ABSTRACT

This chapter provides details for the picture of Chicago and its metropolitan area as of 1950 at the end of two momentous decades. Chicago was entering the second half of the twentieth century as the nation's second city and metropolitan area, with a huge manufacturing and transportation base and a growing downtown financial and business services sector. Suburbanization was underway as two-thirds of population growth in the 1940s was located outside the city of Chicago. The metropolitan area was about to embark on the construction of the expressway system and a new airport, and the City of Chicago had begun urban renewal projects. Population and economic growth in the nation shifted to the South and West, and the nation changed from being an economy mainly of goods production to one of the production of services. The growing African-American population largely was restricted in a segregated housing market that had been unable to expand rapidly enough.