5. One of the last suburbs to become a Chicago neighborhood was Morgan Park on the Far South Side. It wasn’t love at first sight. The 20-year annexation battle started in 1894 with a street fight between a Methodist minister and a politician, and included fistfights at village meetings, accusations of vote fraud, a banking scandal, state legislation, an Illinois Supreme Court ruling and a prank attempt by Morgan Park to annex Chicago. Before they officially joined the city in 1914, residents had gone to the polls eight times (six times voting no and two times yes).

6. The neighborhood of Douglas, which the city’s map now splits into Prairie Shores and Lake Meadows, includes land donated by the family of Sen. Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s rival. During the Civil War, Camp Douglas at 31st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue was a horrific prisoner of war camp where thousands of Confederates died of abuse and disease. The dead were eventually buried at Oak Woods Cemetery, and today these soldiers who fought against emancipation rest alongside such African-American legends as Harold Washington and Jesse Owens.

7. The first fingerprints used to convict an American of murder were found in what is now the Beverly neighborhood. Thomas Jennings was burglarizing a house in 1910 when the homeowner confronted him. Jennings killed him. He also left fingerprints on a freshly painted railing outside the house, and police later picked him up as a suspicious character. Based on the fingerprints, he was convicted and hanged.

8. The White City amusement park, billed as “the city of a million electric lights,” opened around 1905 and operated until the late ’30s at 63rd Street and South Park. Goodyear’s first commercial blimp, the Wingfoot, was assembled and hangared there. While sailing from Grant Park toward White City in 1919, the Wingfoot plunged through the skylight of a downtown bank, killing 10 bank employees and three people on the blimp.

9. Many amazing South Side sites have disappeared, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens entertainment complex at 60th and Cottage Grove and the Washington Park Racetrack at 61st and Cottage Grove. A less regrettable loss was the Robert Taylor Homes, a row of high-rises along the Dan Ryan Expressway that was considered a public housing failure. The development was named for Chicago Housing Authority board member Robert Taylor, grandfather of White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

10. The Levee was a vice district around 20th and State streets with houses of ill repute bearing such colorful names as Bucket of Blood, Why Not and the Library. (A husband could tell his wife he was going to the Library and would not be lying.) Do-gooders closed the Levee in 1912, dispersing prostitution elsewhere in the city and suburbs.