Chicago


 * See also, Chicago (2002 film) and Chicago (band).

Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is a North American city located in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is the third most populous urban area in the United States, after New York City and Los Angeles.

Located on the shores of freshwater Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed and grew rapidly in the mid-19th century. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, the city rebuilt. The construction boom accelerated population growth throughout the following decades, and by 1900, less than 30 years after the great fire, Chicago was the fifth-largest city in the world. Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and zoning standards, including new construction styles (including the Chicago School of architecture), the development of the City Beautiful Movement, and the steel-framed skyscraper.

Chicago is an international hub for finance, culture, commerce, industry, education, technology, telecommunications, and transportation. It is the site of the creation of the first standardized futures contracts, issued by the Chicago Board of Trade, which today is part of the largest and most diverse derivatives market in the world, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures alone. Its municipal government is currently controlled by the Democratic Party, and its current mayor is Brandon Johnson.

Quotes

 * It's every man for himself in this hired air. / Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.
 * Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (1951)


 * An October sort of city even in spring.
 * Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (1951)


 * This is virgin territory out here for whorehouses.
 * Al Capone, referring to suburban Chicago, as quoted in The Bootleggers and Their Era (1961) by Kenneth Alsop


 * Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like all other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. The Illinois Central Railroad Company selected the site upon which the city is built and this consisted of a vast miasmatic swamp far better suited to mosquito culture than for human beings. From the day the site was chosen by (and of course in the interest of all) said railway company, everything that entered into the building of the town and the development of the city was determined purely from profit considerations and without the remotest concern for the health and comfort of the human beings who were to live there, especially those who had to do all the labor and produce all the wealth.
 * Eugene Debs "What's the matter with Chicago?" in The Chicago Socialist (October 25, 1902)


 * They have the time The time or their life I saw a man He danced with his wife In Chicago, my home town.
 * Song "Chicago" (lyrics Fred Fisher)


 * Why stay in Chicago; what did the town have to justify its existence? One decent boulevard, one decent suburb to the north, priced for the rich, two universities and a lake. As for the rest, endless miles of depressing, dirty streets. The town was one big stockyard.
 * Robert A. Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942)


 * I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago… Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.
 * Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea - Letters of Travel


 * Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke.
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 85


 * Chicago's Greektown was adjacent to Hull House, Jane Addams' famed settlement project, whose activities played an important and beneficial role for many early Greek immigrants. The special attention Jane Addams gave to Greek immigrants and her espousal of Greek culture did much to buttress the ethnic pride of the sorely tried Greek immigrants of Chicago.
 * Peter C. Moskos, Greek Americans: Struggle and Success (2013)


 * I came to discover that Chicago is that most American of American cities, but one where citizens from more than 130 nations inhabit a rich tapestry of distinctive neighborhoods. Each one of those neighborhoods -- from Greektown to the Ukrainian Village; from Devon to Pilsen to Washington Park -- has its own unique character, its own unique history, its songs, its language. But each is also part of our city -- one city -- a city where I finally found a home.
 * Barack Obama, The Huffington Post


 * I realized that my gloss as chief economist, head of Economics and Regional Planning... was part of a sinister system aimed not at outfoxing an unsuspecting customer, but rather at promoting the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever known.... The march had begun and it was rapidly encircling the planet. The hoods had discarded their leather jackets, dressed up in business suits, and taken on an air of respectability. Men and women were descending from corporate headquarters in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Tokyo, streaming across every continent to convince corrupt politicians to allow their countries to be shackled to the corporatocracy, and to induce desperate people to sell their bodies to sweatshops and assembly lines... a world of smoke and mirrors intended to keep us all shackled to a system that is morally repugnant and ultimately self-destructive.
 * John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)p. 160

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.
 * Hog Butcher for the World,
 * Carl Sandburg, "Chicago" (1916)


 * And each time I roam, Chicago is calling me home, Chicago is. Why I just grin like a clown! It's my kind of town!
 * Frank Sinatra, "My Kind of Town", Sinatra '65: The Singer Today (1965), Reprise Records


 * I tried not to make judgments. These people were doing something important, all of them. They were testing ways whereby people didn’t have to live in Chicago. That was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
 * John Varley, The Persistence of Vision in Nebula Winners Fourteen, p. 4.