Profiles of Hyde Park

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Community profiles: Hyde Park & neighbors in depth in media-and "myths control"

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Visit also Affordability Information page for basic neighborhood demographics and statistics. For detailed, Tracking Community Trends I and II and Urban Renewal home and Timelines to present. See what glories we have in Events/Fests, Cultural and Arts Calendar, Cultural Resources, Jazz Fest, Civic and social matters Calendar, Faith and Religious Communities, Community Resources, Community Nonprofits.

When Roger Fross arrived in Hyde Park to attend law school at the University of Chicago more than 40 years ago, the neighborhood was getting a fresh start.

The worst slums had been cleared away, and new residential and commercial development was breathing life back into Hyde Park.

"When I got out of law school, it seemed like the most interesting and enjoyable place to live in the city," Fross said of Hyde Park. "Why move?"

So Fross made the South Side neighborhood his home. He married there, and with wife Madelon, they bought a house and raised a son in Hyde Park. They still enjoy what the neighborhood has to offer, whether it's riding bikes on the lakefront and running behind the Museum of Science and Industry in historic Jackson Park, or taking advantage of leisure activities ranging from symphonies and lectures to University of Chicago Maroons' basketball.

Hyde Park* at a Glance
Larger area below

[Washington Post: the 2000 census found that 43.5 percent of the 29,000 residents in Hyde Park proper called themselves white, 37.7 percent black, 11.3 percent Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. Another 3.4 percent answered "other." In economic terms, there are plenty of six-figure earners, yet one in six residents lives in poverty. The median household income is about $45,000, roughly the national average.]

*Population 2000:
29,920

Demographics:
White - 13,020
Black - 11,290
Hispanic - 1,230
Asian - 3,366
Other - 1,014

Median Income:
$35,991

Median Home Price
(January-March 2003):
$181,500*

Sources: U.S. Census, Record information services

*Red Streak 7/18/03 citing Chic. Assn. of REALTORS gives $394,000 based on Chicago area? median $170,000.

Greater Area incl Kenwood and some areas to the west:

Service Area Population including in this case Kenwood: 50,084

Ethnic Grouping (1990 Census)
African American 53.3%
White 37.8%
Hispanic 2.4%
Asian American 6.1%
Native American 0.2%
Other 0.3%

Age distribution (1990 Census)
0-17 years 19.6%
18-34 years 33.8%
35-64 years 33.1%
65+ 13.5%

Average School Years Completed: 12.8

Schools Served: Elementary: 17
High School: 4

Retail mix:

  • 74% independently owned
  • 6.3% regional
  • 19% national
  • 31% eating or drinking
  • 26% personal services
  • 16% specialty goods and stores

    Biggest voids: home furnishings, apparel

In more recent years, Fross has experienced satisfaction in seeing the same standard of living spread into surrounding areas, adding to the security and stability of Hyde Park.

"You can't be an island," Fross said. "Let's not kid ourselves. This isn't nirvana. We still have neighborhoods around us with big problems."

As Hyde Park continued to improve in the last 40 years, it began to resemble an island of stability and affluence on the South Side, and that was reflected in local housing prices.

The real estate market has grown steadily since the urban renewal push of the late 1950s and early 1960s led to demolition of slum housing and vigorous code enforcement to preserve the remaining stock, according to Winston Kennedy, a real estate broker with and former owner of Century 21 Kennedy, Ryan, Monigal in Hyde Park. Today, Hyde Park's real estate market offers "a wide range of product, from studio apartments to mansions and everything in between."

The most popular sellers are condos for first-time home buyers. One- and two-bedroom starter units sell for about $150,000, Kennedy said, while houses and town homes can start in the $300,000 to $400,000 range [and] rise to more than $2 million.

About a third of home buyers are affiliated with the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Hospitals, Kennedy said. Another third are moving within the neighborhood, and the rest are people drawn to Hyde Park.

The fastest growing segment of the population in recent years is what the South East Chicago Commission calls "urban up-and-comers," professionals in the 25- to 34-year-old age bracket, SECC Executive Director Bob Mason said. "Hyde Park has really taken off in the past several years," Mason said. "I expected it to peak a few years ago, but it continues to rise."

There's a lot to draw that population, Mason said. Hyde Park is home to several popular restaurants and more than half a dozen museums of art, culture, science and history. They include the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute at 1155 E. 58th St. and the DuSable Museum of African American History at 740 E. 56th Pl. The university also provides venues for theater, music, dance, films and lectures that are open to the public.

With two shopping centers and several neighborhood business districts, Hyde Park is also a popular shopping hub, according to Lauren Alspaugh, [former] executive director of the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce.

"Many of the customers are from outside Hyde Park," Alspaugh said of the local trade group. "There's relatively no commercial from 47th Street to south downtown."

The neighborhood's main business district is along 53rd Street, which received a $2 million streetscape improvement last year and has been designated a tax increment finance district to raise money for a new parking garage. Several new business[es] have come into the area since creation of the TIF, including a Borders Books & Music expected to open in July at 53rd Street and Lake Park Avenue. Improving conditions in surrounding neighborhoods -- such as North Kenwood-Oakland and Woodlawn -- are also a boon to Hyde Park.

"The university has been an active agent in improving the community and working with the community," said Homer Ashby, [then] president of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference.

Weekly farmers' market in Harper Court

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The third or fourth most diverse neighborhood in Chicago

From Redeye, July 28, 2oo8, by Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz. Followed by another take of the DePaul study in Hyde Park Herald. Both lay the ground of facts but do not abstract how these diversities shape community dynamics and help or hinder in pursuing community goals.

 

...in a city that historically has been racially segregated...Uptown and other traditionally diverse neighborhoods, including Rogers Park, Hyde Park and Edgewater, are remarkable because they've managed to thrive as diverse communities for decades, becoming neither slums nor totally gentrified as other have....

Community groups that push for affordable housing and good health care, schools and jobs are paramount to maintaining neighborhood diversity, Maly [Michael Maly, Sociology Chair, Roosevelt University] said. The Organization of the North East, founded 34 years ago to "build and sustain a successful multi-ethnic, mixed-economic community"... is an important example,' he said. "....They've gotten people to work on projects together."

Some diversity stems not from tradition, but demographic shifts. Such diversity can be temporary. [Maly adds," I think it's important for our country to have those kinds o spaces where people can rub elbows."

Abstracted from the the measures that went into the ranking: Hyde Park (No. 3)

Measurements of the top 20 "most diverse" communities

41% White, 39% Black, 12% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 6% other (Hispanic question was answered separately.)

46% low income, 38% middle income, 16% high income (of top 20 diverse communities:
average for low income- extremes 61% New City, 26% Ashburn,
rather low for middle income- extremes 59% Ashburn, 32% Near West Side
highest (tied with Near West Side) for high income- majority 5%-7%

13% children (under 18), 67% adult (ages 18-54), 20% senior (over 55)
by far the lowest in children, the highest in adults under 55, third highest in seniors (with Uptown)

Hyde Park ranks high in racial, other diversity says Hyde Park Herald August 6 2008. By Sam Cholke

Hyde Park ranks as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago according to a study by DePaul University's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development.

The neighborhood is "recognized as a national model of racial diversity and urban stability," according to the South East Chicago Commission's Web site.

"Much of its diversity stems from the constituencies affiliated with the University of Chicago," Lauren Fischer and Joseph Schwieterman point out in the study. The study ranks Hyde Park the fourth most diverse behind Uptown, New City and Albany Park. Fischer and Schwieterman point out that five of the top eight most diverse neighborhoods are clustered on the North Side of Chicago, "giving this area the distinction of being the most diverse part of the city."

Hyde Park ranks as the most income-diverse neighborhood in the city, followed closely by New Town. "This income is extraordinary considering the relative paucity of income diversity in nearby neighborhoods," Fischer and Schwieterman said in the study. Nearby neighborhoods Washington Park and Grand Boulevard rank in the bottom five for income diversity. The study also points to Woodlawn as lacking in high-income households: 4 percent compared to Hyde Park's 15.6 percent.

