By the 1830s newcomers started arriving by stagecoach and wagon, burlap bags in hand, moneymaking dreams in their heads. A boom was on. By the 1870s, there were some 334,000 people in the city, three times as many now lived here as there were in 1860.
The growth was impressive and some people made fortunes.
But prosperity brought some dangers and disreputable types. The Tribune, founded in 1847, cried in the 1860s, "We are beset on every side by gangs of desperate villains."
Murders and robberies were commonplace (as they are today). Corruption at all levels was rampant.
Most citizens lived in what was mostly a wood-structured frontier town, 6 miles long and three miles wide. It was a town that contained extreme wealth and squalor, from the fashionable homes of Terrace Row on South Michigan Avenue to the sordid diversions and hovels of Conley's Patch a few blocks to the west.
--Cooter
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