calumet city

Calumet City

city, Cook county, northeastern Illinois, U.S. A southern suburb of Chicago, Calumet City lies on the Illinois-Indiana state border and along the Little Calumet River, southeast of Lake Calumet. The area was first settled in the 1860s by Hans Johann Schrum, a German immigrant who produced maple syrup and potatoes on his lands and owned a pickle works. Beginning in the mid-1880s, the town attracted immigrants from Germany and Poland. It was incorporated as a village in 1893 and was called West Hammond until 1924 (Hammond, Indiana, is adjacent), when it was renamed for the waterways (calumet being the name of the peace pipe of the local Native Americans). It developed as a residential-industrial suburb of the Gary-Chicago metropolitan area. For decades beginning in the 1920s, the city's nightclubs-most of them on State Street, known as "the strip"-and red-light district attracted notoriety as places of entertainment for conventioneers visiting Chicago and as havens for organized-crime figures such as Al Capone, earning the city its "Sin City" nickname and causing much municipal discord. Calumet City is now primarily residential, with some light manufacturing. Inc. 1911. Pop. (1990) 37,840; (2000) 39,071.

Learn more about Calumet City with a free trial on Britannica.com.