The Stories Behind Chicago’s Many Nicknames

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By Dave Lifton (@daveeatschicago)

The Windy City: The origin of Chicago’s most famous nickname should be evident to anyone who’s ever visited and felt the breeze coming off Lake Michigan, particularly during the winter. But the reality is that it’s the 12^th windiest of major U.S. cities, with an average windspeed of 10.3 mph. Boston is at the top with 12.3 mph and, among other Great Lakes cities, Chicago ranks behind Buffalo (3), Milwaukee (4) and Cleveland (8).

The oldest surviving mention of Chicago as the “Windy City” was an 1858 Tribune article about federal troops from Chicago denied the chance to quell a Mormon rebellion in Utah Territory, where it was given without context. By 1876, the Cincinnati Enquirer derisively started calling its rival the Windy City, often in reference to its citizens and politicians being full of hot air, but also because a tornado hit Chicago that year.

About a decade later, New York newspapers, in particular the Sun and the World, used it as turn of phrase, often when talking about vice or corruption. As the cities battled for the right to host the World’s Columbian Exposition, It became common for those papers to berate Chicago, with the Sun’s editor, Charles Dana, being particularly vicious, even after New York lost.

In recalling the fight for the Tribune in 1933, while Chicago hosted another World’s Fair, the Century of Progress, James O’Donnell Bennett summarized Dana’s editorials in two sentences:

Don’t pay any attention to the nonsensical claims of that windy city. Its people could not build a World’s Fair even if they won it.

Although Dana never said those exact words, his repeated attacks—bolstered by his reporters and the World—resulted in the phrase being attributed to him, and it took hold.

The Second City: In the 1940s, A.J. Liebling wrote a series of articles for the New Yorker, bitingly decrying how, for all its size, Chicago had failed to live up to its potential as a global capital. The class and culture found all over New York, he opined, were replaced by industrial grime and—again—corruption, all while the natives boasted of its greatness. In 1952, his essays were compiled in a book called Chicago: The Second City.

Seven years later, a group of former University of Chicago theater students who, as the Compass Players, were experimenting with improvisational comedy, decided to open a revue. In an act of self-deprecation, they chose Liebling’s title. The success of The Second City in launching the careers of generations of comedians helped popularize the nickname.

Therefore, Chicago’s two most famous nicknames were rooted in stereotypes of both cities: New Yorkers being condescending about other places, and Chicagoans, fully secure in their own perception of their home, cheerfully adapting the moniker. 

City of Big Shoulders, Hog Butcher for the World: Dana and Liebling saw ugliness, but Carl Sandburg saw beauty. His 1914 poem Chicago acknowledged that it was filled with crime, vice, and poverty, but the enduring spirit and humor of the people was its singular greatness. The poem began by listing a handful of potential of nicknames, but only two entered the public consciousness.

“Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders:”

Porkopolis: The reason Sandburg called Chicago “Hog Butcher for the World” was because of the Union Stock Yards, a one-square mile section of the South Side consisting of pens of livestock and processing plants. In the prior decades, Cincinnati had grown into the largest pork-processing city in the U.S. and called itself “Porkopolis.” But during the Civil War, the Ohio River was blockaded, and meatpackers in Chicago bonded together to create the stockyards in 1865. Chicago soon took Cincinnati’s title as “Porkopolis,” which could be a reason why the Enquirer started calling Chicago “The Windy City.”

City in a Garden: “Urbs in Horto,” Latin for “City in a Garden,” was adapted as Chicago’s official motto upon its incorporation in 1837 and is featured on the seal. It’s often been cited as the reason Chicago places such emphasis on having green spaces throughout the city (the Chicago Park District’s motto is “Hortus in Urbe”—“Garden in a City”). In reality, however, Chicago in the early 19^th century wasn’t a garden, but a low-lying, muddy swamp, which resulted in a little-used nickname, “Mud City.”

Chi-Town: Its true origin is unknown, but it’s believed to have started in the 1890s, when other cities were getting nicknames by adding “-town” to the first letter or syllable. But the hardening of the i (“Shy-town”) and doesn’t say anything about Chicago means that, as well-known as it is, locals never use it.