Windy City not

Another urban legend debunked, by Cecil Adams, of the Chicago Reader....

The Straight Dope: Did 90,000 people die of typhoid fever and cholera in Chicago in 1885?
...Chicago's nickname “the Windy City.” Common but erroneous belief had it that the sobriquet was coined circa 1890 by New York newspaper editor Charles Dana to lampoon Chicago's logorrheic boosters. Barry [Popik] established that, on the contrary, the term was already being used in 1885 with reference to the city's lake breezes, and he's since found instances dating from as early as 1876. Ignorance dies hard in Chicago, however. Despite Barry's tireless efforts, the discredited Charles Dana story is still being flogged by leading local institutions, including the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Tribune.

Which brings us to cholera. In between helpings of the Dana fable, Chicagoans have repeatedly been told that 90,000 (or some other large number) of their predecessors perished from cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne diseases in 1885 when sewage discharged into Lake Michigan fouled the city's water supply. The most recent recounting of this tale (or anyway the most recent I've seen) appeared in the Chicago Tribune Magazine on March 21, 2004. Five minutes of research will suffice to demonstrate that the story is absurd. Chicago's population in 1885 was roughly 700,000. The loss of 90,000 to cholera would have meant a mortality rate of over 12 percent, or about one person in eight, an epidemiological catastrophe with few parallels in modern times. (For comparison, during the global influenza pandemic of 1918-'19, which some consider the most devastating disease outbreak in history, Philadelphia, the hardest-hit U.S. city, lost nearly 13,000 people, or less than 1 percent of its population.)

For the facts we turn to The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Libby Hill (2000). Hill informs us that sanitary facilities in Chicago were wholly inadequate in 1885: sewers emptied into the Chicago River; after heavy rains, runoff caused sewage to flow far out into the lake, the city's source of fresh water. A torrential storm on August 2 of that year dropped five and a half inches of rain on the city in 19 hours, which under other circumstances might have meant disaster. To the relief of all, however, nothing happened, possibly because winds were out of the northeast, which may have kept effluent from reaching the water intake two miles offshore. No cholera deaths were reported (the disease was unknown in Chicago after the 1860s), and the typhoid rate for the year was only slightly above average. Typhoid deaths during the 1880s never exceeded 1,000, peaking in 1891 at 1,700. (Alarmed by the 1885 close call, the city undertook the massive canal project that permanently reversed the flow of the river and ended the typhoid threat.)

Tags: Chicago