🇺🇸 United States · Central and South
Chicago is the great surprise of the United States: an imposing yet surprisingly friendly metropolis, looking out over a lake so big it feels like a sea. Here, in the heart of the Midwest, the skyscraper was born, and the city became a kind of open-air museum of the best architecture in the world, with work by Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and so many others. Its skyline reflected in the river and in Lake Michigan is one of the most spectacular on the planet, and seeing it from a river cruise is one of the finest urban experiences there is.
But Chicago is not only architecture. It is Millennium Park with its shining 'Bean' reflecting the whole city; it is the Riverwalk and the urban beaches along the lake; it is one of the world's great art museums, with masterpieces of Impressionism and American art. It is also a city of deep popular culture: birthplace of electric blues and of a legendary jazz scene, a city of sporting passions (the Cubs, the Bears, Michael Jordan's Bulls), and of its own flavors like the famous deep dish pizza and its hot dog. It has the hard-working, warm character of the Midwest.
This guide covers the essentials of Chicago with a practical and warm eye: how to enjoy Millennium Park and the Riverwalk, which architecture tour to choose, which observation deck to go up, which museums to visit, how to get around on the iconic elevated 'L' train and how to experience its music and food scene. Chicago tends to win over whoever visits: it is big, beautiful, cultured and deeply enjoyable.
The name 'Chicago' comes from a word in the Miami-Illinois language ('shikaakwa'), which referred to a plant of the onion or wild garlic family that grew in the marshy area beside the lake. Before the Europeans, the region was home to peoples of the Illinois Confederation and, later, the Potawatomi. The first permanent non-Indigenous settler was, notably, a trader of Afro-Haitian origin, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the late 18th century and is recognized as the city's founder. Its strategic location, at the point where the Great Lakes system almost connects with the Mississippi basin, made it a key hub. The city was incorporated in 1837 and grew explosively with the railroads and the grain and meat trade, becoming the great center of the Midwest. In 1871, the devastating Great Chicago Fire destroyed much of the city; its rebuilding gave rise to extraordinary architectural innovation and to the birth of the skyscraper. In 1893 it hosted the dazzling World's Columbian Exposition. In the 20th century it received great waves of migration —among them the Great Migration of African Americans from the South, which brought the blues—, lived through the gangster era of Prohibition (Al Capone) and established itself as the cultural, architectural and financial capital of the country's center. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'prairie state': heart of the Midwest, land of the great prehistoric city of Cahokia and of the Illinois confederation, home of Lincoln and of Chicago, cradle of the skyscraper on the shore of Lake Michigan.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name 'Chicago' has its roots in the languages of the region's Indigenous peoples. It comes from a word in the Miami-Illinois language, usually transcribed as 'shikaakwa', which referred to a wild plant of the onion or garlic family (sometimes translated as 'wild onion', 'wild leek' or 'skunk', because of its pungent smell), which grew in abundance in the marshy, damp ground beside the lake and the river. That humble name tied to a swamp plant ended up christening one of the world's great metropolises.
Before the Europeans arrived, the region of present-day Chicago was inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples. At different times, nations of the Illinois Confederation lived there and, later, the Potawatomi, along with other peoples. They lived by hunting, fishing, gathering and farming, making the most of a rich area where the Chicago River flowed into the immense Lake Michigan.
The location was extraordinarily strategic, something the Indigenous peoples knew well and which would prove decisive in the city's history: very close by, a short stretch of land (a 'portage') separated the Great Lakes basin from that of the Mississippi River. Whoever controlled that point controlled one of the great natural crossroads of the continent, linking the Atlantic east with the heart of the continent and, downriver, with the Gulf of Mexico. That privileged geography would be the key to Chicago's destiny.
The story of the first permanent non-Indigenous settlement in Chicago has a remarkable and often overlooked protagonist: Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a fur trader of African descent, connected to Haiti and to French heritage. Toward the end of the 18th century (in the 1780s), Du Sable established a thriving trading post and his home at the mouth of the Chicago River, becoming the first permanent settler in the place. Today he is officially recognized as the founder of the city, a significant fact: the great metropolis of the Midwest was founded by a Black man.
In the early 19th century, the US Army built Fort Dearborn there, and a small settlement began to grow around the fort and the trade. The place stayed modest for decades, but its strategic position at the crossroads of the continent's great waterways drew more and more interest. The signing of treaties with the Indigenous peoples (which meant their displacement from the region) opened the way to mass settlement.
In 1833, the settlement was organized as a small 'town' with barely a few hundred inhabitants. And growth was so dizzying that only four years later, in 1837, Chicago was officially incorporated as a city, already with several thousand inhabitants. What followed would be one of the fastest and most spectacular episodes of urban growth in history: within a few decades, that swampy settlement would become one of the world's great cities.
