On this date Chicago began its 94-year reign as the nation's " Second City." The 1,099,850 souls the United States Census counted in Chicago represented a 119 percent increase over the city's population just 10 years earlier. The landmark tally made Chicago second only to New York in size, a status the city held until it was eclipsed by Los Angeles in 1984.
Not only did the size of Chicago change in that decade but so did its face and its flavor. "Everyone had just come from somewhere--usually from the across the ocean--and all the world was going somewhere else," wrote Edith Abbott in "The Tenements of Chicago." "Here were the most foreign newspapers, the foreign banks, the steamship companies--Italian in one section, Greek in another . . . that made these areas not unlike a series of foreign cities brought together."A chunk of the city's growth came from annexation. Six months before the census, voters in a 120-square-mile area outside the city announced they wanted in. But the most significant increase came from immigrants, who made up about 40 percent of the city's population in 1890. Immigration from northern and western Europe had been an important source of the city's population growth for decades, but by the 1890s, many newcomers originated from the countries of central, eastern and southern Europe.
Drawn to Chicago because of its reputation abroad as a place with well-paying industrial jobs or because relatives already lived in the city, they often arrived with notes in English pinned to their clothes asking that they be directed to their brother's or their uncle's address. Others headed from the train station with their small bundles to one of the ethnic churches that became beachheads for all manner of newcomer.
By 1897 the Greek community--the largest in the nation, both then and a hundred years later--had its first permanent Greek Orthodox parish, Holy Trinity Church, on what became known as the Greek Delta at Halsted and Harrison Streets.
The Greeks had either the good fortune or the good sense to center their community in the front yard of Jane Addams' Hull House, the first settlement house in the nation. Other settlement houses soon sprang up to help immigrants adjust to their new lives, including Erie Neighborhood House, which began as a Presbyterian church in 1870 and served impoverished Germans and Scandinavians in Chicago's West Town neighborhood.
Erie was among the settlement houses that survived, and its new clientele, mostly Hispanic immigrants, tells the continuing story of newcomers to Chicago.
At the turn of the century, nine out of 10 immigrants were from Europe. In the 1990s, immigrants to Chicago came from three distinct regions--Latin America, Europe and Asia. The top countries of origin were Mexico, Poland and the Philippines. In 1990 the government counted 878,000 immigrants in metropolitan Chicago, only slightly fewer than the 900,000 who lived in the area in 1910. And Edith Abbott, who found the ethnic media flourishing at the turn of the century, could just as easily have been writing about 1996, when there were more than one hundred ethnic newspapers and radio and television stations, from African to Ukrainian, whose Chicago area audience numbered 1 million.