Характеристика Чикаго

Chicago,1 with a population of about three and a half million, is the second largest city in the United StatesNew York is the first.It is a centre of industry for the middle part of the country, the most important Great Lakes port,2 the largest city of Illinois and the seat of Cook-County.3 Chicago is also the place where Mayor King Daley6 directed the police to brutalize the young people protesting against the US aggression m South-East Asia while the Democratic Party convention was going on there in August 1968. The city is first in the nation in manufacturing of machinery and electronic parts.

Famous are the stockyards and meat-packing plants, i where cattle from the western prairies are shipped and from which meat is distributed all over the couritry.7 Called the Great Central Market of the USA, Chicago is the railroad and grain centre of the nation.Chicago has a vast commerce by many railroads and by the lake, and exports wheat, meat and manufactured goods.

An unrivalled rail centre, Chicago is called the Cross-Roads of the Continent. It is served by 19 trunk lines and handles 50,000 freight Cars daily. Also, 40 per cent of the countrys motor freight moves in and out of Chicago. More airlines converge on Chicago than any other city of the USA. Chicago is also an important centre of culture and science. It is theseat of the University of Chicago and of several other institutions, andhas -important libraries and art collections.Chicago was the site of thefirst nuclear chain reaction 1942 and is still a leader in nuclearresearch.8 Owing to its position, Chicago has been the meeting-place of many political conventions. From six to seven million tourists come to Chicago fevery year, and another million and a half who come to business and political gatherings.

In its rapid growth, Chicago survived the great fire of 1871,9 the gang wars of 1920s and early 1930s, political machinations of its bosses and financial speculations of its tycoons.

The city was from the start a big melting-pot of different nationalities. For years Chicago had a racial stratification unusual even for American cities. It was German, Polish, Italian, Slavic, Greek, Jewish. Half a million Black Americans live in its South Side, which is one of the most exclusively black areas in the world. About one in four Chicago citizens is black.The Chicago Negroes are almost as numerous as those in New York, a city twice as large.

Chicagos Negroes have a long history of participation in basic industry.They are the most proletarian of all nationality-ethnic groups, and today together with other militant workers they wage a particularly bitter and difficult battle for their right to live and work. Called the City of the Big Shoub ders,10 Chicago has long become the centre of American working-class movement In the 1880s Chicago was already a scene of bitter labour wars, and the big strike of Chicago workers of 1886 led to the establishment of May Day as the holiday of workers of the whole world.

THE CITY OF SUPERLATIVES Chicagoans like to claim that their city has the biggest and greatest of just about everything. Chicago is the second largest city, in the United States it is also the tenth biggest in the world. It is important not to say this in Chicago.The point to bear in mind about Chicago while talking to Chicagoans is that, no matter what its own size, it has the biggest everything in the world.

Other places in America have the biggest something, but Chicago has the biggest everything. You may be convinced after all that most Chicago things are bigger than anywhere else it is unfortunate that they are never the things that one wanted to be big enough. There is, for example, the Merchandise Mart, which claims to be the worlds largest commercial building, with seven and a half miles of corridors and its own police force.In their claims to the biggest and greatest, Chicagoans in a remarkable number of ways are right Although it is no longer the nations largest meat-packing centre Omaha, Nebraska, now claims this distinction, Chicago is the nations busiest air, rail and truck centre, and, since the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the worlds greatest inland seaport.

Chicago also has the worlds largest grain exchange the Chicago Board of Trade, the worlds largest hotel the Conrad Hilton with 2,600 rooms, and the worlds largest convention and trade-show facilities.

Chicagoans resent any implication that their home is in any sense the second city in the US, as New Yorkers have been known to call it. They believe Chicago is really an American city while New York is not America and point with pride to, among other things, the number of red-blooded American authors including Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris,12 Upton Sinclair3 and Carl Sandburg14 who have called Chicago home. SKY-SCRAPERS IIRIE When you arrive in Chicago, you may find it hard to believe that this busy, noisy, modern metropolis with its towering sky-scrapers was until well into the 19th century a muddy onion swamp. But by 1871 this unpromising site had become a city of 300,000, the metropolitan centre of the American Midwest.

