Blue Island is a city in Cook County, Illinois, located nearly 16 miles (26 km) south of Chicago’s Loop. Blue Island is adjoining the city of Chicago and shares its northern boundary bearing in mind that city’s Morgan Park neighborhood. The population was 22,558 at the 2020 United States Census.

Blue Island was time-honored in the 1830s as a quirk station for settlers traveling upon the Vincennes Trace, and the deal prospered because it was usefully situated a day’s journey uncovered of Chicago. The late-nineteenth-century historian and publisher Alfred T. Andreas made the similar to observation on the subject of the song of the minor community in History of Cook County Illinois (1884), “The location of Blue Island Village is a beautiful one. Nowhere very nearly Chicago is there to be found a more sociable and desirable resident locality.”

Since its founding, the city has been an important commercial middle in the south Cook County region, although its perspective in that esteem has been eclipsed in recent years as further significant population centers developed all but it and the region’s advertisement resources became spread beyond a wider area. In addition to its broad long-standing industrial base, the city enjoyed notable enlargement in the 1840s during the construction of the feeder canal (now the Calumet Sag Channel) for the Illinois and Michigan Canal and as the center of a large brick-making industry dawn in the 1850s, which eventually gave Blue Island the status of brick-making capital of the world. Beginning in 1883, Blue Island was afterward host to the car shops of the Rock Island Railroad. Blue Island was home to several breweries, who used the east side of the hill to increase their product back the advent of refrigeration, until the Eighteenth Amendment made these breweries illegal in 1919. A large regional hospital and two major clinics are in addition to located in the city.

Although initially approved by “Yankee” stock, Blue Island has been the tapering off of get into for many of America’s immigrants, beginning in the 1840s taking into account the dawn of a large German population that remained a prominent allocation of the city’s ethnic makeup for many years. By 1850, half of Blue Island’s population was either foreign-born or the kids of foreign-born residents. Later, significant groups came from Italy, Poland, Sweden and Mexico.