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Chicago grew from a trading post established by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, was organized as a town on August 12, 1833, and was incorporated as a city on March 4, 1837; it is the seat of Cook County.

Chicago's name comes from 'shikaakwa,' a Miami-Illinois word for the wild leek that grew along the Chicago River.

Chicago is the third-most populous city in the United States, with 2,746,388 residents in the 2020 census and an estimated 2,731,585 in 2025.

Chicago has about 1,160,205 households averaging 2.29 people each, and only about 46.0% of its homes are owner-occupied.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed roughly a third of the city and left more than 100,000 people homeless.

Chicago is the birthplace of the skyscraper: the ten-story Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885 with a fireproof structural steel frame, is often cited as the world's first skyscraper.

Chicago is the only major city in the world that reversed its river - in 1900 engineers completed the Sanitary and Ship Canal, turning the Chicago River's flow away from Lake Michigan and toward the Mississippi River watershed.

Chicago's motto is 'Urbs in Horto,' Latin for 'City in a Garden,' and the city lives up to it with more than 600 parks and 26 miles of public lakefront along Lake Michigan.

Chicago's Millennium Park, home to the reflective Cloud Gate sculpture nicknamed 'The Bean,' sits alongside the older Grant Park on the downtown lakefront.

Chicago's universities include the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Chicago, DePaul University, Loyola University Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, with Northwestern University just north in Evanston.