Hyde Park's claim to most income diverse will be challenged in coming years as high income households move into Bridgeport and a mix of middle- and high-income households move to West Town.

The study shows Hyde Park falling to the middle of the pack for age diversity ranking 28th [citywide] behind Rogers Park [largely because low in children and high in seniors].

The clearest difference between Hyde Park and its fellow diverse neighborhoods is there are few foreign-born residents. Nineteen percent of Hyde Parkers are foreign born, compared to close to 40 percent in other top-ranked neighborhoods and 58 percent in Albany Park. [Noted also when looking at the 20 most diverse is the very low number of Hispanic, though in fact growing. Number of Asians is low but closer to the median of that pack, percentages varying greatly among the 20.]

The authors admit that due to a lack of data, several factors that more accurately depict the diversity of a neighborhood may have been overlooked. The authors cite a desire to include language religion and country of origin in future studies. [housing types, prices and opportunities are another -but much is available-- see Affordable Information].

Fischer and Schwieterman make a point of noting the relative dearth of diverse neighborhoods in the city as a whole. "Despite rising diversity in the city as a whole, Chicago's reputation as a place lacking integration between white residents and Black residents seems destined to persist," the authors said in the study. "By most commonly accepted measures, Chicago will likely remain the most segregated major city in the country."

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From the September 2008 Conference Reporter

Income Diversity and Community Development in Hyde Park:
A Conversation with D. Garth Taylor (Ph.D. ’77)

Joanne E. Howard

Hyde Park has gone through various changes since the 1960s when urban renewal spread like wildfire across cities around the country. In order to get a perspective on how Hyde Park has changed over the years, the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference interviewed D. Garth Taylor (Ph.D. ’77), President of the Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC) on his views about Hyde Park, neighborhood institutions as anchors, income diversity, and neighborhood vitality. Dr. Taylor is a national expert on community economic development and his most recent study “Income Diversity and the Context of Community Development” was funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Q: You came to Hyde Park in 1972 to attend graduate school. Why did you pick The University of Chicago?

I chose the University of Chicago to learn how to be a public opinion pollster. I learned a great deal from working at NORC (National Opinion Research Center) and studying Sociology at the U of C.

Q: Can you relate how Hyde Park has changed over the years?

In the 1960s, Hyde Park implemented an urban renewal plan that resulted in the move-out of low-income renters. This resulted in a major change to the housing stock. Literally, hundreds of rental apartments were demolished to try to stabilize the neighborhood. There was some replacement housing built – most of what you see on 55th street between Lake Park and Woodlawn dates from this era.

When I arrived in Hyde Park there were definite boundaries to the neighborhood. These boundaries have expanded a lot since the 1970s.

Q: You have written extensively on income diversity in Chicago. How does Hyde Park compare with other parts of the city?

During the 1980s, 1990s and up until a couple of years ago the housing market of Chicago seemed to be rising with no top end in sight. But interestingly, the number of low income families in Chicago is about the same as in 1970 and the number of high income families is also about the same. What is mostly happening is that the city is becoming a place where there are fewer and fewer middle income families (say, between $40,000 and $80,000 in today’s dollars) and neighborhoods are rearranging themselves as places where there are: more low income families; more high income families; or both.

Hyde Park is a place where the middle income category is on a rapid decline. There is a big growth in the number of high income families, and recently some small growth in low income families as well – making it a “bimodal” type of community. It’s tough to build a neighborhood around two widely divergent income levels – the tastes for services, retail stores, restaurants, types of food in the groceries vary quite a bit. Some people like the diversity, that becomes an important asset for the community.

Neighborhoods need to be really careful about shifting too much in the high income direction. If the guy who fixes bicycles can’t afford to live in Hyde Park that means that there’s not going to be a bicycle store for several miles and something will be lost to the community.

Q: What do you have to say about the “anchors” in Hyde Park?

The communities that most successfully weathered the challenges of living in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s are the ones that had major anchor institutions -- major employers that were committed to staying – such as hospitals, and universities. University of Chicago played a huge role in defining and managing the urban renewal era in Hyde Park, and in encouraging new home buyers to move in and improve their property. Now, ironically the role of the anchor institution in gentrifying places is often to assist with more balanced growth – finding ways to support the credit and the housing opportunities for an economically diverse population.

Q: From your broad perspective, what are Hyde Park’s plusses?

Compared to the rest of the city, Hyde Park has a lot of amenities that will always make it a desirable place to be. I would say the most important are:

1. Public education -- Hyde Park has done well in maintaining excellence with its schools
2. Reasonably good linkages to public transportation
3. The lakefront and the parks
4. Good neighbors – a high concentration of interesting people per square mile
5. Diversity – The genome project hasn’t yet located the gene for being stimulated by diversity, but I’ll bet there is one. At some point this will be viewed unambiguously as an asset in Hyde Park.

 

A Tale of Three Neighborhoods: Hyde Park spurs growth in Kenwood-Oakland, Woodlawn

New Homes Magazine June 2005. By Jeffrey Steele.

Conjure and image of the ideal urban neighborhood, and you might visualize Hyde Park on a recent warm Sunday morning. On sun-dappled 53rd Street west of Lake Park Avenue, throngs have converged on the tree-lined sidewalks, strolling, window shopping, sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe.

Near the University of Chicago, a soccer game consumes the energies of players from across the globe, and on Hyde Park Boulevard, dog walkers amble past the stately, ivy-covered apartment buildings that line the street.

Every neighborhood likes to think it's unique, but in Chicago none fits the bill like Hyde Park, bounded roughly by Hyde Park Boulevard, Cottage Grove, 60th and the lake, and neighboring South Kenwood, which stretches north to 47h and is in many ways an extension of Hyde Park.

The distinction can be sensed immediately on 53rd Street the neighborhood's main commercial strip. for one thing, in a city that's among the most segregated in the U.S., the crowd here is incredibly diverse -- African American, white, Asian and Latino. Well-off and poor. Jewish, Muslim, Christian. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Hyde Park is about 46 percent white, 38 percent African American, 11 percent Asian and 4 percent Latino, making it one of the truly integrated communities in the city.

Physically, the neighborhood is nestled in a stunning pocket of parks -- Jackson Park and a beautiful stretch of lakefront on the east, Washington Park on the west and the grassy Midway Plaisance on the south, connecting the two. The architecture is nearly as varied as the population. There are the vintage apartment buildings, many of them former hotels, that house rambling, gracious apartments and condos, and stately single-families with wide lawns. Some gems, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's breathtaking Robie House, are known the world over.

But perhaps the most distinctive neighborhood trait is also the most intangible. Words like culture, recalcitrance and optimism hint at this quality, but they don't adequately explain it. The neighborhood character has been evolving ever since the two formative events that shaped a young Hyde Park: the birth of the University of Chicago in the early 1890s and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

The The Columbian Exposition spurred massive development, including the creation of an elevated train line extending from the Loop to Jackson Park and the community was elevated to a world stage as Daniel H. Burnham oversaw creation of the "White City." The University of Chicago brought an intellectual and cultural powerhouse to the HP Neighborhood and though its role in Hyde Park has not been without controversy, the school proved to be an important anchor and stabilizing force when white flight scarred so much of the South Side.

This is a neighborhood that has had its share of problems, but it's also and incredibly activist community that generally believes, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, that it can overcome them. Take an outdoor seat at t he Starbucks on 53rd, and your neighbors might be arguing over the controversial rehab of Promontory Point (the historic beach at 55th ant South Shore Drive neighbors are adamant about controlling), the financial trouble of the Hyde Park Cooperative Society (which operates two co-op markets in the neighborhood) or the new memoir by Hyde Park resident Leon Despres (for 20 years the staunchest foe -- and often the lone independent voice -- battling the old Machine of former Mayor Richard J. Daley)...

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Thanks to the South East Chicago Commission for the following "clippings."

In 2005 the Chicago Tribune asked Chicagoans to name "The Seven Wonders of Chicago." Three (or 2 and 1/2) of the winners were right here in Hyde Park:

Hyde Park's Medici on 57th was names a "top contender" in the Tribune's 2005competition for Best Burgers in Chicago.

