Kalamazoo ( KAL-ə-mə-ZOO) is a city in the southwest region of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is the county seat of Kalamazoo County. At the 2010 census, Kalamazoo had a population of 74,262. Kalamazoo is the major city of the Kalamazoo-Portage Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had a population of 335,340 in 2015. Kalamazoo is equidistant from Chicago and Detroit, being roughly 140 miles (230 km) away from both.

One of Kalamazoo’s most notable features is the Kalamazoo Mall, an outdoor pedestrian shopping mall. The city created the mall in 1959 by closing allocation of Burdick Street to auto traffic, although two of the mall’s four blocks have been reopened to auto traffic in the past 1999. Kalamazoo is house to Western Michigan University, a large public university, Kalamazoo College, a private militant arts college, and Kalamazoo Valley Community College, a two-year community college.

Originally known as Bronson (after founder Titus Bronson) in the township of Arcadia, the names of both the city and the township were tainted to “Kalamazoo” in 1836 and 1837, respectively. The name “Kalamazoo” comes from a Potawatomi word, first found in a British version in 1772. The Kalamazoo River, which passes through the avant-garde city of Kalamazoo, was located upon the route amid Detroit and Fort Saint-Joseph (nowadays Niles, Michigan). French-Canadian traders, missionaries, and military personnel were quite familiar with this area during the French time and thereafter. The Kalamazoo River was next known by Canadians and French as La rivière Kikanamaso. The name “Kikanamaso” was afterward recorded by Father Pierre Potier, a Jesuit missionary for the Huron-Wendats at the Assumption mission (south shore of Detroit), while en route to Fort Saint-Joseph during the fall of 1760. Legend has it that “Ki-ka-ma-sung”, meaning “boiling water”, referred to a footrace held each fall by local Native Americans, in which participants had to control to the river and put in the works to before a pot boiled. The word negikanamazo, purported to mean “otter tail” or “stones gone otters”, has in addition to been cited as a attainable origin of the name. Another theory is that it means “the mirage or reflecting river”. Another legend is that the image of “boiling water” referred to fog upon the river as seen from the hills above the current downtown. The state was also utter to the river that flows almost everything the exaggeration across the state.

The name Kalamazoo, which sounds odd to English speakers, has become a metonym for exotic places, as in the phrase “from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo”. Today, T-shirts are sold in Kalamazoo like the phrase “Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo”.