The legend I have heard about Chicago is that the prevailing winds are from the North and the rich folks didn’t want to live downwind of the stockyards. Ergo they took the Northern land and left the downwind land to the peasants.
I’ve heard that prevailing winds often account for the “bad side” of towns.
Cleveland is an interesting case, though. Nowadays, the east side is the bad side… but a century ago, the east side of Cleveland was home to the richest neighborhood in the nation, and even today, nearly all of the city’s culture is on the east side. The story goes that the first millionaire to settle in Cleveland preferred the east side so the sun wouldn’t be in his eyes on his commute, and then of course other millionaires settled near him.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I remember in Austin, Texas, that many of the older homes face Southward, due to the prevailing Southern breeze. It was one of the reasons Brackenridge Hospital was placed what was then on the far Northern end of town. Better to keep the bad air of the patents away from the rest of the city.
Link to column: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1358/is-the-south-side-always-the-baddest-part-of-town
I’d heard something similar with regard to British cities where the West end is generally posh and the East end is poor, and that was attributed to the West-to-East prevailing winds.
I think I read somewhere that cities tend to be located on rivers (frequently at junctions where two rivers join together) and, in the Northern Hemisphere, rivers are more likely to flow South than North, so the South side of town tends to be down river.
That bias toward southern flow is certainly true in the eastern USA (thanks to the ice age glaciers), but I’m none too sure it’s universal.
I don’t think the bias towards southern flow in the US is because of glaciers; I think it’s just because we’re on the southern portion of our continent. If you’re near the south coast, then rivers will flow south, because that’s where the ocean is. But rivers can and do flow any which way if they’re not emptying into an ocean. Looking at major rivers in North America, the Mississippi flows south, but the Missouri flows mostly east, the Ohio flows mostly west, the Rio Grande flows mostly east, the Colorado flows mostly west, and the St. Lawrence flows mostly east.
What I always found amusing was when classmates in school would boldly assert that all (and they would say “all”, not just “most”) rivers flow north to south, when we live right next to a river (the Cuyahoga) that flows south to north (because the lake is north).
But in the East, you have the Penobscot, the Kennebec, the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware, all in a row, which does tend to leave an impression. And the Missouri and the Ohio feed into the Mississippi, which ends up going south, too.