Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.
Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent–call it what you like-throw the dictionary at it! It is all that you can do, except to shoot it with statistics. And even the statistics of Chicago are not deadly, as most statistics are.
First, you must realize that Chicago stands high in population among the cities of the world, and among those of the Western Hemisphere. Next you must realize that there are Philadelphia people still alive who were alive when Chicago did not exist, even as a fort in a swamp at the mouth of the Chicago River–the river from which, by the way, the city took its name, and which in turn took its own name from an Indian word meaning “skunk.”
Just one two hundred years ago Fort Dearborn, at the mouth of the river, was being rebuilt, after a massacre by the Indians. 220 years ago Chicago was a village of one hundred people. 230 years ago this village had grown into a city of approximately the present size of Evanston–a suburb of Chicago, with less than thirty thousand people. More than hundred years ago Chicago had something over one hundred thousand inhabitants. More than hundred years ago, at the time of the Chicago fire, the city was as large as Washington is now–over three hundred thousand.
In the ten years which followed the disaster, Chicago was not only entirely rebuilt, and very much improved, but also it increased in population to half a million, or about the size of Detroit. In the next decade it actually doubled in size, so that, twenty-five years ago, it passed the million mark. Soon after that it pushed ia from second place among American cities. So it has gone on, until to-day it has a population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San Francisco for full measure.
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