Chicago's growth in the 19th century was, quite simply, explosive, and it came from its role as the great transport hub of the center of the continent. First came water: the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 finally connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system by navigable water, exactly what the geography had promised. But the real engine was the railroad: Chicago became the largest rail hub in the United States, the point where the lines linking the industrialized east with the vast agricultural and ranching west converged.
That position turned it into the great market and processing center for the riches of the Midwest. Chicago became the world capital of grain (with its enormous silos and its commodities exchange), of timber and, above all, of meat: its gigantic slaughterhouses and packing plants (the famous Union Stock Yards) processed livestock from across the west and distributed it around the country in the new refrigerated cars. The city drew hundreds of thousands of European immigrants —Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians and many more— who came to work in its industries, factories and slaughterhouses.
Within a few decades, Chicago went from a few thousand inhabitants to being one of the biggest and most dynamic cities in the country, a thriving, industrial, cosmopolitan metropolis that symbolized the energy and ambition of the young, expanding nation. It was a city growing at a dizzying, almost chaotic speed, on the marshy ground beside the lake.
The most dramatic event in Chicago's history, and at the same time the origin of its architectural glory, was the Great Fire of 1871. In October of that year, a fire broke out in the city (popular legend, with no solid basis, blamed a cow that was said to have knocked over a lantern in a barn) and, fed by the wind and by a city built largely of wood after years of disorderly growth, it burned for days. The fire razed much of downtown, left tens of thousands of people homeless and killed hundreds. It was a catastrophe of colossal proportions.
But Chicago turned the tragedy into an extraordinary opportunity. Rebuilding the city almost from scratch drew a generation of brilliant, daring architects who, with new techniques and new materials (steel frames, elevators, fireproof concrete), revolutionized the way things were built. Out of that ferment came the so-called Chicago School of architecture and, with it, an invention that would change cities across the world: the skyscraper. Chicago put up the first tall buildings with steel frames, freed from thick load-bearing walls.
That innovative tradition continued throughout the following century, with figures such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and, later, Mies van der Rohe, making Chicago one of the world capitals of architecture, a role it holds to this day. The splendor of the rebuilt city was dazzlingly displayed in 1893, when Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, a magnificent world's fair that showed the world the city's rebirth.
The 20th century brought Chicago new waves of people and new memorable chapters. One of the most profound was the Great Migration: from the First World War onward, and through the following decades, hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South migrated to Chicago (as to other northern cities) fleeing segregation and poverty, in search of work in industry. That migration transformed the city's demographics and culture, and had an extraordinary artistic consequence: Black musicians from Mississippi brought the blues with them, and in Chicago it was 'electrified' (with the electric guitar and a full band) and gave rise to the famous Chicago blues, embodied by legendary figures such as Muddy Waters, which would decisively influence the birth of rock and roll.
The other great image of the Chicago of that era is darker and more cinematic: the Prohibition years (the ban on alcohol, in the 1920s). Prohibition set off bootlegging and organized crime, and Chicago became the setting par excellence for gang wars. The mythic figure of those years is Al Capone, the famous mobster who controlled much of the city's illegal business, in an era of shootouts, bribes and famous episodes like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. That gangster image marked the popular imagination about Chicago forever.
Beyond the dark legend, 20th-century Chicago consolidated itself as a thriving industrial, financial and cultural metropolis, with great institutions, universities, museums and a rich artistic life, the undisputed capital of the American Midwest.
In the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, Chicago consolidated its identity as one of the world's great capitals of architecture and as a modern, cultured, vibrant metropolis. The tradition begun after the 1871 fire continued with the arrival of the architect Mies van der Rohe, a master of the modern movement, whose steel and glass towers defined much of the skyline and of 20th-century architecture. Later, Chicago went on putting up ever taller skyscrapers, such as the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), for years the tallest building in the world. Today a cruise along its river is a tour through the best architecture of the last hundred and fifty years.
The city also renewed its Lake Michigan waterfront, one of its greatest treasures, with kilometers of parks, urban beaches and publicly accessible promenades (a vision inherited from Daniel Burnham's city plan, which sought to preserve the shore for the people). The great symbol of that renewal is Millennium Park, opened in 2004, with its famous mirrored sculpture Cloud Gate (the 'Bean'), which became the city's new icon. The Riverwalk, along the river, completed that transformation of public space.
Chicago today is the third city of the United States, an important financial center (with one of the world's largest futures exchanges), transport hub (its O'Hare airport is among the busiest on the planet), and educational and cultural center. It keeps its hard-working, warm Midwestern character, its architectural pride, its passion for sport and music, and an identity of its own that sets it apart from the coastal metropolises. Out of that swampy 'wild onion' settlement grew one of the great cities of the world.