Windy City, Origin of Name (Chicago)
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The City of Chicago has been known by many nicknames, but it is most widely recognized as The Windy City. Possible explanations for this particular nickname include Chicago's weather, politics, World's Fair, and rivalry with Cincinnati.
The earliest known reference to Chicago as the "Windy City" is from an 1858 Chicago Tribune article. The first known repeated effort to label Chicago with this nickname is from 1876, and involves Chicago's rivalry with Cincinnati. The term "Windy City" was first used by New York Sun editor Charles Dana in the bidding for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The popularity of the nickname has endured, even after the Cincinnati rivalry and the Columbian Exposition both ended.
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[edit] Meaning
[edit] Weather
Geographic conditions in the area (e.g., proximity to Lake Michigan, local prevailing winds, etc.) make Chicago a naturally breezy area. Another contributing factor is how the city was rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire. Planners modeled new streets on the grid system. This resulted in man-made wind tunnels in high density areas, such as the Loop, as the wind could travel down the columns and rows formed by the buildings and pick up speed. However, regardless of these facts, Chicago is not noted to be significantly windier than any other US city.
This "windy" explanation is from the Freeborn County Standard of Albert Lea, Minnesota, November 20, 1892 (digitized citation available on Newspaperarchive.com}:
- Chicago has been called the “windie” city, the term being used metaphorically to make out that Chicagoans were braggarts. The city is losing this reputation, for the reason that as people got acquainted with it they found most of her claims to be backed up by facts. As usual, people go to extremes in this thing also, and one can tell a stranger almost anything about Chicago today and feel that he believes it implicitly.
- But in another sense Chicago is actually earning the title of the “windy” city. It is one of the effects of the tall buildings which engineers and architects apparently did not foresee that the wind is sucked down into the streets. Walk past the Masonic Temple or the Auditorium any day even though it may be perfectly calm elsewhere, and you will meet with a lively breeze at the base of the building that will compel you to put your hand to your hat.
Chicago had long billed itself as an ideal summer resort because of its cool lake breeze. The Boston Globe of July 8, 1873 wrote that "a few years ago, Chicago advertised itself as a summer resort, on the strength of the lake breezes which so nicely tempered the mid-summer heats." The Chicago Tribune of June 14, 1876 discussed "Chicago as a Summer Resort" at length, proudly declaring that "the people of this city are enjoying cool breezes, refreshing rains, green fields, a grateful sun, and balmy air—winds from the north and east tempered by the coolness of the Lake, and from the south and west, bearing to us frequent hints of the grass, flowers, wheat and corn of the prairies."
The February 4, 1873 The Philadelphia Inquirer called Chicago "the great city of winds and fires."[1]
[edit] Cincinnati rivalry
Cincinnati and Chicago were rival cities in the 1860s and 1870s. Cincinnati was well known in the meatpacking trade, and it was called "Porkopolis" from at least 1843. Starting from the early 1860s, Chicago surpassed Cincinnati in this trade and proudly claimed the very same "Porkopolis" nickname.[2]
The baseball inter-city matches were especially intense. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were the pride of all of baseball, so Chicago came up with a rival team called the White Stockings to defeat them. "Windy City" often appeared in the Cincinnati sporting news of the 1870s and 1880s.
The first known citations of "Windy City" are three from 1876, and all involve Cincinnati:
- Cincinnati Enquirer, May 9, 1876 headline: "THAT WINDY CITY. Some Freaks of the Last Chicago Tornado."
- Cincinnati Enquirer, May 13, 1876: "Only the plucky nerve of the eating-house keeper rescued the useful seats from a journey to the Windy City."
- Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1876: "The Cincinnati Enquirer, in common with many other papers, has been waiting with great anxiety for the fulfillment of its prophecy: that the Chicago papers would call the Whites hard names when they lost. Witness these scraps the day after the Whites lost to the Athletics: There comes a wail to us from the Windy City."
For the Cincinnati papers, "Windy City" had meant a Chicago that was full of bluster.
[edit] Politics
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Others say that the name comes from Chicago's political history. Specifically, they reference the "spectator sport" style of politics practiced in the last century, and the adage that when Chicago politicians speak they are "blowing a lot of wind".[citation needed] It is meant to be a jab towards the Chicago Democratic Machine, which for the most part has been led by the Daley family for the past 50 years. Although machine politics has mostly fallen out of style elsewhere in the United States, it is, for the most part, alive and well in Chicago.
[edit] World's Fair
As the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas approached, the United States planned to hold a world's fair to celebrate. This was a big deal because the French had just put the Americans to shame at the previous World's Fair with the building of the Eiffel Tower. The next world's fair was seen as a chance by many Americans to show the world that it too was a great country.
The prestige of holding the fair enticed several prominent cities to compete to host the fair. At the top New York, St. Louis and Washington D.C. all fought hard for the right and many New Yorkers thought they had a win guaranteed. In the end, it came down to New York and Chicago. In 1890, Chicago won the bid to host the World's Fair, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition, after eight ballots.[3]. Many prominent New Yorkers were extremely irritated that a "frontier town" could beat them.
It is a popular myth that the first person to use the term "Windy City" was the New York Sun editor Charles Dana. Charles Dana was New York's leading fair booster, but there is little evidence that he ever used the "Windy City" term. The first known attribution of Dana to the origin of "Windy City" was in the Chicago Tribune, "Chicago Dubbed 'Windy' in Fight for Fair of '93," June 11, 1933:
- “Don’t pay any attention,” wrote Charles A. Dana day in and day out in his New York Sun, “to the nonsensical claims of that windy city. Its people could not build a World’s Fair even if they won it."
[edit] The Hawk, or Hawkins
Chicago's wind is often called "The Hawk." This term has long been popular in African-American English. A Baltimore Sun series of columns in 1934 attempted to examine the origin of the phrase "Hawkins is coming" for a cold, winter wind. The first recorded Chicago citation is in the Chicago Defender, October 20, 1936: "And these cold mornings are on us—in other words “Hawkins” has got us."[4]
[edit] Chicago in Science Fiction
"What's the Name of that Town?" is a science-fiction story by R.A. Lafferty, originally published in 1964 but taking place at some time in the near future. The characters in the story vaguely recall that a certain American city no longer exists (due to some disaster left undescribed), but they are unable to remember the city's name. They discover that everyone's vocabulary has been modified to eliminate words that might evoke memories of the vanished city ... such as the words "loop" and "cub". Although the absent city is never identified, astute readers will realize that it is Chicago.
In addition, the science-fiction roleplaying game RIFTS uses Chicago as a principal setting. The the far-future, post-apocalyptic world of RIFTS, Chicago is referred to as "Chi-Town."
[edit] References
- ^ The Big Apple: Windy City (summary)
- ^ The Big Apple: Porkopolis (Cincinnati and Chicago nickname)
- ^ Chicago Tribune, Feb. 25, 1890, p.1 (reporting the Congressional votes for the host city)
- ^ http://www.barrypopik.com/article/591/the-hawk
- NBierma.com - Nathan Bierma lists several references to the name compiled from sources at the Chicago Public Library stretching from 1890 to 1939.
- USA Today - The transcript of a letter from Barry Popik, who is an historian of American slang and a consultant to Oxford English Dictionary.
- The Straight Dope - Ongoing updates to the source of the name.
