It’s amazing how clearly Chicago’s present character, its claims to fame and, yes, its controversies too have been shaped by its past. You have just to look at some of Chicago’s numerous nicknames to discover many of its prominent history-makers and historic happenings.
Perhaps most-used, Chicago’s “Windy City” moniker does not, in fact, describe its breezy lakefront location (Chicago doesn’t even rank in the top 10 windiest of US cities). Rather, it was popularized when a New York newspaper article derided the civic boosters who argued (with a lot of hot air, evidently) for Chicago’s chance to host the 1893 World’s Fair—an event that, in turn, left its own description of Chicago as “The White City.” Another common city slogan, “The Second City,” is never a putdown for Chicagoans, as it most likely stemmed from the city’s impressive rebirth after its devastating fire of 1871. And, yes, it also describes Chicago’s size, which was the nation’s second most populous city behind New York from about 1890 until the late 1980s when Los Angeles topped it, so now we’re third.
If you hear Chicago referred to as the “City of the Big Shoulders,” you’re taken back to the early 20th century and writer Carl Sandburg’s ode to the city’s hard-earned toughness in his 1916 poem “Chicago.” Another of Sandburg’s epithets, “Hog Butcher for the World” recalls the city’s rough but profitable stockyard heyday. In Frank Sinatra’s jaunty “My Kind of Town,” Chicago is revered as a “razzmatazz” town that “won’t let you down.” And indeed, though Chicago is one of the largest cities in the world, its residents regularly describe their hometown as just that: a “town.”
Chicago’s own chosen motto was “Urbs in Horto,” which translates to “City in a Garden,” and there was once a prediction that the city would be the “Paris on the Prairie”—a reference to Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 “Plan of Chicago.” But alas, Chicago history is not all romance and flowers, but rather a beautifully marred story of sundry scandals, corruption, and prejudice, and a lot of good old-fashioned sweat equity. Chicago wears it all with pride, and this quick shot of Chicago history aims to give you a sense of where that pride stems from.