Don't Believe the Height! Why Chicago Suburb Names Flat Out Lie about their Elevation

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2015

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From Chicago Heights to Mount Prospect, here’s why Chicago suburb names flat out lie about their elevation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When were the...
0:03.7	What school's...
0:06.0	Who decides what the next...
0:07.8	Where's that story?
0:09.2	Why they give the look?
0:11.2	What is this?
0:13.6	It's Curious City.
0:15.0	Where WBEZ answers your questions about Chicago, the region, and its people.
0:20.2	I'm Curious City producer Logan Jaffe, and I'm just going to admit it,
0:23.8	I grew up on a cul-de-sac in a Florida neighborhood named Oak Forest, which didn't have many oaks.
0:30.8	Or come to think of it a forest.
0:34.1	Questioner John Leahy noticed a similar discrepancy where he grew up in Chicago's northwest suburbs.
0:39.3	It started years ago with a family joke.
0:42.3	My dad has a very dad-like sense of humor.
0:45.3	And for years, when we were heading up north and coming back, we'd say, oh, yes, we just finished our trek up, you know, Mount Prospect and came down Arlington Heights and through Rolling Meadows.
0:58.0	And it would be this joke of these town names that clearly do not line up with their actual geography.
1:06.1	The geography of the Chicago area being flat, flat, really flat.
1:17.2	Well, it just seems so odd.
1:19.0	Why do so many suburbs' names imply elevation?
1:22.2	Hmm.
1:22.8	A curious observation.
1:24.8	But John's right.
	...

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