Where described Hyde Park among "Beyond the Mag Mile: 6 Hot Neighborhoods Worth Exploring," in its October 2005 issue. Hyde Park is a "culture corner," with recommended amenities including the Museum of Science and Industry- including the U-505, Jackson Park's Osaka Garden, Smart Museum of Art, Robie House, Seminary Co-op Bookstore/57th St. Books, Calypso Cafe/Dixie Kitchen, and Medici on 57th.

The Tribune in fall 2005 recommended among the most scenic drives in the Chicago Region- Jackson Park.

Chicago Magazine, in its 2005 Chicago bests, named Harold's Chicken Shack a place to go for one's last meal on earth.

New Homes magazine published a neighborhood profile on Hyde Park, saying that no neighborhood in Chicago fits the description "unique" like Hyde Park! One of the hallmarks of this is its diversity, according to the article.

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Win Kennedy, with Jeanne Spurlock, tells of Urban Renewal, evolution of real estate in the neighborhood, and what attracts home buyers to Hyde Park

Winston Kennedy on the real estate perspective, from Urban Renewal (which he says improved it) days to the early 21st century. Also Deco Arts Building.

Hyde Park Herald, March 28, 2007. By Brian Wellner

Winston Kennedy has been selling real estate in Hyde Park for a long time, 40 years to be exact. While planning an anniversary celebration, Kennedy sat down with the Hyde Park Herald last week and reflected on how the neighborhood’s real estate market has changed since the 1960s.

He believes it changed for the better, in large past due to Urban Renewal. “It worked very well. It provided a lot of housing and got rid of a lot of eyesores,” Kennedy said. “It put Hyde Park on the map.”

Mistakes were made, too, he admitted. “There was a clearing of Hyde Park, maybe to much.” The federally-funded Urban Renewal project of the 1950s and 60s converted much of the neighborhood’s retail environment to new housing, especially town homes and condominium developments that Kennedy said catered especially to homeowners affiliated with the University of Chicago who wanted to live near work.

Before Urban Renewal, Kennedy said there was very little code enforcement in the area and the housing stock deteriorated. Kennedy was manager of the university’s commercial real estate department from 1956 to 1967, when Urban Renewal was at its peak. During that time the university created the South East Chicago Commission [sic-SECC was in its heyday then, but was created in 1952] to enforce codes and track crime in Hyde Park.

Kennedy credited the creation of the SECC—as well as the university’s decision in 1952 to stay in the neighborhood and not to move to the suburbs—with improving the area’s real estate market.

The change was gradual “The financial community had written off the South Side and Hyde Park,” Kennedy said. He said banks often would not give mortgages to Hyde Park homeowners. “It was partly a racial thing,” he said.

Urban Renewal, he said, allowed the Federal Housing Authority to become involved in multi-family housing developments in the neighborhood, such as Regent’s Park.

One of the streets hit hardest by Urban Renewal’s block-by-block redevelopment was 55thstreet, once a major commercial strip in the area. In 1978, Kennedy bought on of the last of the old commercial buildings on 555th Street, the Deco Arts Building.

Hyde Park Chevrolet used to own the whole building, which was built in 1928, and the showroom faced Lake Park Avenue. Drawings of cars are still etched into the outer walls above the windows.

Kennedy, who said he was hooked on racquetball at the time, moved his real estate business, Kennedy, Ryan and Monigal and Associates, from 57th Street to the old showroom. He wanted to build a racquetball court on the roof, but plans never materialized. By 1980 he opened a Century 21 franchise in the showroom, where he still has an office to this day.

Kennedy started his real estate business in 1967 out of a studio apartment in the Windermere building. A year later he bought Parker Holsman Co., one of Hyde Park’s oldest businesses, which handles the management of real estate properties. Kennedy, Ryan and Monigal worked out of one part of the office. Parker Holsman continued to work out of another part. Having outgrown the Parker Holsman office on 57th Street, Kennedy relocated to the Deco arts building.

Kennedy is the last of the partners who made up Kennedy, (Edward) Ryan and (Vernon) Monigal still selling real estate. Ryan and Monigal have retired. Kennedy said his is one of the last remaining real estate businesses to have survived the 1960s. “They’re gone. We’re left,” he said.

Jeanne Spurlock joined the firm in 1981 and bought the company in 1997. She said home buyers are attracted to Hyde Park’s diversity and schools. And she said the neighborhood is perceived as less congested than Lincoln Park, which is typically the draw for people moving to the city for the first time. “Often times we win out because of the congestion of Lincoln Park,” Spurlock said. “We’re still a good value in comparison.”

According to Spurlock, the typical home buyer moving to Hyde Park has a family, one or two cars, and is affiliated with the University of Chicago.

Kennedy said he doesn’t plan on retiring anytime soon. “I’ve stayed on because I don’t know what else to do,” he said.

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A look at the unusual and historic along Kimbark's 54o0 block, Honorary Father Thomas J. Fitzgerald.

A feature in the April 12, 2007 Chicago Weekly News by Sam Feldman takes a walk along a "typical" block that harbors some treasures:

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Melissa Harris-Lacewell, former head of the U of C program on Race, Culture and Politics, on "Obama's own small-town values"

Chicago Tribune, September 8, 2008

Speakers at the Republican National Convention talked a lot about small-town values. They told America that a man from Chicago could not relate to the homegrown ethics of ordinary people. I know better. Barack Obama was my state senator: Right in the middle of that Senate district is my beloved small town. Hyde Park. There is no small town that knows more about sacrifice, honesty, hard work, community and patriotism.

We know about terrorism in Hyde Park. I was embraced by dozens of neighbors on Sept. 11, 2001. We stood at Lake Michigan and turned our eyes toward our precious Chicago skyline. We kept vigil over our city, wondering if we would be targeted next.

We know how to be neighborly. Hyde Park is where a homeless man caught me when I stumbled while walking home in the snow eight months pregnant. He carried my bags 10 blocks. He wasn't rich, but he was righteous. Hyde Park is where we make room for each other to set up tents and barbecue in the parks on warm summer days. We parade down 53rd Street on Independence Day and together we listen to blues and jazz. We celebrate America with the flair and flavor of the best patriots.

We know about the energy crisis. In Hyde Park we walk to work, take Metra or catch the No. 6 bus downtown. We are city people, but we share our trees with the monk parakeets and feed the pigeons in the park.

We know about the power of faith. In Hyde Park we brave the bitter winds to gather in Rockefeller Chapel on Thanksgiving morning. We are welcomed by African drums; we are blessed by rabbis, priests and preachers; then we are sent home to our holiday feasts by the smell of burning sage offered by Indian tribal leaders.

We know about caring for our young people. In Hyde Park I watched a young woman turn down corporate job offers so that she could take over as principal of a filing public high school. With the help of parents, the commitment of students, and her own powerful determination, she is making Kenwood Academy one of the best schools in the city.

We know about diversity. Blacks and whites share a chess game in the park. Jews and Muslims work together to feed the hungry. Immigrants and citizens share the lakefront for a jog.

We know how to look beyond the outside of a person. I learned that the old man who sits at the Starbucks worked for the late Mayor Harold Washington; the young students buying compact discs escaped genocide in her home country; the homeless man seeking handouts is a skilled carpenter; and the skinny guy who represented us in the General Assembly had the chops to want to be president.

Hyde Park is not perfect. We struggle over affordable housing and business development. We worry about the relationship between the University of Chicago and the community. We worry that young people have a place to play and seniors have a place to rest. We worry about the snow in winter and the heat in summer. we are not perfect, but we struggle together.

This is what Barack Obama learned when he served Hyde Park. He learned that love of country means tolerating difference. He learned that everyone has something to contribute to the debate. He learned that democracy is messy because we have to find a way to work together across our differences. Hyde Park is a small town. We know each other. We smile at each other's children. We greet each other's pets. We pray for each other.

The people of rural America do not have a monopoly on these principles. And they are not the only Americans who count. Obama spent nearly a decade representing one of the best "small towns" in America.

