Dear Dr. Ink:
Why is Chicago called the “Windy City?” This is a serious question and I would appreciate an answer.
Gary Straub
(former journalist, now retired)
Answer: At first Dr. Ink thought this was a trick question, like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” or “What color was Lee’s white horse?” The Doc has walked the streets of the Second City during brutal winter days and has felt the wind whipping like barbed wire across his face.
But what the heck. With no ideas for a more meaningful column, Doc did a Google search and came up with a single link. But it was a doozy. On Sept. 17, 1999 a site called The Straight Dope, a site registered to the Chicago Reader, cites an “indefatigable word sleuth” named Barry Popik as the best source on the Windy City question.
While the common understanding is meteorological, there is another explanation that dates back to the 1890s. It seems New York and Chicago were competing for the 1892 world’s fair commemorating the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in America. Chicago politicians were making big claims on why they should hold the fair. In New York, newspaper editor Charles Dana told his readers to ignore “the nonsensical claims of that windy city.” In other words, the Chicago politicians were gas bags.
It’s possible, of course, that Dana was playing his political meaning off of the meteorological one. Popik eventually found a headline from an 1885 edition of the Cleveland Gazette referring to Chicago as “the Windy City.”
Dr. Ink, who wrote his graduate dissertation on medieval scatology, wonders if there may not be another, more fundamental, origin to this gaseous nickname. After all, them hog butchers of the world sure do eat a lot of bratwurst.
