Chicago is where everyone from architects to a pope and future presidents have made a name for themselves in their chosen fields.
That’s why, for this last edition of the Illinois 250, we’re taking a look back at the influence dozens of people have taken with them from our great city to the rest of the nation and the world.
It’s impossible to compile a complete list, but we wanted to point to some notables. Though a few have been mentioned in previous editions of this project in honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, these names are worth repeating because their impact was so great.
- Illinois 250: Celebrating the state’s fabulous firsts
- Illinois 250: Art, culture, food and music made here — and then shared with the world
- Illinois 250: The political land of Lincoln, but also Addams, Daley, Washington, Jackson, Obama and more
- Illinois 250: Sports teams and individuals that have achieved greatness — or infamy
- Illinois 250: From ‘The Jungle’ to Shel Silverstein, how the state has helped shape the printed word
- Illinois 250: What we’ve invented, innovated, created and manufactured
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
There’s a reason why the state is nicknamed the “Land of Lincoln.” Though he was born in Kentucky, the 16th president’s political career was made in Illinois.
Philip Armour (1832-1901)
Armour, who moved to Chicago from Milwaukee in 1867, slaughtered beef as well as pork as part of his Armour and Co. He added a chill room in 1872 as an alternative to salting as a form of meat preservation. In addition to his wealth, the meatpacking giant founded the Armour Institute of Technology. The school merged with the Lewis Institute to form the Illinois Institute of Technology (now Illinois Tech) in 1940.
Marshall Field (1834-1906)
The retailer, whose first State Street store opened in 1868, is famously remembered for his credo: “The customer is always right.”
Aaron Montgomery Ward (1843-1913)
The mail-order magnate created one of the country’s oldest retailers — Montgomery Ward & Co. — which remained in operation until 2000.
Ward also went to court three times between 1890 and 1909 to get the city’s lakefront from Randolph to Madison streets, then known as Lake Park, cleared off and preserved as park space — and won each time. He forced the city to create and maintain the now 200-acre Grant Park and won legal recognition of citizens’ rights to have a say about the city’s parks.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
The famed trial lawyer defended Socialist candidate for president Eugene Debs; Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who believed they committed “the perfect murder”; and John T. Scopes of the “monkey trial.”
“Defender in a hundred or more murder trials, no client of his ever died on gallows or electric chair,” the Tribune wrote after Darrow’s death in 1938. Some believe his ghost haunts a bridge named in his honor in Jackson Park.
Jane Addams (1860-1935)
The co-founder of Hull House was also the first American woman (and the second woman ever) to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The award, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, was for her activities in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which she helped to found and served as its first president.
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
Also known by her married name, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an iconic investigative journalist who crusaded against the lynching of Black men, pushed for women’s right to vote and started numerous organizations aimed at improving the economic and social status of African Americans. She was born into slavery in Mississippi, but went on to be a schoolteacher and created the first kindergarten for Black children.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: How Chicago expressways and other major roads got their names
Wells-Barnett settled in Bronzeville in 1894 after her life was threatened, and she developed a reputation as a fearless activist and political strategist. Wells-Barnett’s image was unveiled on a quarter in 2025 by the U.S. Mint.
Charles Gates Dawes (1865-1951)
The Evanston resident, who was elected vice president under Calvin Coolidge, helped broker a deal to stabilize Germany’s finances after World War I. The result was called the Dawes Plan, and for it, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
The American architect’s surviving work includes 400 buildings in 35 states, prompting Tribune architecture columnist Edward Keegan to write in May: “Wright remains relevant because his work was really that good. The best of his designs are timeless, touching on architecture’s rich history while pointing to future possibilities.”
Unity Temple in Oak Park, completed in 1908, was reopened in 2016 after a $25 million restoration. The Wright-designed S.C. Johnson Administrative Complex in Racine, Wisconsin, still serves as the company’s headquarters. And the Frederick C. Robie House is still a masterpiece of Wright’s Prairie style.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)
The German architect arrived in Chicago in 1938 as the newly hired head of the architecture department at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) on the city’s South Side. His works — including Chicago’s IBM Plaza, 111 East Wacker and Plano’s Farnsworth House — project his philosophy of “Less is more.” Van der Rohe received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.
George Halas (1895-1983)
“Papa Bear” was 25 when he attended a meeting in Canton, Ohio, that created the National Football League. In 40 seasons as head coach, Halas compiled one of football’s most amazing records. He coached the Bears to six world championships, with his last title in 1963 at age 68. He had 318 regular-season wins and 324 total victories. Only former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula has more NFL wins.
Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975)
Born Elijah Robert Poole, the son of a Baptist preacher and sharecropper assumed leadership of the Nation of Islam. He moved the group’s headquarters to the city’s South Side after its founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad, disappeared in 1934. He also bestowed the name Muhammad Ali on new follower Cassius Clay in 1964 and criticized Malcolm X as a “hypocrite” following the speaker’s assassination in 1965.
Al Capone (1899-1947)
The head of the Chicago Outfit arrived in Chicago and turned 21 the same day Prohibition was enacted. His nefarious acts — bootlegger, racketeer and suspected orchestrator of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 — became well documented in the Tribune, though he was never convicted of killing anyone.
Capone was, however, convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Syphilis-related complications earned Capone an early release from prison in 1939 after he served seven years for tax evasion. He died almost eight years later.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
The author and three of his five siblings were delivered by their father, a doctor, at the family’s Queen Anne-style home at 339 N. Oak Park Ave. in Oak Park. Hemingway graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School, where he wrote for the school newspaper and literary magazine before setting out for larger adventures that didn’t include college.
Hemingway worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star; drove an ambulance for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was wounded in the first World War; worked as a European correspondent for the Toronto Star; traveled with an expatriate group of authors including Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce; worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s; published many books; and married four times, according to the Hemingway Foundation.
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist defected to the U.S. from fascist-controlled Italy. He led a team at the University of Chicago in the birth of the Atomic Age. The scientists were successful in producing the world’s first sustained nuclear reaction on Dec. 2, 1942, at Stagg Field on the school’s campus, though Chicago’s role in creating the atomic bomb wasn’t revealed publicly until nearly three years later, after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.
Richard J. (1902-1976) and Richard M. (1942-) Daley
The father and son served a combined 43 years as Chicago mayors. Richard M. became mayor in 1989. He served until 2011, holding office even longer than his father — “Da Boss” — had, even as the political machine Richard J. Daley had built slowly crumbled.
Ray Kroc (1902-1984)
The Oak Park-raised businessman eked out a living as a pianist, failed real estate speculator in Florida, dedicated paper cup salesman for the Lily-Tulip Co., and distributor for the Multimixer milkshake machine. Kroc’s life changed after he saw eight of his Multimixers in action inside a red-and-white tiled octagon-shaped drive-in operated by the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, California.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: As McDonald’s turns 70, a look back at its suburban origins
Kroc opened the first McDonald’s franchise at 400 N. Lee St., Des Plaines, using the McDonald’s brothers’ playbook as a guide. There are 36,000 McDonald’s restaurants today in more than 100 countries.
Harold Edward ‘Red’ Grange (1903-1991)
Just days after he abruptly left the University of Illinois in 1925 to don the navy and orange of the Bears, the three-time All-American played in his first NFL game. Most Bears games drew about 5,000 fans at the time, but 36,000 packed Wrigley Field. A $100,000 contract and a barnstorming tour made Grange rich.
A knee injury in 1927 greatly affected Grange’s speed, but both he and Halas were inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1963.
Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972)
The magnitude of her talent was unmistakable when Jackson made her professional debut in 1928 at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
“It was a voice quality no one else had,” her mentor Thomas Dorsey told the Tribune when Jackson died in 1972. “Hard to put into words what it was — a sort of cry or whine, with a lot of pathos.”
The “Queen of Gospel,” as she became known, performed just before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, for the 250,000 marchers who came to Washington, D.C., to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Jackson customarily closed her eyes while performing, explaining it gave her focus: “No one else is there for me — I’m singing to the Lord.”
Hugh Hefner (1926-2017)
As a boy, Hefner published a typewritten newspaper and sold copies for a penny each while growing up on the city’s Northwest Side. As a young man, he started Playboy with $8,000 raised through selling his furniture and borrowing from family and friends. The debut issue, produced at the kitchen table of his apartment at 6052 S. Harper Ave., featured a Marilyn Monroe photograph purchased from a suburban calendar company. It didn’t include a cover date since Hefner was unsure when or if he would be able to produce another. Playboy was printed in Chicago until 1985, and remained in monthly circulation until 2018.
Ernie Banks (1931-2015)
Known worldwide as “Mr. Cub,” Banks became the Cubs’ first African American player on Sept. 17, 1953, and went on to become an 11-time All-Star and two-time National League Most Valuable Player (1958-59). Banks was also the ninth player in MLB history to reach 500 home runs. When he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977, Banks told the crowd: “There’s sunshine, fresh air, and the team’s behind us. Let’s play two.”
