Chicago, Illinois, goes by many nicknames, among them “hog butcher to the world,” “city of industry,” and, in the poet Carl Sandburg’s famous phrase, “city of big shoulders.” Perhaps its best known nickname, however, is “the windy city,” a sobriquet that owes its origins not to the weather—though, as anyone who knows Chicago can tell you, the winds blow fiercely off Lake Michigan at every time of the year—but instead to the city’s longtime role as a venue for political conventions, where orators fill the air with windy words.
In Chicago, the average annual wind speed is only about 10 miles per hour, but the wind is often a little brisker closer to the edges of Lake Michigan. March and April are traditionally the windiest months, and, at other times of the year, storms may produce gusts of more than 50 miles an hour. In 1952, a November gale produced Chicago’s record wind speed, 60 miles per hour.
A windy day at Wrigley Field, May 2016. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
America’s true windy cities lie elsewhere, scattered across the country. Among the windiest are the great seaports of Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island, where cold winds from the North Atlantic collide with warmer winds spilling off the continental landmass to produce crying gales. One Boston suburb, Blue Hill, clocks an average year-round wind speed of 15.4 miles per hour. Similar figures come from Des Moines, Iowa, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, making them far more appropriate to bear the moniker Windy City than nearby Chicago. And higher numbers still come from the small towns and cities that lie along the Gulf of Alaska, such as Cold Bay and Anchorage, where the howl of the North Pacific wind accompanies the calls of blue whales and the grunts of polar bears.
Other windy cities lie on the Great Plains, where, at all times of the year, cold winds blow straight down from the Arctic, unimpeded by mountains. The people of Great Falls, Montana, stand up straight not because of pride in their hometown—or so local legend has it—but because the constant winds keep them from slouching. Oklahoma City regularly clocks near-cyclonic winds, even in times when other parts of the Plains are relatively calm. Wichita, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, are frequently battened by gale-force windstorms. And, ranchers will tell you, in West Texas the cows fall over in those rare moments when the wind is not blowing down from Alberta.
So windy are the Great Plains, in fact, that entrepreneurs have been working diligently to convert the region into a great energy-producing center. In autumn 2000 more than five hundred of them gathered in Bismarck, North Dakota—another of the continent’s windiest cities—to discuss the prospects for developing a homegrown “green power” wind-energy industry. Said Dean Gosselin, the president of the American Wind Energy Association, “Wind power is the export commodity of the next decade.” North Dakota, Minnesota, and other Great Plains states still rank behind California in harvesting wind energy, but Texas and New Mexico have become wind energy powerhouses, harvesting nature.
An Oklahoma wind turbine array. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
The windiest place in the lower 48 lies far from cities. Mount Washington, New Hampshire, is a forbidding granite spur high among the Appalachians, commanding the Presidential Range. Although not high by world standards, Mount Washington is a haven of howling winds and monstrously cold temperatures, and furious storms and hypothermia take their toll on human visitors in all seasons; although the summertime temperature may approach 90° F at Mount Washington’s base, the wind chill may take it down to freezing at the summit—for which reason hikers are warned to carry cold-weather gear even on the Fourth of July. The average wind speed on this peak is 35.4 miles per hour, and an amazing gust there clocked in at 231 miles per hour, a continental and very nearly a world record.
Wherever you live, you’re likelier to experience higher winds in cities than in the suburbs or countryside, even though the average wind speed in cities is generally lower than that in open country. This is not some trick of nature to punish urbanites, but a simple fact of physics: A city street, lined with tall buildings and paved with smooth asphalt, makes an ideal wind tunnel, one that can amplify the slightest breeze into a hurricane. Not only that, but wind speed increases with height above the ground; where the wind may be blowing at 30 miles per hour on a city street, it can be moving at twice that speed at the top of a skyscraper.
On a particularly windy day, if you’re sensitive to such things, it’s well to stay close to the ground and off the streets. The next time you’re pinging like a windblown pinball off the shops of Michigan Avenue or Broadway, too, remember that relief from the storm is just a subway ride away.
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