Food
A lot of your favorite foods all have different origins. Some being other countries and some being major cities in the U.S. such as Chicago. Here is a list of famous foods first developed in the Windy City!
- Deep dish pizza – 1949
- Brownie – 1898
- Chicago style hotdog
- Oscar Meyer
- Twinkies – 1930
- Kraft Food – Started first Kraft cheese factory in Chicago in 1914.
- Italian beef sandwich – 1930
- Gyros first introduced to the US in Chicago – 1975
- Juicy Fruit gum – 1891
- Cracker Jacks – 1912
- Cream of Wheat / Shredded Wheat
- Frozen Desserts (Sally Lee) – 1976
Inventions
This is a small list of inventions that first originated in Chicago.
- Birth Control Pill – 1960
- First U.S. Blood Bank – 1937
- Playboy – 1953
- Wireless Remote Control – 1955
- Vacuum Cleaner – 1868
- The Zipper – 1893
- Softball – 1887
- Dishwasher – 1886
- The Ferris Wheel – 1983
- Open Heart Surgery – 1893
- Cell Phone – 1973
- The Skyscraper – 1884
- First Drive-In Bank – 1946
- First Steel Rail Road – 1865
Milestones
Via CityOfChicago.org:
- The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the largest and most extensive collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world.
- Chicago was one of the first and largest municipalities to require public art as part of the renovation or construction of municipal buildings, with the passage of the Percentage-for-Arts Ordinance in 1978.
- The Chicago Cultural Center is the first free municipal cultural center in the U.S. and home to the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome.
- When it opened in 1991, the Harold Washington Library Center, with approximately 6.5 million books, was the world’s largest municipal library.
- The Lincoln Park Zoo, one of only three major free zoos in the country, is the country’s oldest public zoo with an estimated annual attendance of three million.
- Four states are visible from the Skydeck Chicago (formerly the Sears Tower Skydeck). Indiana, Illinois, Michigan & Wisconsin.
- The first mail-order business, Montgomery Ward & Co., was established in 1872.
- The Adler Planetarium became the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere in 1930.
- Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1949.
Politics
Via CityOfChicago.org:
- The first Democratic National Convention televised coast-to-coast was held in 1952 at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. (The first televised Democratic National Convention, in 1948, only reached viewers in the Northeast.)
- Maria Callas made her U.S. debut at the Lyric Opera in 1954.
- The first televised U.S. presidential candidates’ debate was broadcast from Chicago’s CBS Studios on September 26, 1960, between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon.
- Sen. Carol Moseley Braun became the country’s first female African-American U.S. senator in 1992.
- The late Mayor Richard J. Daley and former Mayor Richard M. Daley became the first father-son team to head the United States Conference of Mayors in 1996.
Images and Sources: WTTW, WBEZ, MentalFloss, ChicagoTribune
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