Interactive: How Irish Is Chicago?

With two parades, a green river — and this year, numerous landmark buildings lit up with green lights as part of an effort to make this the “greenest city in the world” — there is no question that Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day extols an abundance of Irish pride. But given the many other ethnicities that make up the city, exactly how “Irish” is Chicago? By examining the latest census data on ancestry — defined as a person’s ethnic origin, heritage, descent or “roots” — it turns out that Chicago, on a per capita basis, falls about in the middle among U.S. cities. Pittsburgh, Boston, even Scottsdale, Ariz., could be considered more Irish as a percentage of the population. Yet with the second-highest raw number of people in any city identifying as Irish, Chicago, and its surrounding area, remains home to more than half a million residents with Irish roots, if not pride. Scroll through these graphics to see where Chicago and Cook County’s Irish hotspots are and how the city’s Irish stack up against the 100 largest U.S. cities:

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