Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
Well, my point was that Chicago was never really thought of as much of a threat to take over New York as the nation's largest city. It's been a century since Chicago's growth rate was high enough for the thought to even enter someone's mind.
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oh, of course. and i think that the only minds that ever honestly entertained the notion of chicago actually overtaking new york belonged to chicago's most vociferous boosters. i think you'd be hard-pressed to find any historical new york figure who felt seriously threatened by chicago's explosive growth in the latter half of the 19th century. at that time, chicago was growing at a pace never before seen in world history, but new york was already much larger than chicago at the time, and new york was itself growing pretty explosively in the latter half of the 19th century as well. chicago's growth rate may have been a bit higher then, but that's only because chicago began from essentially nothing, and then 50 years later there were 2 million people living there. new york was growing at an extremely impressive clip as well, a rate that was never going to allow chicago to catch up given its much larger starting size.