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To the students: What you'll find here

From Hyde Park Herald Orientation section, September 24, 2008

Hyde Park is a village as much as it is a neighborhood. Those of you who will- and some of you will- stay, marry, settle down, raise children and become that wonderful Chicagoan hothouse flower, a Hyde Parker, will come to understand and appreciate the passion we have for our neighborhood. Many of you, though, will not spend quite that much time here, so we want to make sure you enjoy some of the pleasures that are unique to this place you now call home.

If this were a guided tour, we would awaken you before down, drag you to Lake Park Avenue and give you a boost up to an apple tree just south of the Hyde Park Historical Society's headquarters at 5529 S. Lake Park Ave. There you'll find an apple tree bearing fruit with a tartness that captures the spirit of autumn. Before you bite, though, we'll walk further north, stroll down 55th Street to Lake Michigan and settle in at Promontory Point..

Sunrise at the Point is something no U. of C. student ought to miss. The graceful limestone revetment circling the Point warms in tone with the rising of the sun, and the hues and sparkle off Lake Michigan perfect the scene. Imagine a chilly trip in the early hours, apple in hand, and the pleasure of the warmth brought by the awakening sun, the flavor of an autumn fruit and the spectacle of a glorious morning

This is Hyde Park. We treasure our homegrown, idiosyncratic fruit - both the natural and constructed qualities of the neighborhood.... We invite you to enjoy them as well. Here are just a few highlights.

..You might be taking par t in the inaugural Midnight Madness Student Reception, the product of Powell's Bookstore co-owner Brad Jonas' fertile imagination.... your introduction to businesses you'll certainly frequent during your stay here [including] our vibrant row of independent bookstores...

Hyde Park is also home to a thriving cultural scene, and students are invited to become a part of that aspect of the neighborhood. Check out Artisans 21 Gallery, 5225 S. Harper Ave., [a collective]. The Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., is another place that will get your creative juices flowing. Perhaps the most innovative cultural institution in the neighborhood, however, is Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Everything from music to lectures to the newly reopened Blackstone Bicycle Works is housed in this cultural cauldron.

The amazing park system that rings Hyde Park is another resource students should get to know. From Jackson Park, which lines the southeast end of Hyde Park along the lake, to Washington Park along the west end of the neighborhood, there is ample green space to explore and enjoy. Jackson Park is a favorite spot for outdoor sports, including golf. Visitors to Jackson Park should be sue to check out Wooded Island, a haven from the hustle and bustle of academia [and stop on a great bird flyway]. Tucked inside Wooded Island is the Osaka Garden, a Japanese strolling garden that is one of the few remaining pieces of evidence reminding us that Hyde Park was home to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the World's Fair that shaped Hyde Park's destiny for decades. The Museum of Science and Industry is another artifact from the fair, originally constructed as the Palace of Fine Arts. Other reminders of the historic event include Daniel Chester French's The Republic, a reproduction of a much larger statue built for the fair and house in Jackson Park, and the depressed fields of the Midway Plaisance, which runs along the south end of the neighborhood and links Jackson Park to Washington Park. Originally [the entertainment and "anthropological" section of the fair, then] intended to be a canal, the grounds of the Plaisance are home to many neighborhood activities (including [soccer and] ice skating in the Midway's rink) and a perennial favorite among students.

Washington Park is another popular venue for sports events and is a popular site for South Siders' family reunions and barbecues [or strolling the lagoons]. Always home to a flurry of activity, Washington Park is an experience not to be missed. Perhaps its quirkiest trait is the regular Sunday meeting, weather permitting, of elders in the African American communities of the South Side. If you want to learn about the history of Hyde Park and our neighboring communities, this is a unique source. The elders meet just north of 55th Street on the western edge of Washington Park.

Our smaller parks are just as important a venue as these grand open spaces. Nichols Park, between Kimbark and Kenwood avenues and 53rd and 55th street, has a native grasses and wildflowers display that is a must-see. If you have children or just enjoy people watching, Bixler Park, just north of 57th Street and west of Kenwood Avenue, is a perfect place to visit....

[Music:} Start by tuning in to WHPK, 88.5 FM, run right out of the university's Reynold's Club, 5706 S. University Ave. Dr. Wax, 5226 S. Harper Ave., is a great source both of new and used cds and vinyl and the contemporary music scene. Chat with the knowledgeable staff about what's going on locally. Right next door, check on the university's Department of Visual Art's new space at 5228 S. Harper Ave. While you're on 53rd Street, there's plenty of other interesting, locally owned retail worth checking out, and another music store, Hyde Park Records at 1377 E. 53rdd Street.

There's also great live music to check out in Hyde Park. The Checkerboard Lounge, 52[01] S. Harper Ave., is a must-visit spot. Enjoy CheckerJazz on Sunday nights and be sure to go back for great live blues throughout the rest of the week. [Weekends are also hot for jazz and other music on weekends at Chant and Mellow Yellow in the block to the east of 53rd-- the same block that hosts the famous Valois Cafeteria on 53rd.] Blues and jazz are also on tap at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap at the corner of 55th Street and Woodlawn Avenue. Every Sunday night, trumpeter and band leaders Curtis Black and his friends regale listeners with great jazz jams, while blues take place earlier in the day. The jazz sessions are as worthwhile for the drop-in musicians they draw as they are to hear the regular quartet.

Hyde Park is second to no other neighborhood in Chicago in architectural quality. From Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House to Rockefeller Chapel tot he Museum of Science and Industry, there are plenty of grand architectural flourishes to enjoy, but perhaps most significant are the historic residences lining the streets of the neighborhood. Hyde Park's housing stock includes some of the oldest homes in Chicago as well as some of the most distinctly modern. Venture a bit north of the neighborhood, and you'll see some of the most extravagant blocks of historic homes in the city in South Kenwood.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. [There's the University year round and] no guide, no calendar listing, no promotional brochure can replace the adventure of exploring the community yourself. Introduce yourself, and get to know some of your neighbors. Hyde Park is home to numerous storytellers, and talking to someone with some history to recount is always time well spent.

Two final suggestions. First, attend a community meeting. To know Hyde Park's meetings is to know Hyde Park. We staunchly defend our neighborhood, and there's nothing like seeing civic participation in action. They're inspirational.

Second, get to know the Hyde Park Herald....

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Washington Post article, Uncommon Ground
Yes, Obama Lives There. But Chicago's Hyde Park Is a Place All Its Own

In response to the Ferguson article, below.

Mr. Obama's Neighborhood
The Chicago-area community that counts the presidential candidate as its most famous resident is anything but mainstream.


By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 16, 2008; Page C01

CHICAGO

No American president has been elected from a place quite like Hyde Park, the home of Sen. Barack Obama. Among the community's notable features are a university famous for intellectualism, a pair of 1960s Weather Underground radicals famous for being unrepentant and a bloc of voters famous for choosing Sen. John Kerry over President Bush by 19 to 1.

Judging by the swift demonization, Obama might as well live at the corner of Liberal and Kumbaya. Republican strategist Karl Rove placed Hyde Park alongside Cambridge, Mass., and San Francisco in a triad of leftist tomfoolery. The Weekly Standard, recalling Obama's description of former Weatherman Bill Ayers as merely "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," asked who lives in a neighborhood like that.

Hyde Park in real life is not so easily typecast. The political ethic is proudly progressive on matters of race and social justice, yet the community is anchored by the University of Chicago, an incubator for some of the nation's most influential conservatives, from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to Nobel Prize-winning free marketeer Milton Friedman.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan lives within four blocks of Obama's $1.6 million home, as do former Weather Underground members Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Yet so does Richard Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor who is quick to say he is friends with Scalia and Ayers -- and once tried to hire Dohrn.

"I don't consider myself a Chicagoan," Epstein explains. "I consider myself a Hyde Parker."

To be a Hyde Parker, dozens of residents say, is to choose to live in a community that considers variations of race, creed, wealth and politics to be a neighborhood selling point, like bicycle paths or broadband in a far suburb. Finishing breakfast at the Valois Cafeteria, retired utility worker Dwight Lewis points to a woman selling StreetWise, a newspaper written by homeless people.