Then, on October 8 of that year, disaster struck.It all began in the barn of a certain Mrs. OLeary on West De Koven Street where, as the legend goes, a cow kicked over a kerosene lantern, starting a fire that quickly swept the city. The blaze destroyed more than 17,000 buildings that left third of the citys people homeless.

Yet in one sense this tragedy was responsible for Chicagos main contribution to the development of modern architecture.The fire levelled the entire business district, and the citys engineers and architects . had to rebuild from the ground up. Armed with a series of technological innovations most notably steel framework and the hydraulic, lift they set to work and in the last decades of the 19th century the sky-scraper was born William-Le Barren Jenny, one of the construction engineers, used this new method when he received the commission to build the Chicago office of the Home Insurance Company.

It was ten stories high, much taller than any building ever before erected.The building was the first sky-scraper, a term now so common for a high building that few people realize that, to begin with, a skyscraper was a triangular sail used high on the mast of sailing vessels before steamships came into use.15 Quickly a new Chicago arose of brick and stone.

Within a year the business district was restored along the crescent formed by Lake Michigan in the citys west. Here lies Americas second-ranking canyon of finance, La Salle Street, where the Board of Trade Building towers above a forest of sky-scrapers.Each sky-scraper is stamped by a specific commodity the Wrigley equals chewing-gum, the Chicago Tribune and the Daily News mean newspapers, the Continental Illinois banking, the Chicago Temple offices of reputed firms, the Merchandise Mart wholesale dry goods, the imposing Marshal Field department store de luxe, and so on. Each building stands as if a huge monument to a trust. While you ride through Chicago you have an opportunity to see a little of the city. The streets are usually crowded with traffic at whatever hour you arrive.

Over your head thunders the local elevated train, which runs on a platform.

If your route takes you near the shore of Lake Michigan, you will see a broad boulevard along the water-front with eight lanes of fast-moving traffic. Beautiful, tall office buildings and hotels make a spectacular picture against the blue waters of the lake. If your route lay further back from the lake, you would see narrow, crowded streets lined with rows and rows of red-brick houses.Vegetable sellers may push little carts through the streets and call out the names of things for safe in any one of a number of languages.

One of Chicagos many nicknames is the Windy City, and despite me US Weather Bureau, which lists Chicago as only the nations 19th windiest, it richly deserves this nickname as you will soon agree if you ae caught on a Chicago street corner when an icy January gale screams oflf Lake Michigan. Wind is not the only extreme characteristic of the loal weather.Chicago is noted for its subzero Fahrenheit temperatures in winter and 90-plus temperatures in summer.

And dont be misled if you arrive in winter and it seems unreasonably warm. Chicago weather changes quickly.THE CENTRE OF CLASS WARS The most proletarian of American cities, Chicago was a scene of bitter labour wars, of the Haymarket affair 1886 and of the Pullman strike 1894 Called the Red Square of Chicago, Haymarket has become world-famous for the Haymarket affair of 1886. The official US history books call it the Haymarket Riot. The spring of 1886 was marked by a national strike movement for the 8-hour working day. At the giant McCormick Harvester plant in Chicago, six striking workers were killed by the police.

A mass meeting for May the 4th was called in the Haymarket. Suddenly the crowded square shook with the explosion of a bomb thrown by an unknown hand. Seven policemen and four workers were killed, and many were injured. Amid wild hysteria eight labour leaders were arrested.All eight arrested workers were convicted in what is now commonly recognized as a frame-up. Four of them Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel were hanged.

Five years later, Governor John Altgeld of Illinois, a rare type in US politics, freed the four Haymarketers remaining in prison and proclaimed their innocence. The movement for the 8-hour working day and the Haymarket affair caused a great swell of trade-union organization.Furthermore International May Day emerged from this movement, for the International Socialist Congress, convened in France in 1889, declared May the 1st as the day of celebration by world labour.