George “Buddy” Guy (1936-)
The bluesman came to Chicago from rural Louisiana in 1957 at the end of the Great Migration. He has made 20 records under his own name and many others with friends and collaborators. Guy also won nine Grammys — all without ever taking a single guitar lesson.
“He got a National Medal of Arts from George W. Bush, Kennedy Center Honors from Barack Obama and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by one of his inspirations (B.B. King) and one of his acolytes (Eric Clapton),” the Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli wrote in 2024.
Emmett Till (1941-1955)
An Aug. 24, 1955, interaction between shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant, a young white mother of two sons, and the 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, lasted just minutes and involved 2 cents’ worth of bubble gum at the Bryant Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Mississippi.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: The death of Emmett Till and his legacy, as reported by the Tribune
Till was abducted and killed after the encounter, a shocking event that helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement. One hundred days later, Till’s death inspired Rosa Parks to remain seated instead of giving up her place to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Eight years to the day after Till was slain, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. (1941-2026)
The civil rights leader, two-time presidential candidate, minister and founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition spent the last 60 years of his life in front of cameras advocating for social justice. Known for his rhetorical flourishes and his short, catchy and sometimes-rhythmic and rhyming phrases — ideal as sound bites — Jackson sought to instill self-confidence in Black people with his trademark call-and-response celebration of the self that started with “I am somebody.”
Hillary Clinton (1947-)
The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state who lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago and grew up in northwest suburban Park Ridge.
Bill Murray (1950-)
The fifth of nine Murray siblings was born in Evanston and grew up in Wilmette. With his brothers, Murray wrote and acted in the 1980 film “Caddyshack,” which was inspired by their caddy experiences growing up. The die-hard Cubs fan honed his comedy skills at The Second City before starring on “Saturday Night Live.” And on every Feb. 2, his performance in the Woodstock-filmed “Groundhog Day” airs on television.
Walter Payton (1953-1999)
“Sweetness” is the best player in Bears history and one of the greatest to ever play professional football. When he retired in 1987, the 5-foot-10-inch, 200-pound Payton was the NFL’s all-time leading rusher, though he’s since been surpassed. The NFL Man of the Year Award, which he won along with his MVP in 1977, was renamed after Payton in 2000.
Oprah Winfrey (1954-)
“The Oprah Winfrey Show” was nationally syndicated for 25 seasons from 1986 to 2011 and produced more than 4,500 episodes. It is among the longest-running and highest-rated talk shows in history, with 47 Daytime Emmy Awards before Winfrey stopped submitting it for consideration in 2000.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Oprah Winfrey — 10 moments from her Chicago years
Winfrey’s hiring was announced in the Dec. 2, 1983, edition of the Tribune: “She’s expected here in early January and brings credits that range from reporting and anchoring to touring in a one-woman show, ‘The History of Black Women through Drama and Song.’” Within weeks of her debut as the host of “A.M. Chicago,” the 29-year-old pulled her show into a virtual dead-heat in the ratings with WBBM-Ch. 2’s Phil Donahue.
Pope Leo XIV (1955-)
Before he became pontiff in 2025, Robert Prevost was “the pride and joy of every priest and nun” at St. Mary’s on Chicago’s South Side. The local boy, who was born at Mercy Hospital, pursued a master’s degree at the Chicago Theological Union, cheered for the White Sox during the team’s run to the 2005 World Series title and met friends for pizza at Aurelio’s in Homewood.
Barack (1961-) and Michelle Obama (1964-)
The nation’s 44th president and first lady fell in love on the city’s South Side, celebrated Election Night 2008 in Grant Park with thousands of supporters, and last month opened the Obama Presidential Center together in Jackson Park.
Michael Jordan (1963-)
No. 23’s professional accomplishments are numerous and unprecedented: Six-time NBA champion with the Bulls. Rookie of the Year. Five-time NBA MVP. Six-time NBA Finals MVP. 10-time All-NBA First Team. Nine-time NBA All-Defensive First Team. Defensive Player of the Year. 14-time NBA All-Star. Three-time NBA All-Star MVP. 32,292 points during his 15-year career — the third-highest total in league history. Ten scoring titles — an NBA record and seven consecutive that matches Wilt Chamberlain. Retired with the NBA’s highest scoring average of 30.1 points per game. Finally, a Hall of Fame inductee.
Jennifer Hudson (1981-)
The Chicago-born-and-raised singer has won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, and currently hosts a daytime talk show.
