Greg's Chicago Project

     Last Friday,  February 2nd, I was assigned to go and venture through Chicago's Chinatown area, northwest of IIT.  A well-established community in Chicago, it is, however, not the first Chinatown that the city had. The Original Chinatown was located at the intersection of Clark St. and Van Buren St. and was established by the first city-recognized Chinese citizen, T. C. Moy. "Mr. Moy arrived in Chicago from San Francisco in 1878. Finding Chicago fairly hospitable, he settled in the Clark and Van Buren community, and wrote to friends and family back in China, encouraging them to come to Chicago" ( Doerksen).  Moy was able to convince about 80 of his fellow men to come to Chicago by the end of 1878; this small group would expand to around 567 in the year 1890. Due to the rampant racism at the time, the immigrants had very few options for work, but the Chinese did find jobs doing laundry or opening restaurants. Food was a major factor in normaliz...

Before Chicago became the bustling metropolis that it is today,  it had to start small. Originally known as  Chigagaou, which roughly translates  “The Wild Garlic Place” in the Miami Native American dialect,  the land went uninhabited by local Native American tribes due to the rough, boggy terrain. It wasn’t until1673 when Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, two French explorers who were assigned to tread tough the then French-owned land, came through the marsh on their way back to the French-Canadian territory. Seeing potential in the land as a place to spread Christianity to the local tribes, Marquette stayed behind and built a house on the land. Fig. 1. A picture depicting Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet as they tread a waterway.       While Marquette ended up dying in 1675, two years after he built his house, it wasn’t long that explorers from the east would end up in the area. Eventually, a small community would aris...