Why Chicago Is the Opposite of The Midwest

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]This is the Midwest and right here is Chicago. It's technically part of this region, but ask anyone who's been there and they'll tell you it doesn't really feel like it. The size is different, the density is different, the entire culture is different. It's the third largest city in the country with a population of 2.7 million people, while the next biggest one in the entire region is just a third of its population. So, how did this happen? How did Chicago end up being unlike anywhere else in the Midwest despite being known as its capital? Well, of course, it starts with its geography. Just look at where Chicago is. It's situated at the southernmost point that the Great Lakes reach into the agricultural heartland of the US. It's also very crucially right at the point where a navigable waterway within the Great Lakes watershed, the Chicago River, comes closest to a navigable waterway in the Mississippi watershed, the Displayplains River.

[00:00:55]Indigenous travelers had been using this as a portage point for centuries before the city even existed. So when the American frontier started rapidly developing in the early 19th century, all of this new agricultural output needed to get to the major population centers back east. And the easiest way to do that after the completion of America's first infrastructure mega project, the Eerie Canal in 1825 was through the Great Lakes to Buffalo, then down the Hudson River to New York City.

[00:01:23]But this was only the beginning because in 1848 the Illinois and Michigan canal was built connecting the Chicago River and the Displayplains River. This connection suddenly allowed barge shipment of goods from basically the entire middle third of the US to the entire northeast and it all passed through Chicago. This was only the first of three monumental things to happen for Chicago that year though. Their first railroad, the Galena and Chicago Union, also began operations, while the Chicago Board of Trade was founded, too. Each of these alone would have been significant.

[00:01:57]They launched Chicago onto a completely different trajectory from every other city in the region. But it was the railroads that mattered most. Senator Steven A. Douglas engineered the Illinois Central Railroad through federal legislation in 1850, creating a state chartered railroad that upon its completion in 1856 was the longest railroad in the world. That same year, 10 major railroad lines terminated in Chicago, making it the largest railroad center in the world. Now, here's the part most people don't know. Chicago's dominance wasn't inevitable. It won because its biggest rival made a catastrophic mistake. St. Lewis was the largest city west of the Mississippi and the second largest port city in the country. It should have been the one to dominate the interior, but St. Louis's leaders actively rejected railroads.

[00:02:46]Steamboat interests blocked permits for constructing railroad bridges across the Mississippi. The river at St. Louis was too wide to bridge easily, so getting rail cars across required fing them, which was slow and expensive. St. Louis wouldn't get a direct rail bridge across the Mississippi until 1874. More than two decades after Chicago's network was already locked in, Missouri's status as a slave state didn't help either, which repelled the northern capital, investors who might have funded St. Louis's growth redirected their money to Chicago instead. Then the Civil War sealed it.

[00:03:20]The Union needed massive quantities of meat for its armies, and Chicago delivered. Meanwhile, Confederate forces controlled the lower Mississippi, choking off the river trade that had connected the Midwest to the Gulf for decades, forcing everyone to use the railroads through Chicago. And the results were staggering. Between 1840 and 1890, Chicago's population multiplied nearly 250 times over from 4,500 to 1.1 million. Nothing else came close. St. Louis and Chicago were actually neck andneck around 1870 with both at 300,000 people. But St. Louis just couldn't keep up, reaching only 450,000 two decades later instead. But why this kind of growth? What does being the transport hub of America actually produce? Well, in an industrial capitalist economy, when you're the hub, you don't just move goods through, you process them. Grain from the entire interior funneled into Chicago where it was graded, pulled, and traded as a standardized commodity. The Chicago Board of Trade created grading standards by 1857 and introduced standardized futures contracts in 1865, one of the first standardized commodities futures markets in the world. By 1854, Chicago was already claiming the title of the greatest primary grain port in the world. Meat packing consolidated at the Union stockyards where by 1890 9 million animals were moving through those yards annually. When the refrigerated railroad car was developed in the late 1870s, it meant Chicago packed meat could now ship to New York and everywhere in between.

[00:04:57]Meanwhile, lumber from the northern forests flowed through the city in enormous volumes, making it the world's largest lumber market. Chicago became the largest grain port, largest lumber market, and largest meatacking center in the world simultaneously. See, being the hub creates economic mass. Economic mass attracts capital. Capital attracts immigrants. Immigrants supply labor.

[00:05:21]Labor attracts more industry. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that no other city could replicate because the railroad network was already locked in.

[00:05:29]The window for competing with Chicago closed within a single generation. By the end of the 19th century, Chicago was the second largest city in America, going from 92nd to second in roughly 50 years. Now, a lot of cities got big during this era. But getting big alone doesn't make you different. So, why does Chicago actually look like a completely different kind of city from anywhere else in the Midwest? Well, the answer starts with you subscribing to the channel. Just kidding. It starts with a disaster. On October 8th, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire broke out. Over 3 days, it killed approximately 300 people, left over 100,000 of the city's roughly 300,000 residents homeless, and destroyed 17,000 buildings across just 3.3 square miles. The damage was worth close to 6 billion when accounting for inflation. But here's the thing. The fire spared the industrial infrastructure. The stockyards, the grain elevators, the railroad terminals were mostly intact. The economic engine survived. Eastern investors saw this and capital flooded in immediately. The first load of rebuilding lumber was delivered the day the last burning building was still being extinguished.