"You've got people who have nothing to people who have everything," he says. "You've got people living on the street to people who have homes worth several million dollars."

For Hyde Park's most famous resident, who wants to be seen as distinctive but unthreatening, his chosen turf represents the political eclecticism and sense of post-racial possibility at the heart of his personality and campaign. Yet as Obama is learning, the narrative cuts both ways. To no one's surprise, Sen. John McCain and his supporters have pushed the idea, echoed by early surveys, that Obama is a risky choice, that he is somehow just too exotic, too erudite -- and did we mention naive? He bodysurfs in Hawaii, he orders green tea ice cream in Oregon, he writes his own books in deft prose, his name is Barack Obama.

"This is not a man who sees America as you and I do, as the greatest force for good in the world," says Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's tart-tongued running mate, who grounds her own narrative in the recently paved roads of an Alaskan town 1/500th the size of Chicago.

Palin would no doubt beg to differ, but Obama friend and lifelong resident Valerie Jarrett puts it this way: "Hyde Park is the real world as it should be. If we could take Hyde Park and we could help make more Hyde Parks around our country, I think we would be a much stronger country."

Blueprint of Diversity

Mainstream, as mainstream is commonly defined, is not Hyde Park. The average white metropolitan resident lives in a neighborhood 80 percent white and only 7 percent black, says Northwestern University professor Mary Pattillo, who calls Hyde Park "anomalous for whites." Census tracts in the exurbs and the countryside tend to be even whiter.

By contrast, the 2000 census found that 43.5 percent of the 29,000 residents in Hyde Park proper called themselves white, 37.7 percent black, 11.3 percent Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. Another 3.4 percent answered "other." In economic terms, there are plenty of six-figure earners, yet one in six residents lives in poverty. The median household income is about $45,000, roughly the national average.

"Given all this," Pattillo says, "you can better understand the foreignness of a place like Hyde Park."

Hyde Park sprang from open space along Lake Michigan in the mid-1800s as new train service attracted seaside vacationers and well-to-do residents of boomtime Chicago. In 1892, John D. Rockefeller bankrolled an upstart university and, one year later, the area hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, which helped put the Windy City on the map.

By the early 1900s, Hyde Park had a growing Jewish population that expanded with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. The area also became a rare island where middle-class black people could aspire to live.

By the 1940s, fear among some whites of the growing numbers of black families produced a bitter fight over race. The University of Chicago, saying it was trying to maintain safe surroundings, backed restrictive covenants as well as white neighborhood groups intent on barring blacks.

When the Supreme Court banned racial covenants in 1948, university leaders feared white flight and an influx of poor blacks from surrounding neighborhoods. They hammered home a 1950s urban renewal plan that displaced thousands. The idea, wrote historian Arnold R. Hirsch, was to generate real estate prices high enough to "regulate both the number and 'quality' of blacks remaining."

This prompted the joke that Hyde Park, for all of its pride about racial integration, was a case of "black and white together, working shoulder to shoulder against the poor." Yet the strategy worked as the university had hoped, says Timuel Black, 89, a longtime political activist. Sufficient numbers of middle-class whites and blacks stayed to preserve the community's multiracial core.

"When whites found out that blacks were just like them," Black recalls with a wry smile, "acceptance was very easy."

As it happens, Obama is trying to lead white voters to that same conclusion.

All About the Mix


Hyde Park was the first place Obama alighted in 1985 when he became a $1,000-a-month community organizer. He chose a cheap apartment in the Chicago neighborhood that best reflected his own urban, multiethnic politics and lifestyle. He listened to jazz, swam in the lake and drove his clunker to the impoverished far South Side.

"That's the kind of place Barack felt most at home," says Chicago Tribune writer Don Terry, who grew up in a mulitracial family in Hyde Park.

In 1993, two years after his return from Harvard Law School, Obama bought a 2,200-square-foot condominium in an integrated Hyde Park complex called East View Park with his wife Michelle, raised in nearby South Shore. They lived there through his first half-dozen campaigns and much of his tenure as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. Their two daughters spent their early years there, Michelle soon commuting to work at a series of university outreach jobs.

In 2005, the family moved to a house with six bedrooms and four fireplaces across the street from a synagogue. They live on a street of tall trees and landscaped lawns in the neighborhood of Kenwood, which extends four blocks north of Hyde Park but is commonly considered part of the greater Hyde Park community.

Until his life was subsumed by the presidential campaign, Obama shopped at the local food co-op, browsed the stacks at 57th Street Books and hung out with his girls at the playground. He continues to wear a tattered Chicago White Sox cap and get his hair cut at a busy salon where his longtime barber, known by the single name Zariff, says, "You have to be yourself when you come in here."

A few blocks from Obama's home, the Currency Exchange cashes paychecks only steps from an Aveda shop. A pita restaurant's bulletin board carries notes for Tri Yoga, Ken's Klean Kuts and the Temple of Mercy Association Annual International Marcus Garvey 2008 Parade.

Valois Cafeteria, the anti-Starbucks, is packed at breakfast with transport workers cheek by jowl with businessmen studying their Wall Street Journals. Each Wednesday, a dozen retired black men get together to jaw. One day, hearing that Republicans are branding Obama and his home turf as elitist, they take up the question.

"Most all of us in this room, we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps," explains Sandy Roach, a chemist. "We got student loans, worked our way through college. We don't have any George Bushes, nobody born with silver spoons in our mouths."

Nodding toward his friends, Charles Doty says, "You can find a rocket scientist and a fellow who can teach you how to shoot dice."

Ask anyone: Hyde Park is all about the mix.

"It shaped us, our careers and our personalities," says Alison P. Ranney, a white businesswoman. "In some ways, you don't realize until you leave how special it is."

Ranney was 9 years old in the 1970s when her family left Hyde Park and moved to a coal-mining town in southern Illinois. At the new school, fourth-graders who had heard she was from Chicago kept asking whether she actually went to school with black children. Of course she did, and what of it? She remembers coming home from her first day of school and asking her mother, "Is there something you haven't been telling me about black people?"

The 700 students at the public William H. Ray Elementary School are "diverse in every way imaginable," says principal Bernadette Butler. The variety of students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools served as models for the inquisitive, multicultural 12-year-old protagonists in Blue Balliett's best-selling novel, "Chasing Vermeer." Balliett taught writing at Lab, where Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens graduated and Langston Hughes was once artist in residence. Malia and Sasha Obama are students there, and Michelle Obama sits on the board.

"It's a place where you can be who you are and bring any kind of diversity to the table and be celebrated for it. Kids really can grow up in Hyde Park and never hear a negative conversation about those differences," Balliett says over lunch at Medici, a local hangout with carved-up wooden tables and a racially diverse clientele. "My son used to say, 'How come we aren't at least Jewish and Christian?' "

When he was a boy, social activist Jamie Kalven lived in an apartment in a home owned by Manhattan Project chemist Harold Urey. At various times, the place was also owned by prizefighter Sonny Liston and jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. Muhammad Ali once lived nearby and kept a pair of lions in an outdoor cage. Kalven is struck by the presence in Hyde Park of a roughly equal number of blacks and whites "for whom the fact of living together is no big deal."

Which, in a sense, is the big deal.

Political Blocks


Hyde Park is often painted as an island by residents and outsiders. The depiction extends to politics.

Democrats from Hyde Park often describe themselves as independents. In Chicago terms, that means they steer a course apart from the long-dominant, now fading, party machine. Hyde Park produced alderman Leon Despres, a corruption fighter who often found himself on the lonely end of 49-1 city council votes. It was home to Harold Washington, the anti-machine candidate elected as the city's first black mayor, and Sen. Paul H. Douglas, a social reformer and civil rights activist.

Decades ago, when the machine was far stronger, young Abner Mikva, an Obama mentor who served as a congressman, federal judge and White House counsel, tried to volunteer at the 8th Ward Regular Democratic headquarters. "We don't want nobody nobody sent," the party operative told him. When Mikva said he was from the University of Chicago and was willing to work free, the man said, "We don't want nobody from the University of Chicago in this organization."

