The city that invented the skyscraper, gave the world the blues and house music, and built a river that flows backwards — America's most architecturally honest city
Chicago (2.7 million; metro 9.5 million) is the cultural and commercial capital of the American Midwest: the birthplace of the skyscraper (Home Insurance Building, 1885), the Chicago School of architecture, Chicago blues (Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf), house music (Frankie Knuckles at The Warehouse, 1977), deep-dish pizza, and the Chicago-style hot dog. The Loop — Chicago's historic downtown — is bounded by an elevated train line and contains one of the finest concentrations of 20th-century architecture in the world, from Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building (1889) to Mies van der Rohe's modern…
Chicago was founded as a settlement at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1830 and incorporated as a city in 1837; it grew from 4,000 to 300,000 people in a single generation, driven by the convergence of rail lines making it the hub of US commodity trade in timber, grain, and livestock. The Great Chicago Fire of 8–10 October 1871 destroyed 17,450 buildings and killed an estimated 300 people; the rebuilding that followed became the architectural laboratory in which the skyscraper was invented — the Chicago School's steel-frame construction (pioneered by William Le Baron Jenney) made the modern…