforced by (and often confused with) the city’s genuinely blustery lakefront weather.
Chicago is famous for a lot, spanning history, culture, and daily life. There’s the architecture and skyline. There’s the food angle with deep-dish pizza, Chicago-style hot dogs (“dragged through the garden,” never ketchup), Italian beef sandwiches, and Garrett popcorn (I’m hooked for sure). Sports plays a role with Michael Jordan and the Bulls’ 1990s dynasty; the Cubs (and their 108-year championship drought, ended 2016); and the Bears, White Sox, Blackhawks. Chicago is also considrrrd the birthplace/home of Chicago blues (Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy) and house music; also a major jazz and improv comedy hub (Second City launched many SNL comedians). I also learned about one of Chicago’s most famous engineering feats. The original problem was that the Chicago River naturally flowed into Lake Michigan, which was also the city’s drinking water source. Chicago dumped raw sewage and stockyard waste into the river, which then flowed straight into the lake, contaminating the very water supply the city drank from. The engineering solution was that rather than treat the sewage, Chicago’s engineers decided to reverse the river’s flow entirely to send waste away from Lake Michigan and down toward the Mississippi River watershed instead. They built the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900, which connected the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River (part of the Mississippi watershed). By deepening the canal below the level of Lake Michigan, engineers created a gradient that pulled the river’s flow westward and southward instead of east into the lake. It’s considered one of the greatest civil engineering achievements of its era. The reversal also connected the Great Lakes watershed to the Mississippi River watershed via a man-made link.
Lots of interesting things about this stinky onion.