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Chicago
The architectural capital of the American Midwest, on Lake Michigan
Chicago stands at the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan, a flat prairie city that gave the world the skyscraper and rebuilt itself into one of architecture's great showcases. Nearly nine million people live across its metropolitan area, the third-largest in the United States, anchored by a downtown of glass and steel rising abruptly from the lakeshore. It is the commercial and transportation hub of the American interior, a place whose grain markets, rail yards, and trading floors long made it the engine of the Midwest.
The city sits on a low, flat plain barely above the level of the lake, on land so swampy that in the 1850s engineers raised entire buildings on jackscrews to install a drainage system. Its defining engineering feat came in 1900, when the flow of the Chicago River was reversed to send sewage away from the lake that supplies the city's drinking water. Lake Michigan moderates the climate and feeds the brutal winter winds that earned Chicago part of its windy reputation, though the nickname's origins are disputed. The flat terrain and grid made the city endlessly expandable across the prairie.
Chicago incorporated as a town in 1833 with a few hundred settlers near a portage the Potawatomi had long used between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watershed. Railroads turned it into the nexus of the continent, and the stockyards and grain elevators made it the hog butcher and breadbasket of the nation. The Great Fire of 1871 leveled the center and cleared the way for a generation of architects who invented the steel-framed tower. Today Chicago remains a powerhouse of finance, architecture, and culture, with a skyline that reads like a textbook of modern building.