Numbers

Second City (Chicago)

How It's Used

"'Of course we'll try to come up with creative ways to get around it, but honestly, I haven't gone down that path yet because I don't want to believe that's what things have come to in Chicago. People are always knocking us as provincial, as Second City, all the time. Banning smoking is just going to play into those stereotypes.'

“Mr. [Charles] Newell [of artistic director of the Court Theatre at the University of Chicago] is referring to a famous nickname coined by A.J. Liebling in Chicago: The Second City, the 1952 book in which he mocked the Windy City's pretensions to cultural distinction, dismissing it as hopelessly inferior to New York on all counts. 'Chicagoans with the price of airplane tickets do their theatregoing here in New York,' Liebling wrote. 'It is not considered smart to admit having seen any play in Chicago, because this implies either (a) that you haven't seen the real play or (b) that you haven't the airplane fare or (c), and possibly worst of all, that you are indifferent to nuances and might, therefore, just as well go back to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where you went to high school.'

“Liebling's sneers may have stung once upon a time, but nowadays Chicago is about as provincial as Paris or London. A city with companies like the Court Theatre and Chicago Shakespeare Theater, musical ensembles like the Chicago Symphony and the Lyric Opera, museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, and buildings like Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall need not take a back seat to anyplace else in the world.”

“In 1952, when an article in The New Yorker derisively referred to Chicago as the Second City, little offense was taken. It became a marketing pitch, with the thinking that second fiddle was far better than no fiddle at all.”

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