A monument in honour of the Haymarket martyrs, erected by the labour movement, now stands in Waldheim Cemetery outside Chicago. The Chicago police have not forgotten Haymarket either. In fact, they put up. a monument on the site of the tragedy.Not to the victims, but to their executioners a 3-metre statue of a policeman was put up on a tall pedestal in the hope, apparently, that the people of Chicago would cover it with flowers in token of their respect. There were no flowers, but there were bombs.

In fact, the New York Times remarked that this was Chicagos most frequently bombed statue. There was a series of explosions in October 1969 in protest against the police attack on a youth demonstration during the Democratic Party convention. A year later there was another explosion it cost 5,500 to repair the damage. Guarding the statue became a problem.In 1970, after it had been repaired, it was placed under round-the-clock guard.

To make double-sure, it was constantly scrutinized by a hidden TV camera This cost the city 68,000 a year, more than the statue had cost. There were several suggestions how to reduce the cost. In the end, it was decided to remove the bronze statue from Haymarket Square and put it in a safe place. It now stands in the lobby of Chicago police headquarters.THE GANGLAND CAPITAL OF THE USA In its bustling growth, Chicago survived the political machinations of mayors like Big Bill Thompson,16 the speculations of Samuel Tnsull17 and the gang wars of Al Capones days.18 The one thing for which Chicago is known around the world is crime.

In January 1919, the sale of whiskey was prohibited in the USA. Prohibition gave rise to the. illegal liquor trade with big profits for the powerful criminal gangs who shared the money with the police and politicians in order to buy immunity from arrest.The gangs competed with each other in the illicit liquor trade bootlegging, gambling, the operation Or protection of night-clubs and illicit bars speakeasies.

They also supplied strike-breakers to employers and the trade-union chieftains who used them against the militant left-wing. Murder, arson and vandalism were engaged in as business enterprise on a practical basis.The combination of war profits, polyglot political structure, building boom and prohibition turned Chicago, figuratively, overnight in the crime centre of the USA, the gangland capital of the USA. And even now, thanks to countless film and television shows depicting that era of Chicagos history, some visitors expect to see black limousines filled with scarfaced gangsters roaring about the streets.

Organized crime is still a part of Chicagos life as it is in most US cities. Crime has become an integral part of the American way of life. As Americans themselves put it, in the US you feel very afraid to walk the streets at night.Even in the daytime it is sometimes dangerous but especially so at night. 1 Chicago seems to have a clearly established than usual.

A French explorer who visited the region in 1688 said the natives called it Chicagou because of the abundance of wild onions growing there.Scholars have thought it was the disagreeable odour Of the little wild onions that inspired the Indian name, and that place of the bad smell might be more accurate interpretation of the name. 2 Among Chicagos numerous nicknames are the Lake City and the Queen City of the Upper Lakes. 3 Similar to other US cities, Chicago has a dual city and county government.

Chicago and its suburbs comprise Cook County which exercises certain governmental functions over the entire area. Other functions are retained individually by the City of Chicago and the suburbs in a municipal form. This political structure, based on a capitalist economy, providesfat profits for bankers, bondholders, real-estate dealers, public utilityinterests, politicians, the police and criminals. 4 The American Peace Crusade an American organization embrac ing peace supporters of all walks of life. 5 The Young Workers Liberation League a progressive youth organization of the United States.

It fights against militarism and racism, for democracy and socialism, for all young peoples demands for work and education.Its main aim is a democratic government and full civil rights for all. 6 King Daley Richard J. Daley, former mayor of Chicago, boss of the Democratic political machine fbr Cook County.