[00:06:43]Chicago was simply too valuable to abandon. But a rebuild did have to be made, especially after a second major fire in 1874. and it transformed the city's physical form entirely. Chicago mandated fireproof construction citywide. This forced innovation, steel frame construction with terra cotta cladding. And because Chicago's been built on low-lying marshy grounds, engineers pushed towards steel frames that could go up instead of out. Hence, the birth of the skyscraper. The home insurance building, completed in 1885, is widely considered to be the world's first one. It was just 10 stories, but it was the start of something more. The rebuilt city was dense, vertical, and structured on a tight uniform grid with short walkable blocks. The urban texture that emerged looks like Philadelphia or New York, not like anything else in the Midwest. Then came the Alra, Chicago's first elevated line opened in June of 1892. By 1897, the Union Loop connected all elevated lines through downtown, literally giving the central business district its name, the Loop. By 1909, Chicago had one of the best rapid transit systems in the world. That same year, a man named Daniel Burnham published the plan of Chicago, one of the first comprehensive urban plans in American history. Commissioned not by the city government, but by the Commercial Club, Chicago's business elite. The plan was sweeping. a unified boulevard system, a network of regional parks, and most consequentially, a declaration that the entire lakefront belonged to the public, not to developers, not to rail yards, to the people. That single principle is why Chicago today has 26 mi of uninterrupted public lakefront, while comparable American cities handed theirs to industry a century ago. And unlike most grand city plans, this one was at least partially built. The parks, the boulevards, the civic institutions Burnham laid out were constructed over the following decades, locking in a physical identity no other Midwest city had the scale or ambition to replicate.

[00:08:51]The timing of this was everything. Let me explain. If Chicago had reached a massive population just a few decades later, like Los Angeles did, for example, then it very well may have ended up not being as dense or walkable as it is now. But Chicago was already the second largest city in the US, home to 2.2 2 million people by 1910. So when you look at other large Midwest cities today like Indianapolis or Columbus, which were still relatively small cities when the automobile arrived, they simply were able to build around the car. So Chicago looks different because of when it grew. But does it feel different?

[00:09:26]What about the people? Well, this is where two massive waves of migration gave Chicago a cultural DNA completely unlike the broader Midwest. The first was the original immigration flood. The railroads and factories needed labor and they got it from everywhere. Poland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Czecha, and Lithuania to name a few. By 1890, 79% of Chicagoans were either born abroad or were children of immigrants. Chicago had more Poles than any one of New York's five burrows. It was the third largest Czech city in the world after Prague and Vienna. These communities didn't dissolve into a normal Midwestern identity of mostly Scandinavians and Germans. They created neighborhoods, institutions, and an attitude, a bluntness, and a workingclass lack of pretention that feels completely different from the broader Midwest with their politeness. The food, deep dish pizza, the Chicago style hot dog, and the Italian beef sandwich. These aren't just dishes. They're artifacts of layered immigrant and working-class culture with no real parallel anywhere else in the region. Chicago is also the only city in the Midwest that hosts all five major professional sports teams.

[00:10:37]The second wave was the Great Migration, the mass movement of approximately 6 million African-Ameans from South to Northern and Western cities between 1910 and 1970. seeking industrial jobs, relative freedom, and escape from Jim Crow laws. The system of racial segregation enforced across the South.

[00:10:56]Chicago was a primary destination.

[00:10:58]Chicago's African-Amean population grew from about 44,000 in 1910 to over 1 million by 1970. This wave didn't just add numbers, it transformed American culture. Louisie Armstrong followed King Oliver from New Orleans to Chicago in 1922, transforming jazz. Muddy Waters moved up from Mississippi in 1943, plugged in an electric guitar, and helped invent Chicago blues. These two waves, the immigrant workingclass and the great migration, layered on top of each other to produce a city whose identity is genuinely its own. But there's another factor to the uniqueness of Chicago, the economics. In the midentth century, the Midwest, particularly the rust belt parts like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis and of course Chicago were booming due to manufacturing and heavy industry. But then industrialization hit like a wrecking ball. Detroit went from a population of 1.85 million in 1950 to 620,000 in 2020, a drop of over 65%.

[00:12:02]These other cities also dropped similarly. And don't get me wrong, Chicago got hit, too. Between 1963 and 1982, nearly 21,000 factories closed across the Midwest. But this isn't a story about how Chicago avoided de-industrialization, but how it survived it, unlike many of these rust belt cities that got hollowed out.

[00:12:22]Manufacturing employment in the city went from 668,000 jobs in 1947 to 66,000 in 2013, a decline of over 90%. So why didn't Chicago fall off? Well, the answer goes back to history. Nothing could take away its position as the logistics hub of America, which meant nothing could fully take away its role as a center of trade and exchange. The commodity markets evolved into financial markets. A professional services economy grew around them. If you're the place where everything is traded, you eventually become the place where trading itself is the product. Today, Chicago arguably holds the most diversified economy in the nation for a major city. So, what has all this produced? Well, Chicago is the only global city in the entire Midwest and Alpha City as ranked by the GAWC. The metro population sits at over 9.6 million, more than double the next largest Midwest metro. It's one of the very few American cities where you can actually live without a car, thanks to the Alra and bus network. Being in the Midwest instead of a coastal city also contributes to making it much cheaper than the only two cities bigger than it, New York and LA. To many Midwesterners, Chicago is more of a giant Milwaukee than something like a small NYC. It's a big city culture filtered through a Midwest lens. After all, these cities evolved together around the industry of the Great Lakes. Some would even think of Chicago as more of a Great Lakes city than a Midwest one. Though, once you spread out into the neighborhoods farther from downtown, the city rapidly begins to start feeling more traditionally Midwestern. Despite how the city looks, the people of Chicago are characteristically more humble, friendly, and similar to other Midwesterners than any people outside the region. It's not a bad thing either.

[00:14:07]While cities like New York and LA are more for the world, Chicago is for America. And it wouldn't feel that way if it wasn't in the Midwest. Thank you for watching, and don't forget to subscribe for more content like this.

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