The university is a central part of the narrative of Hyde Park as a highfalutin, arugula-eating slice of academic elitism. The U of C, as everyone calls it, boasts that 78 alumni or onetime faculty have won the Nobel Prize. That makes Hyde Park surely the only place in America where an academic and his wife, going through a divorce, would include a clause splitting future winnings if he scored the economics prize. He won, and sent her $500,000.

As with Hyde Park itself, there is an essential element of the university that reflects Obama's way of seeing the world. It has to do with the interchange of ideas, a realm in which the cerebral, pragmatic, inherently cautious Illinois senator may be at his most comfortable. University President Robert Zimmer describes an atmosphere of ferment and says, "There's a real push for people not to be overly comfortable with their assumptions."

While Zimmer talks of rigor, Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan talks of openness, idealism and accomplishment. An Obama friend and Hyde Parker to the core, Duncan says unabashedly that the Obamas "represent the best of what Hyde Park is." He considers it no coincidence that "a disproportionate number of civic leaders come out of Hyde Park."

It is ironic -- or perhaps inevitable -- that a Daumier-like caricature of Hyde Park has fueled critics and mischief-makers on opposing sides. Conservative columnist David Brooks noted the idea in some Republican circles that Obama is "some naive university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson." When challenged by Obama in a 2000 House race, Rep. Bobby Rush (D), a former Black Panther, jeered that Obama "went to Harvard and became an educated fool." State Sen. Donne Trotter said Obama was seen as "the white man in blackface in our community."

This is Mr. Obama's neighborhood, where conservative law professor Epstein can cite a "slightly loopy side to Hyde Park politics" and still praise a history of "social toleration." It is the home turf of Ayers and Dohrn, whose fiery 1960s ambition to topple U.S. government gave way to roles as university professors and intense Little League coaches.

It is a place where differences are just differences.

"Hyde Park should be held up as an example of what an integrated community could be," says University of Chicago law professor M. Todd Henderson, who grew up in a white Pittsburgh suburb. "It wasn't some sort of social experiment."

Henderson says his adopted community is a place where ideas matter more than pedigree and one cannot infer social status by skin color. He says the visible hardships in nearby neighborhoods and the persistent threat of crime undermine any notion that Hyde Park is, in his words, "a fantasy land."

"To criticize Hyde Park as being aloof, out of touch and elitist is just poppycock," he says. "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and there is nothing America should be ashamed about Hyde Park. On the contrary, America should be proud of Hyde Park."
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An excellent critique of the critiques, filling in gaps and imbalances, too-"Under the microscope: The national media and the real Hyde Park"

Chicago Weekly, November 6, 2008. By Katy Rossing

Reminding us that Barack Obama once dismissed Bill Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," the Weekly Standard last June asked what kind of person lives in a neighborhood like that. The Washington Post's coverage of Hyde Park celebrates the proximity of an Aveda salon "only steps" from a payday loans franchise. And in a video debate on the New York Times' website, a pooh-poohing Eli Lake wonders how many hacky sack stores the neighborhood supports.

Is that really our Hyde Park they're talking about? Drum circles, organic gardens on every corner, munificent racial tolerance, and, as the Standard put it, "cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard'"?

The unflagging appetite for details of Obama's personal life has prompted a furry of profiles of Hyde Park in the national media in the last few months. Some of the over-the-top characterization of the neighborhood is understandable, given journalists' desire to read something into Obama's neighborhood, aligning it with a particular agenda or lifestyle. The question is, did they get it right?

Petty as the question posed in the Weekly Standard may seem, it is not inconsequential. American voters attach a lot of importance to where their candidates shop for groceries. The otherwise barren political landscape of stump speeches and photo-ops provides its plasticized figureheads about as much character and authenticity as Ken dolls. And true to our partisan politics, the media has produced a bipartisan set of portraits of Hyde Park: one painting our neighborhood as a liberal nexus between unrepentant domestic terrorists and elitist fair-trade coffee-sipping yuppies, and another emphasizing the evident diversity of the area, proclaiming it to be a "bastion of integration," where the progressive dream for urban America came true.

Of course both versions are based on elements of truth about the neighborhood. Looking at the 2000 Census, Hyde Park is one of the most integrated neighborhoods in Chicago. The population of 29,820 is about 44 percent white and 38 percent black, roughly inline with the racial breakdown in the city as a whole. Hyde Park is also home to a significant Asian population, comprising 11 percent of the population.

We're economically diverse, too, with plenty of residents earning six-figure salaries, more than one in ten individuals living below the poverty level, and a middle-of-the-road median household income of $44,000. As the Washington Post pointed out, this combination produces an array of commercial activity catering to both epicureans who peruse imported butter at "America's Most European Supermarket" and lovers of the half regular with hot sauce at Harold's [Chicken Shack].

The New York Times called Hyde Park a "bastion of integration" in a segregated city. But the other articles point out that this integration fails to dip below a certain socioeconomic bracket, resulting in an integration that Mike Nichols characterized wryly as "black and white, working shoulder to shoulder against the poor." This idea comes from urban renewal policies of the 1950s that leveled swaths of low-income housing and neighborhood nightlife as the University attempted to reshape its surroundings.

The socioeconomic and racial diversity of Hyde Park is evident in a walk down 53rd Street, even if actual integration, in the full sense of acceptance, is not. Although its idealization as "a place where differences are just differences" may be a stretch, Hyde Park is definitely, as the Washington Post writes, "all about the mix."

Below the upper socioeconomic stratum the social scene in Hyde Park is more discordant than integrated. In his sociological tract focusing on the landmark Valois Cafeteria, "Slim's Table," Mitchell Dunier spoke of Hyde Park as a community of "social contrasts" --- contrasts such as those "between some of the best academic bookstores in the world ... and branches of the best chicken rib shacks on the near South Side...; between the BMWs of Chicago's 'buppies' (black urban professionals) and the maroon-striped campus buses that transport thousands of white students through the streets considered to be dangerous." For many residents, Hyde Park offers alternative experiences, rather than a cohesive Kumbaya-type one. After all, there's not much chance of th customers from the Aveda salon popping next door for a payday loan after dropping $22.00 on a bottle of tea tree oil shampoo (or vice versa).

Besides the theme of diversity and integration, media profiles of Hyde Park profiles of Hyde Park all emphasize its political liberalism. Its representatives on city council have historically resisted the machine politics of patronage and cronyism. Informal measures of a neighborhood's politics testify to a liberal bent in residents as well. Clunky old cars with "Free Tibet" stickers line the blocks, and a sign in the church at 57th and University announces that it's a nuclear-free zone.

However, even these qualities don't justify the Weekly Standards' suggestion that Hyde Park is something of a "Berkeley with snow." The simple equation of academia and political liberalism is only partially true: while the majority of faculty and students hold liberal political views and values, they are tempered by the more fundamental value placed on pragmatic intellectual rigor. Moreover, the University of Chicago serve as the incubator for the intellectuals conservatives love, like Milton Friedman, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss. The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson calls the University of Chicago's reputation for conservatism "wobbly," but the campus atmosphere is a far cry from the atmosphere of activist ferment on a campus like UC-Berkeley. If anything, the UofC is a place where thoughtful opinion from all points on the political spectrum can find a receptive audience. Like Hyde Park as a whole, it is far too complicated and full of life to be summed up in a couple columns of newsprint. Hyde Park may be a place where domestic terrorists rub shoulders with free-market evangelists, but first and foremost it is as neighborhood like any other, with its own shared history, established institutions, and local heroes.

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Ferguson in the Weekly Standard.. followed by part of a NY Times article

From Andrew Ferguson's now-famous (or for at least some part deservedly infamous) Weekly Standard piece, June 16 2008,
Mr. Obama's Neighborhood: The Democratic candidate has made his home in Chicago's Hyde Park, a place that's not like any other in America.

