Why haven tornadoes hit downtown Chicago?
Tornadoes have occurred in downtown Chicago, just not very often. On May 6, 1876, a tornado went through what is now the Loop. Several have hit north of downtown around Evanston since the 1950s, and in 1961 and again in 1967 tornadoes hit just south of the University of Chicago campus. History shows that tornadoes can hit big cities. You will find a map showing the paths of all of the tornadoes to hit the Chicago area from 1876 through 1995 in the book U.S. Tornadoes, Part 1, 70-year Statistics by T. Theodore Fujita, published by the University of Chicago in 1987. Fujita, for whom the 1-5 tornado ranking scale is named, was at the University of Chicago from 1953 until he died in 1998. If you are in the Chicago area, you should be able to find a copy of the book in a local library, or I certainly hope in the university’s library. In it, he notes that: “Since 1921, practically no tornadoes occurred or moved across the central portion of Chicago.” He says some have speculated that the cit