Got notoriety in 1968 when he brutally dispersed the peaceful demonstration of students during the Democratic Party nominating convention in Chicago. 7 Today new process and techniques have made it unnecessary to move Americas meat to Chicago for processing the butchers have gone to the prairies and the memories of those moutains of flesh, that pervasive scent of the stockyards, are like many other things of Chicagos past, just a terrible ghost-story. 8 In 1942, at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi and other scientists set off the worlds first controlled atomic reaction. 9 The Chicago fire October 8 9, 1871 devastated an area three and one-half miles square, left almost 100,000 persons homeless.

By 1871 Chicago was a city built of wood. Even the side-walks were of pine and a dry season preceding the fire made the city a virtual tinder-box. 10.The phrase is taken from Chicago 1914, a poem in free verse by Carl Sandburg Hog Butcher of the World, Tool-Maker, Stacker of Wheat Player with Railroads and the Nations Freight Handler Stormy, Husky, Brawling City of the Big Shoulders. 11. In 1912 Theodore Dreiser 1871 1945 published The Financier, a novel about Frank Cowperwood, a shrewd and ruthless businessman, who accumulated a fortune through financial machinations.

The fashionable North Side of Chicago could not bear The Financier, for it cut too close to the bone, so the publisher, Harpers, refused to publish its sequel The Titan. Frank Cowperwoo,d was too clearly identified with Charles Yerkes, the Chicago magnate who donated the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago.

Yerkes earlier corrupt manipulation of Philadelphias municipal funds, followed by imprisonment, was known to his colleagues in Chicago, but he was given access to the public funds again.Dreiser had become familiar with tVse robber barons while working as a journalist in Chicago. 12 The Pit, a novel by Frank Morris 1870 1902, brought to life the spectacular wheat market on La Salle Street in Chicago.

The Pit was actually a sequel to The Octopus, which tells of the struggle between the California wheat farmers and the railroad companies. 13. The Jungle, a novel by Upton Sinclair 1878 1968, was published in 1906. Its detailed first-hand description of conditions in the Chicago stockyards sparked off a campaign that led to the passage of a Pure Foodand Drug Act and a Meat Inspection Act by the US Congress.The novel gave a most compelling picture of the humans engaged in the industry where only the squeals of the animals escaped being converted into profits. 14. Sandburg, Carl 1878 1967. Born in Illinois, Carl Sandburg wrote in his free verse of the turbulent life he had observed in the small prairie towns of Illinois and in the raw metropolis in Chicago.

He first gained reputation with his Chicago Poems 1915. He was awarded the Pulit-zer Prize 1951 for his Collected Poems. 15. Within a decade, however, New York City captured the tallest sky-scraper lead and held it. The champion until May 1973, was Manhattans 1,350-feet-high, twin-towered World Trade Center, which tops the Empire State Building by 100 feet. But now, after a lapse of about 80 years, Chicago again boasts the tallest tower the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Building, which soars 1,450 feet above the city. 16. Big Bill Thompson 1869 1944 served three terms as mayor of Chicago, became notorious for political machinations. Thompson practised what in American political terminology is known as the spoils system to the victor belongs the spoils.

In the 1920s it seemed that power in Chicago was shared between Thompson, entrenched in City Hall, and Capone, sitting with his gunmen in the Lexington Hotel. This state of bliss was enjoyed by the financiers, industrialists, gangsters and politicians. 17. Samuel Insull 1859 1938 public-utilities financier.

By 1907 he overcame the competing publjc-utilities companies in Chicago and soon he came to control the citys transit system.

When the Depression broke out in 1929, Insults pyramid of corporations was one of the first to collapse into bankruptcy. Thousands of his stockholders were ruined. Insull disappeared before he could be brought into court 18 Al Caponet1899 1947 American gang leader in Chicago in the 1920s. He received tribute from businessmen and politicians. His crime syndicate terrorized Chicago and controlled the gambling there.Capone was mysteriously murdered and given a funeral featured by more than twenty truckloads of floral wreaths and numerous limousines filled with gangsters.

Thousands watched while the newsreel cameras cranked away. Crime as big business went on in time the warfare between gangs produced a new czar.