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    "headline": "Chicago’s ‘Windy City’ nickname started as an 1876 jab in its rivalry with Cincinnati, not a",
    "description": "Chicago's 'Windy City' nickname first stuck in 1876 headlines from its rivalry with Cincinnati, years before the World's Fair myth says it began.",
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    "articleSection": "History",
    "keywords": "Charles Dana, Chicago, Cincinnati, Lake Michigan, Windy City",
    "articleBody": "Chicago is not the windiest big city in America, and it never was. Its average annual wind speed is about 10.3 mph, below Boston’s 12.4 mph and far below Dodge City, Kansas, at 13.9 mph. Yet the world calls it “the Windy City,” and the best evidence says the label started as a sports-page jab from a rival town in 1876. The 1876 paper trail The earliest repeated use of “Windy City” for Chicago turns up in the spring and summer of 1876, and every one of the first four known citations involves Cincinnati. In April a Chicago headline crowed about a “WINDY CITY” lacrosse team beating a Cincinnati side. In May a Cincinnati paper ran the headline “THAT WINDY CITY. Some Freaks of the Last Chicago Tornado.” Days later the same Cincinnati paper joked about seats nearly taking “a journey to the Windy City.” By July, Chicago writers were quoting the jibes back at their rivals after the White Stockings lost a game: “There comes a wail to us from the Windy City.” The two cities had plenty to fight about. Cincinnati had been nicknamed “Porkopolis” for its meatpacking trade since at least 1843. From the early 1860s Chicago overtook it in that business and grabbed the nickname too. On the diamond, the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball’s proudest team, and Chicago built the White Stockings expressly to beat them. Hot air, not cold air The insult had a second edge. As early as 1858 a Chicago paper used “windy city” to describe the town’s people, and a Milwaukee paper did the same in 1860. Nineteenth-century writers, many of them in New York, cast Chicago’s boosters and politicians as “full of wind”: braggarts whose claims ran ahead of the facts. Chicagoans eventually took the label back and wore it with pride. Weather did play a part in the city’s image. Chicago sold itself as a summer resort in the 1870s on the strength of its cool lake breezes, and an 1873 article called it “the great city of winds and fires.” By 1892 a Minnesota paper noted a new kind of wind: gusts pulled down to street level by Chicago’s tall buildings, strong enough to make passers-by grab their hats outside the Masonic Temple and the Auditorium. The World’s Fair myth The most repeated origin story is wrong. It credits New York editor Charles Dana with coining “Windy City” in the 1890s, sulking after Chicago beat New York for the right to host the World’s Fair. Chicago won that bid in 1890, but the nickname was already in print in 1876 and in common use by 1886. Dana could not have invented it. For more quotes that history pinned on the wrong person, see how Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute?” first appeared in a 1595 London play. A quick timeline of the nickname 1840s-1850s: Buffalo, New York, and Green Bay (1856) are called a “windy city” before Chicago is. 1858-1860: Chicago and Milwaukee papers use “windy” for Chicago’s people, meaning boastful. 1876: The Chicago-Cincinnati rivalry produces the first cluster of “Windy City” headlines. 1890: Chicago wins the World’s Fair bid, 14 years after the nickname first stuck. 1936: The first recorded Chicago citation of “Hawkins,” later “the Hawk,” as a name for the bitter winter wind. That last item shows how the name changed meaning over 150 years. A label that began as mockery of loud-mouthed boosters now reads as a description of the icy gusts off Lake Michigan. Chicago singer Lou Rawls spelled it out in the spoken intro to his 1967 song “Dead End Street”: “They call it The Windy City because of the Hawk.” Chicago is still making headlines of its own, from the crowd that tried to push the 110-ton Bean in Millennium Park to more stories in our history section. And it does not hold the nickname alone: Wellington, New Zealand, Chicago-sized rival Philadelphia, and at least 14 other cities around the world claim some version of “Windy City” too. Further reading Wikipedia: Windy City (nickname) Image: DimiTalen, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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