Sign in with Facebook
the river
ahhh cloud gate
at the deck
the fountainWhy is it called the windy city?
“I’ve heard three explanations for the term Windy City as an epithet for Chicago, Illinois: the common assumption that it refers to the winds gusting through the city (understandable to anyone who’s been there).
[A] It is indeed often said that the word windy in the name refers to the long-winded and boastful speech of Chicago politicians.
That we now have what looks like the real story is owed, as so often with American expressions, to Barry Popik, part-time parking judge and expert amateur word sleuth.
For example, the Chicago Tribune for 11 September 1886: “The name of ‘Windy City,’ which is sometimes used by village papers in New York and Michigan to designate Chicago, is intended as a tribute to the refreshing lake breezes of the great summer resort of the West, but is an awkward and rather ill-chosen expression and is doubtless misunderstood”.
It has only recently been discovered that the term appears even earlier, in a headline on the front page of the Cleveland Gazette for 19 September 1885, reporting several items of news from Chicago, particularly a judicial decision: “From the Windy City: Judge Foote’s Civil Right decision”. For the nickname to be well enough known in Cleveland that it appeared in a headline without explanation indicates that it was by 1885 getting to be an established term.
Mr Popik has suggested that the name actually originated in a scheme by the Chicago Tribune about that date to promote the city as a summer resort, using the cool breeze off the lake as the basis of its attraction. Before then, Chicago was usually nicknamed Garden City (its Latin motto was and is Urbs in Horto, “city in a garden”). There seems to have been a shift from the old name to the new in the middle 1880s.
Excerpt from www.askjeeves.com Bike riding along the Lakeshore in the summer and in the winter, Christmas shopping on the Magnificent Mile (North Michigan Avenue).
