“First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village,” journalist Lincoln Steffens described the Windy City in 1903.1 From its start as a marshy portage for Native American and French trappers and traders, Chicago grew to a bustling metropolis of 2.7 million by the time influenza arrived on September 8, 1918, when a few sailors at the nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station fell ill with the disease. A week later, seven army cadets from the Northwestern University SATC unit came down with influenza. Then, a few days after that, cases developed among cadets at the Lewis Institute SATC unit on South Hoyne Street in Chicago itself. The epidemic had begun. More>

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