This newspaper article was published by the Cleveland Gazette in 1885.
The city of Chicago has been known by many nicknames, but it is most widely recognized as the "Windy City".
The earliest known reference to the "Windy City" was actually to Green Bay in 1856.[1] The first known repeated effort to label Chicago with this nickname is from 1876 and involves Chicago's rivalry with Cincinnati. The popularity of the nickname endures to this day, more than a century after the Cincinnati rivalry ended.
Second City
"Second City" originates as an insult from a series of articles in The New Yorker by A. J. Liebling, later combined into a book titled Chicago: The Second City (1952). In it, Liebling writes about his hatred for Chicago and contrasts it to his hometown New York City. He complains about Chicago's economic decline, rampant organized crime and political corruption, declining population, outdated schools of thought, and general dependency on the cities along the east coast.[2] The Chicago-based improv comedy group The Second City references Liebling's book in their self-mocking name.[3] In 2011, Chicago announced its adoption of the slogan "Second to None", a protest stance indirectly referring to Liebling's publications.[4] The slogan was replaced with another in 2022.[5]
An etymology popularized by tour guides suggests that it refers to rebuilding the city following the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.[6][7]
Chi-town
"Chi-Town" redirects here. For the song, see Chi-Town (song).
"Chi-town," "Chi-Town," or "Chitown" (/ˈʃaɪtaʊn/SHY-town)[8] is a nickname that follows an established pattern of shortening a city's name and appending the suffix "-town," like "H-Town" refers to Houston.[9] Despite many mentions by well-known figures in popular works, such as C. W. McCall's song "Convoy," its popularity as a nickname used by locals is disputed.[10]Wendy McClure wrote in the Chicago Reader in 2017 that it is the "cilantro of nicknames": its distastefulness depends on who is using it.[8] Events and organizations often use the nickname, for example, the hockey team Chi-Town Shooters, the WCW event Chi-Town Rumble, and the New Year's Eve event Chi-Town Rising.[10]
City of Big Shoulders
"City of Big Shoulders" is a nickname coined by Carl Sandburg in his 1914 poem "Chicago," which describes the city as "stormy, husky, [and] brawling." It is the last of several nicknames in the poem; the others hint at the city's major industrial activities, for example, the meat-packing industry and railroad industry.[11] It is also sometimes said as the "City of Broad Shoulders."[12]
Chiberia
"Chiberia"–a portmanteau of "Chicago" and "Siberia"– was coined by Richard Castro, a meteorologist working for the National Weather Service, during a cold wave in 2014 that brought the coldest temperatures to the city in multiple decades.[13] The National Weather Service used the hashtag "#Chiberia" during its reporting on the cold wave.[14] The nickname continues to be used during cold weather events, for example in 2017[15] and in 2019.[16]
Chiraq
"Chi-raq" redirects here. For the film, see Chi-Raq.
"Chiraq"–a portmanteau of "Chicago" and "Iraq"–controversially compares the city (given its crime rates) to war-torn Iraq. Chuck Goudie, a reporter for ABC7 Chicago, asserted that the nickname is based on an Iraq War statistic: from 2003 to 2012, 4,265 people were killed in Chicago, nearly equal to the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in the same period. The origin of the nickname is not definitive, but it saw increasing popularity in usage around the end of the Iraq War.[17]Spike Lee used the nickname as the title of his 2015 film.[18]
City in a Garden
In the 1830s, the government of Chicago adopted the motto "Urbs in Horto," a Latin term that translates to 'City in a Garden.' It is displayed in the city's seal.[19] The Chicago Park District adopted a seal in 1934 that contains the Latin phrase Hortus in Urbe, meaning 'Garden in a City.'[20]
"Mud City" – possibly the oldest nickname for the city, referring to the fact that the terrain of the city used to be a mud flat[22]
"City by the Lake" – used as early as the 1890s[23]
"The City that Works" – slogan from Richard J. Daley's tenure as mayor, describing Chicago as a blue-collar, hard-working city, which ran relatively smoothly[24]
↑ Christiansen, Richard (2004). "Second City Theatre". In Grossman, James R.; Keating, Ann Durkin; Reiff, Janice L. (eds.). The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society. p.744. ISBN0-226-31015-9. Retrieved March 7, 2008.
↑ English, Thomas J. (2005). Paddy whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster. HarperCollins. pp.73–74. ISBN0-06-059002-5. The city had been built, inexplicably, in the middle of a mud flat, which necessitated raising portions of the downtown area on stilts above the sloshy earth, giving Chicago the first of many nicknames: Mud City.
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