Rust Belt

Chicago is one of the large northern U.S. cities that fell from prominence in the 1970s, losing its place as an important manufacturing center as economic conditions changed. These cities, dotting the map from Illinois to New York, came to be referred to collectively as the Rust Belt.

Historically, the United States has been a world-class economic power, in part because of its huge crop lands in the South and its manufacturing base in the North. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Buffalo, which had good methods of transportation (rivers, lakes, or railroads), developed as centers for industry, with factories that pumped out the manufactured goods, from cars to paper to buttons, that powered U.S. economic growth. Particularly after World War II (1939-45), which had itself brought an end to the previous decade of economic depression, the industrial cities in the North...