Famous people who grew up or lived in and around Chicago

Benny Goodman1909–1925

📍 Maxwell Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

I was born in Chicago in May 1909, one of twelve children of David Goodman, a tailor from Warsaw, and Dora, who came from Kovno. They were Jewish immigrants who had met in Baltimore, and…

Bo Diddley1935–1955

📍 Bronzeville, Chicago, IL, USA

I was born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, in December 1928, and I was adopted and raised by my mother's cousin, Gussie McDaniel, so I became Ellas McDaniel. When I was a boy, she…

Ernest Hemingway1899–1904

📍 339 N Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60302, USA

I was born in the upstairs bedroom at my grandparents' house on North Oak Park Avenue on the twenty-first of July 1899. My family moved soon after to 600 Kenilworth Avenue two blocks away…

Frank Lloyd Wright1889–1909

📍 951 Chicago Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60302, USA

I grew up in Wisconsin, where my mother hung engravings of English cathedrals on my nursery walls and gave me a set of Froebel kindergarten blocks; I played with their maple cubes and…

Harrison Ford1942–1960

📍 Park Ridge, Illinois, USA

Harrison Ford was born in Chicago in July 1942 and grew up in Park Ridge, a quiet, leafy suburb north-west of the city, near O'Hare airport. His father, Christopher, was an advertising…

Herbie Hancock1940–1956

📍 Chicago, IL, USA

Herbert Jeffrey Hancock was born in Chicago in April 1940, and grew up on the city's South Side, the son of Wayman Hancock, a government meat inspector, and Winnie Hancock. His parents…

Jane Addams1889–1935

📍 800 S Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

I co-founded Hull House on the Near West Side of Chicago in 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr, in a rundown mansion in one of the city's most impoverished immigrant neighbourhoods. We moved in…

Kanye West1980–2002

📍 South Shore, Chicago, IL, USA

Kanye Omari West was born in Atlanta in June 1977, and when he was three, after his parents divorced, his mother, Donda, brought him to Chicago. In the early 1980s she bought a…

Michelle Obama1964–1981

📍 7436 South Euclid Avenue, South Shore, Chicago, IL 60649, USA

Michelle Robinson grew up on the upper floor of her great-aunt's brick bungalow at 7436 South Euclid Avenue in South Shore, on Chicago's South Side. Her family rented the small one-bedroom…

Nat King Cole1923–1936

📍 Bronzeville, Chicago, IL, USA

I was born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1919, and when I was about four my family moved to Chicago, joining the Great Migration north. We lived in Bronzeville, on…

Sam Cooke1933–1950

📍 Bronzeville, Chicago, IL 60653, USA

I was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in January 1931, the fifth of eight children of the Reverend Charles Cook, a Holiness minister, and his wife, Annie Mae. When I was two, my father…