[Gary Ossewaarde: William Ayers is now a well-thought-of academic in the University of Illinois at Chicago Education Department and known to some of the present writers' friends. His wife Bernardine Dohrn is an academic at Northwestern University who makes many appearances as a speaker on panelist, and has thoughtful ideas on prisons, juvenile courts and incarceration and on health care. Ayers blogs do rant on about a revolution based on solidarity and love against approaches (racism) and ways of doing things (capitalism, imperialism) but doesn't define what he wants except he opposes terrorism. Neither are leaders in local politics or organizations.
The characterization of the neighborhood as "hemmed in" by hellish slums is a serious exaggeration, at least for most of the blocks immediately north and south--there's a lot of skipped history and maybe visual-assumption judging here, although in a couple enclaves deteriorated and or high crime areas are perilously nearby. The parks certainly are isolating barriers (though created long before a racial changeover was conceivable) , but revitalized parts of surrounding neighborhoods are here ignored. On the other hand, HP is not all "stately mansions." And the analysis of the University's and neighborhood's conservatism (however defined) and their continuance is "wobbly". The remarks about absence of Hispanics is astoundingly false--and Asians are at least 12%. See the Co-Op page for a much more complete and balanced look at the failure of the Co-Op store-- there was tons of blame, some realities, and university expenditure of $6 million to get rid of the store to go around. The urban renewal parts are mostly true, although absolving the university of racism in the '50s (and calling the administrators liberals also) ignores a lot including operation of real estate division and enforcement of racial covenants even after they were outlawed.
And defining 'Hyde Park liberalism' 'for all time' by Mike Nichols' "black and white against the poor" is a calumny, and to ignore what the thousands in the HPKCC fought for an many Hyde Parkers still do-- a diverse community where all are welcome. And to say that Obama, as a community organizer identified with "against the poor" does not make sense, or at least cannot be shown by the line of argument (or rather innuendo.) And many Hyde Parkers don't think they are upper class or that that's all that's here.
And the last sentence, about being the perfect place for a man without and identity to make an identity of ones own choosing--isn't that what at least used to be touted as the glory and calling card of America and of Chicago?]

When Barack Obama was briefly embarrassed earlier his year by his association with the onetime bomb-builder and wannabe bomb-exploder William Ayers, he blamed his neighborhood, sort of. "He is a guy who lives in my neighborhood," Obama said with a shrug, as if to say, "Don't we all have top put up with those cranky old terrorists wandering through the yard?" But of course not every neighborhood has a former Weatherman and his wife, former Weathermoll Bernardine Dohrn, living in it, especially not as twin pillars of the community. Obama's casual dismissal led people all across America, people who live in all kinds of communities without bombers, to look at each other and say: "Wow, what kind of neighborhood does Barack live in?"

It's not a trifling question. ... a neighborhood can be a problem for a candidate. Voters often feel that incidentals like these reveal something essential about a potential president.. Just as important, political consultants often go to great lengths to make voters feel that way. Recall poor Michael Dukakis....

As Republicans felt about Brookline, so Obama supporters feel about Obama's neighborhood: it 's a measure of the man. "What better way to define what you're all about than where you choose to live and bring up your family?" said Obama's friend, neighbor, and campaign advisory John Rogers in USA Today. Obamas' neighborhood, Hyde Park, is on the South Side of Chicago, about seven miles from the Loop. Not counting time spent in college and law school, plus part of a year working for a consulting firm in Manhattan, Hyde Park is the only place Barack Obama has lived as an adult. He first moved there in 1984, when he came to Chicago as a community organizer, and he returned after graduating from Harvard Law School. Here he courted his future wife, who grew up in the nearby neighborhood of South Shore, and here his children were born and now attend (private) school. Here, too, is the mansion he bought in 2005, with the proceeds from his two bestselling books in which he speaks fondly of the life he has built here.

The affection is mutual. The Hyde Park Herald printed a gala issue when Obama announced his candidacy, in February 2007. "Despite national fame, Barack Obama remains a Hyde Parker to the core," read the banner headline. Inside were display ads from local businesses, full of good wishes an exclamation points: "Good luck, neighbor!"' "Wish Hyde Parks' very own Barack Obama and family all the best!"; "Congratulations to Barack, our hometown hero!" There were pages of testimonials from neighbors, shopkeepers, political activists, and his barber, too. All agreed he's "down to earth." One local mother recalled standing next to him at a Halloween parade. "He greeted me with a friendly 'hello,'" she testified. A waitress at his favorite restaurant: "No matter what might be on his mind, he always asks how I'm doing." "He was always one of my quietest customers," said the owner of the local video store. "But when he did have something to say it was always soothing and stimulating at the same time. When he walked away he would leave that thought in your mind. It made you wonder." America has the same reaction, but Hyde Parkers experienced it first.

If you think this sounds improbably quaint and Norman Rockwellish, like Anytown, USA, Hyde Parkers think so too. They often refer to their neighborhood as a "small town." Hyde Park isn't a town, but with a population of 35,000, depending on who's counting and how, it's pretty small: 15 city blocks from north to south, another 15 or so from Washington Park on the west to its eastern boundary at the shore of Lake Michigan. Its sense of urban intimacy is reinforced by its isolation. It's the most racially integrated neighborhood in the nation's most segregated city. On three sides it is closed in by some of the most hellish slums in the country, miles of littered streets, acres of abandoned lots, block after block of shuttered storefronts and empty apartment buildings left over from the 19th century. These terminate abruptly at the edge of Hyde Park and give way to shade trees and lawns and stately brick mansions and huge, tidied-up apartment houses. Surrounded, Hyde Park is different from any neighborhood in Chicago--different from anywhere else in America, for that matter.

Some people call it a college town, since its largest inhabitant, the institution that defines the neighborhood' character, is the University of Chicago, one of the worlds' most prestigious universities. A friend once described Hyde Park as "Berkeley with snow." and it does indeed have the same graduate-student flavor, the same political activism and boho intellectualism, the same alarmingly high number of men wandering about looking like NPR announcers-- the wispy beards and wire rims, the pressed jeans and unscuffed sneakers, the backpacks and bikes. (This is a pretty good description of William Ayers, by the way.) But the similarities can be overdone. "Not 'Berkeley with snow,'" a U. of C. professor said, when I mentioned my friends' comment to him. "It's the snow that keeps us from being Berkeley. The snow and cold keep the street people away. It drives everyone inside. You don't have all the students who dropped out of school or graduated and refused to leave. If they stay, they do something. If not, they get out of town. It's too cold to just hang around."

This contributes to the neighborhood's relatively low crime rate and, in part, to the university's reputation as a home for squares and nerds, a buttoned-down "bastion of conservatism," in the phrase of one magazine writer. And the conservatism, by popular account, infects the neighborhood at large, tempers its politics, and adds to its diversity. But the reputation for right-wingery is based on a simple if imprecise bit of data that shocks the delicate sensitivity of college professors: Of the tens of thousands of faculty who have taught at the University of Chicago over the past half-century, perhaps as any as 65 have, at some point in their lives, voted for a Republican. Many of these insurgents were either disciples of the university's most famous faculty member, the free-market economist Milton Friedman, or were drawn to the school because of him; others came under the influence of Allan Bloom, the Straussian philosopher, who ran the university' Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, along with a few classically minded scholars. Bloom is dead. So is Friedman. The Olin Center closed its doors in 2005. Their disciples and colleagues who remain at the university aren't getting any younger. It's unlikely that the school's wobbly reputation for conservatism, and the neighborhood's, will survive them.

The reputation for diversity, though, probably will survive. It's not often noted that the neighborhood's diversity has its limits. "In Hyde Park," a resident told me, "'integration' means white people and black people." The nation's fastest growing ethnic group, Hispanics, is hardly represented at all; same for Asians. the neighborhood is better known as a haven for the black upper class, especially those who don't want to move to an all-white suburb but also don't want the crime risks and miserable schools associated with the neighborhoods to the immediately south, west adn north. Some of these people are famous -- Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, lived in an apartment by the lake, and Muhammad Ali lived down the block from Louis Farrakhan, who live in Elijah Muhammad's old digs, around the corner from the house of Joe Louis's widow. Most are lawyers and business executives from the Loop, doctors and technicians from the university hospital center, administrators and professors from the university -- united to the white upper class through shared politics and aspirations, and delighted in, and congratulating one another on, their unique neighborhood.

