Chicago (598 alt., 9,785,747 pop.), vibrant, noisy, every inch alive, is the youngest of the world’s great cities, and has the optimism, the exuberant and often rather self-assertive pride of youth. But there is more than youthful swagger–there is a legitimate sense of triumph for achievements in the past, a boundless self-confidence as it faces the future, in the challenging ring of its civic motto, I WILL!
Gargantuan alike in size and rate of growth, the New World’s second largest metropolis, the seventh largest on the globe,
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders…
it lies at the point where the long finger of Lake Michigan pushes deep into the continent through the North woods and touches the fertile open prairie, the granary and stock farm of the Nation. Of that contact Chicago was born.
Toward the blue waters of the lake, fringed with a green ribbon of parks, Chicago presents its most impressive front. South from Evanston to the Indiana line, in a 25-mile arc, the lake front is lined with many of its finer mansions and apartment hotels; in and around the Loop, rising high above great museums housed in vast marble piles, looms a serrated mass of towers, spires, shafts, and huge cubes, a jagged mountain range of brick, stone, steel, concrete, and glass. To the south, beyond the busy docks along the Calumet River, are great black mills, factories, and furnaces, filled with the roar and rumble of machinery, their gaunt stacks belching black clouds by day, red flames by night.
Behind this façade, for a depth of almost 10 miles, lies not so much a city as a sprawling plexus of industrial towns, local shopping districts, crowded tenement neighborhoods, green and spacious settlements, spread unevenly on 212 square miles of flat and once marshy lowland. By the North and South Branches of the Chicago River, the city is divided into three sections–the North Side, the West Side, and the South Side, each with its own characteristics. Beyond, in an unbroken line of settlement, extend other cities, towns, villages, and subdivisions, with nothing but road signs to indicate where one stops and another begins.
Known to millions as the Windy City, although many American communities excel it in this respect, Chicago remains essentially a prairie town. Like every other, it is laid out in a rigid gridiron pattern, with a few diagonals. Some of its longer streets stretch straight ahead for more than 20 Miles, flat gray bands tying horizon to horizon. Prairie-like, too, are the clumps of trees in occasional parks, and the raw scars of erosion in its poorer sections. But there is nothing bucolic in the roar and smoke and quick pace of its activities.
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