Travelers to Chicago may experience the wind blow that come off Lake Michigan , get cast aside around a bit and think , “ So this is why it ’s called the Windy City . ” The moniker , which go steady back to the late 1870s , is deceiving : Chicago is literally a windy city , but that ’s not what the phrase was designate to reference .
Talk to unlike people and you ’ll get dissimilar resolution , but most fingers head to Charles A. Dana , once the editor of theNew York Sun — a newspaper release between 1833 and 1950 — who wrote an newspaper column that say Chicago was blowy because of its full - of - spicy - aviation politicians . TheChicago Tribuneevenpublished a pillar in 2004 , which they declare as the “ determinate article on the term , ” giving Dana deferred payment . During the time of Dana ’s annunciation , Chicago and New York were competing to host the 1893 World ’s Columbian Exposition . TheTribune ’s tower writes that the famous musical phrase comes from when Dana advocated against the “ preposterous claims of that windy city . Its hoi polloi could not hold up a humankind ’s bonny even if they won it . ”
The problem with using Dana as a source is that no one has ever been able-bodied to find this legendary newspaper column . Not even a date of publication .
accord toBarry Popik , a New York City parking - ticket judge by twenty-four hour period and a parole sleuthhound by dark , he has found thetrue lineage of the phrase . He came across an entry in a May 9 , 1876Cincinnati Enquirerarticle with the headline , “ THAT impractical CITY . Some of the Freaks of the Last Chicago Tornado . ” Popik said theheadline used innuendoto scuttlebutt on the speakers who were full of malarky and that there was a windstorm . This is the earliest find address of Chicago being call the Windy City , predate Dana ’s use of the phrasal idiom by a little more than a decade .
Still , both theTribuneand the Chicago Public Library stick out by the fact that Dana popularized the terminus , even if he did n’t strike it .
