Chicago: City of the Century

Released: 2003-01-13

Runtime: 87 minutes

Episode Overview

Chicago's location at the end of a canal linking the Mississippi to New York makes it attractive to Yankee speculators as well as Irish laborers. In just a few decades, the remote fur trading post explodes into the metropolis of the West. Not even the great fire of 1871 can slow the city's development.

Series Overview

In just 60 years Chicago grew from a remote, swampy frontier town into one of the most explosively alive cities in the world. Captains of industry built empires through innovation, ingenuity, determination, and sheer ruthlessness, while the labor of millions of working men and women -- most of them immigrants from Ireland and Northern Europe -- helped reinvent the way America did business.