Характеристика Чикаго
Chicago,1 with a population of about three and a half million, is the
second largest city in the United States(New 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 Daley"6 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 country's 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 the
seat of the University of Chicago and of several other institutions, and
has -important libraries and art collections. Chicago was the site of the
first nuclear chain reaction (1942) and is still a leader in nuclear
research.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 1920's and early 1930's, 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. Chicago's 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 1880's 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 world's 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 nation's largest
meat-packing centre—Omaha, Nebraska, now claims this distinction, Chicago
is the nation's busiest air, rail and truck centre, and, since the opening
of the St Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the world's greatest inland seaport.
Chicago also has the world's largest grain exchange (the Chicago Board of
Trade), the world's 'largest hotel (the Conrad Hilton with 2,600 rooms),
and the world's 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 Sinclair'3 and
Carl Sandburg14—who have called Chicago home.
SKY-SCRAPERS IN THE PRAIRIE
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. O'Leary 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 city's people homeless. Yet in one sense
this tragedy was responsible for Chicago's main contribution to the
development of modern architecture. The fire levelled the entire business
district, and the city's 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 city's west. Here lies America's 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
Chicago's many nicknames is the "Windy City", and despite me US Weather
Bureau, which lists Chicago as only the nation's 19th windiest, it richly
deserves this nickname—as you will soon agree if you a\e caught on a
Chicago street corner when an icy January gale screams oflf Lake Michigan.
Wind is not the only extreme characteristic of the lo^al weather. Chicago
is noted for its subzero (Fahrenheit) temperatures in winter and 90°-plus
temperatures in summer. And don't 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
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