Born from fire, built toward the sky
Chicago is the second city built on this ground. The Great Fire of 1871 burned roughly three and a half square miles, left a third of the population homeless, and cleared the way for a rebuilding boom that drew ambitious architects from everywhere. They solved the height problem with steel frames, and the Home Insurance Building of 1885 is generally counted as the world's first skyscraper. That inheritance is still legible along the river, where the Willis Tower, the John Hancock Center, and the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower argue with each other across a century of styles. The city also reversed the flow of its own river in 1900 to stop sewage from reaching its drinking water. The blues came up from the Delta with the Great Migration and never left.
