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Chicago is one of the best places in the world because of its vitality, diversity and art.  It is a wonderful place to buy a condominium because the real estate market is low and will rise within the next few years.  It is a great idea to buy a condo in Chicago if you are a young businessperson working in the city and cannot afford a house, but find an apartment too small.  Chicago is the largest city in Illinois and the third-most populous city in the United States, with approximately 2.9 million people.

In order to understand what a great place the city is, it is a good idea to learn about the city.  Since its foundation in 1833 as a frontier town of the Old Northwest, Chicago has grown into one of the ten most influential world cities. Chicago today is the financial, economic, and cultural capital of the Midwest, and is recognized as a major transportation, business, and architectural center.

In the 1700s the Chicago area was inhabited primarily by Potawatomis who took the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox people. The first non-native settler in Chicago, Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, was Haitian and arrived in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi woman, and founded the area's first trading post. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Fort Dearborn Massacre. The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi later ceded the land to the United States in the Treaty of St. Louis of 1816.

On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of 350, and within seven years it grew to a population of over 4,000. The City of Chicago was incorporated on March 4, 1837.Chicago in its first century was one of the fastest growing cities in the world, having started with a population of zero at the beginning of the 1800's swelling to over 1 million people by 1900. It was the only city in the world with over 1 million people at the beginning of the 20th century that did not exist at the beginning of the previous century.

In 1848, the city became an important transportation link between the eastern and western United States with the opening of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, Chicago's first railway, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which allowed shipping from the Great Lakes through Chicago to the Mississippi River.

With a flourishing economy that brought many new residents from rural communities and immigrants from Europe, Chicago grew from a city of 299,000 to nearly 1.7 million between 1870 and 1900. The city's manufacturing and retail sectors dominated the Midwest and greatly influenced the American economy, with the Union Stock Yards' dominating the packing trade.
After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Chicago experienced rapid rebuilding and growth. During Chicago's rebuilding period, the first skyscraper was constructed in 1885 using steel-skeleton construction.   Now it is a Mecca for art and activity.