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Over 250 people died and 17,000 buildings were destroyed in this fire, allegedly started by a cow kicking over a lantern. Just a few buildings survived, including the Historic Water Tower and Pumping Station.

Though just a measly – by today’s standards – nine stories, the Home Insurance Building (now demolished) was the tallest of its time. William LeBarron Jenney achieved this architectural feat by designing the first weight-bearing steel frame. From then on, the only way was up.

Wealthy industrialists funded amazing Chicago arts institutions, but their workers toiled long hours in abominable conditions. In May 1886, a labor protest ended in an explosion at Haymarket Square that killed eight policemen and two bystanders. Eight anarchists were convicted of murder, though three were later pardoned for lack of evidence.

The first train traveled just 3.6 miles (5.8 km) along tracks built above city-owned alleys, (avoiding the need to negotiate with private property owners). By 1893, the line was extended to Jackson Park to transport visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition (see The Museum’s Origins).

With sewage flowing downriver to Lake Michigan, the source of the city’s drinking water, thousands of Chicagoans were dying from the contamination. To solve the problem, engineers created a canal that forced the river to flow away from the lake: an extraordinary feat of modern engineering.

The Chicago White Sox was a winning baseball team but poorly paid, so players sometimes fixed games, pocketing money from gamblers. After a group of players conspired to lose the 1919 World Series, eight of them were indicted, acquitted for insufficient evidence, but banned for life from baseball – and forever nicknamed the “Black Sox.”

This brutal murder of seven of Al Capone’s rival gangsters is one of history’s most notorious massacres. Capone set up a sting that sent George “Bugsy” Moran’s main men to a nearby garage. There, Capone’s henchmen, dressed as police officers, lined them up and riddled them with bullets. Seven bushes now mark the spot (at Clark Street and Dickens Avenue).

Under the football stands on the campus of the University of Chicago (see University of Chicago) Enrico Fermi made history. He supervised the creation of a primitive nuclear reactor and took the first major step in understanding how to build an atomic bomb.

Ray Kroc, a milkshake mixer salesman, changed diets worldwide by convincing Dick and Mac McDonald’s to franchise their San Bernadino, California burger stand. The original restaurant in Des Plaines – 15 miles (24 km) west of Chicago – is now a museum.