Hyde Park has always been relatively affluent, but the neighborhood's character was changed forever beginning in the mid-1950s, when university officials orchestrated an ambitious scheme of urban renewal, paid for by the city and federal governments. The project was the first of its kind in Chicago, and one of the first in the country, and it served for a generation as a model for other cities, for better or worse-- usually worse. But in Hyde Park urban renewal worked like a Swiss watch.

"You have to understand the mindset," a preservationist, Jack Spicer, told me. "In the middle of the 1950s, the university thought they were in the middle of an emergency. Alarms were going off everywhere." All around Hyde Park, white flight was transforming Chicago, goosed by racial panic and the sleazy importunities of "blockbusters"-- real estate speculators who bought houses of fleeing whites at high profit to incoming blacks. "The university figured Hyde Park was next," Spicer said. The school was having trouble attracting students and faculty. Administrators considered moving the campus to Arizona or New Mexico -- anywhere pleasant -- but balked at the expense. At last they decided that if they couldn't move to a nice neighborhood, they would make their neighborhood nice.

The aim of urban renewal in Hyde Park, according to the university's president, was "to buy, control, and rebuild our neighborhood" until it was a "community of similar tastes and interests." The program lasted a decade. By the end of it the neighborhood had been reconfigured physically and redefined socially. Vast stretches of the old Hyde Park had been bulldozed, including the main shopping and entertainment (that is honky-tonk) district along 55th Street. Planner clear-cut an entire subneighborhood of wooded bungalows that housed workers from the nearby slaughterhouses and Indiana steel mills, scattering the residents to parts unknown. From these razed blocks spring parking garages, dormitories, classroom buildings, parks and rows of townhouses suitable for students and faculty.

What survived the wrecking ball was equally desirable: the mansions built during the neighborhood's day as the city's Gold Coast, in the 189s, when it drew Armours, Swifts, and other monied families looking for a lakeside home. Just to the south, turn-of-the century apartment houses were saved, refurbished, and offered as housing for the administrators and faculty at U. of C. Having uprooted most neighborhood businesses, the plan concentrated all commercial activity into three small shopping centers, from which most of the old shop owners were excluded. A single saloon survived. Notably absent from the scene was any public housing for the poor [not entirely true]. After ten years of urban renewal, the neighborhood's population had dropped by 40 percent.

Hyde Park's isolation was by design. At its boundaries, the university bought and leveled city blocks that could serve as a buffer, or moat, from the surrounding South Side as it filled with impoverished blacks. The isolation brings a whiff of unreality to the neighborhood. The place seems uprooted. Its' neither one thing nor the other. Hyde Park lacks the freewheeling energy of a college town, and it lacks the surprises and variety of a healthy city neighborhood. strolling the quiet streets on a morning in May you'll admire the lilacs spilling over the low stone fences, the mansions with the squares of lawn marching to the edge of the boulevards, the funky, vine-covered apartment buildings shaded by overarching oak and poplar. Only after a day or so do you notice what's not here. There are no movie theaters, for example, and not much commerce generally. There's nowhere to buy a pair of pants or shoes. There aren't many restaurants, and only a single overpriced restaurant catering to the culinary affectations of the yuppie trade -- strange for a neighborhood with so many wealthy residents. Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store.

And both of these, the fancy restaurant and the new grocery store, are creatures of the university's paternalism. the university has long been aware that the neighborhood it created lacks the amenities that urban dwellers demand as compensation for the discomforts of city living. So when the neighborhood's only large grocery store failed recently -- it was a customer-owned cooperative, whose empty shelves and accumulated gunk attested to its Soviet-like disdain for market forces -- the university subsidized a new outlet from a "gourmet" grocery chain. Now everybody's happy. The fancy restaurant, too was encouraged by the university as something its cultured faculty would like, and as a place where parents might take their student children on campus visits; the university keeps the restaurant owners afloat by providing business for their catering business. And, having obliterated the neighborhood's entertainment district 50 years ago, it is now trying to draw bars and clubs back to Hyde Park, either through subsidy or outright purchase. U. of C. recently bought and moved the South Side landmark Checkerboard Lounge close to campus, to restore the nightlife that the 1950s urban planners hoped to kill (and did).

Hyde Parkers sometimes seem strangely unaware of how completely their neighborhood's uniqueness is a product of the university's noblesse oblige. An outsider sees it most clearly in the university's police cars that patrol Hyde Park around the clock, and in the emergency call boxes spaced throughout the entire neighborhood, far beyond the campus proper, that anyone can use at any time to summon campus cops. (The university police force is the second largest police force in Illinois.) The paternalism is less obvious because it has never been racial. Urban renewal drove out as many poor whites as poor blacks; for university officials in the 1050s enlightened liberals all, the panic was over a decline in social and economic class. "They wanted a comfortable place for the upper class to live," said Spicer, the preservationist. "They didn't want only black families, or all black families, but black families of the right sort were welcomed." The neighborhood's famous racial harmony is the result. The comedian (and later movie director) Mike Nichols, who got his start in a club on the old 55th Street, defined Hyde Park liberalism for all time: "Black and white, marching arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder against the poor."

Right out of college, Barack Obama placed himself in the middle of this curious legacy. Culturally, he's never been a "South Sider," because no one on the south side thinks of Hyde Park as a South Side neighborhood [plenty do...] It's an anomaly that the writer and cultural critic Andrew Partner, a native Hyde Parker of which there are many], tried to explain to me as we drove around the neighborhood one day.

"There's a certain wariness toward Hyde Park among South Side blacks, most of whom are poor," he said. "If you're from another neighborhood, you might go to Hyde Park on the weekends. But there's a word, sadiddy. It means you think maybe you're better than you are. Pretentious. That's the sort of the view of Hyde Park. It's too weird, too far out side what most of Chicago knows.

This had consequences for Obama's political future. Most successful African-American politicians in Chicago came up through the Democratic big-city political machine -- either the old machine of Richard J. Daley or the gentler version overseen by his son, the current mayor, Richard M. Daley. Even Harold Washington, now canonized as the greatest of Chicago reformers, was machine-made. By contrast, politicians from Hyde Park, white or black, actively opposed the machine and the headlock it had on the city's politics. "Politically," wrote the Chicago political analyst David Fremon, "Hyde Park has never joined the city." Obama is a politician of Hyde Park pedigree, outside the normal bloodlines of Chicago's black politics.

"When Barack announced for president," Patner told me, "it was a total ho-hum in the black community"--beyond Hyde Park, that is. "It just wasn't a big deal." A political rival, State Senator Donne Trotter, put it this way in an interview with the Chicago Reader: Barack is viewed in part to be a white man in blackface in our community. You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind."

"That's one of the downsides to his background, coming up outside normal channels," Patner went on. "He's always had to prove himself with the black community. He never had that seal of approval. But there are upsides, too."

One upside is that Obama, the Hyde Parker, was automatically more appealing -- and less threatening -- to white liberals, in Hyde Park and beyond. The other upside, said Patner, is that "because he came up through Hyde Park instead of the machine, he stayed clear of all the corruption that's involved with that."

By Chicago standards, Obama's sweetheart real estate deals with the convicted fixer Tony Rezko -- who purchased the to next to the house Obama was buying, effectively giving him a bigger yard for free-- is almost beneath comment: a cost of doing business or a small professional benefit, typical of machne-backed pols and reformers alike. None of the progressive politicos I spoke with in Hyde Park considered it dismaying -- "disappointing," as one oldtimer said, but hardly disqualifiying. Most found in Obama instead a mint-perfect expression of their particular brand of politics.

"Barack is perfect for the neighborhood!" Rabbi Arnold Wolf told me, when I stopped by his Hyde Park house one afternoon for a talk. He's as round and white-bearded as a Santa, with the same twinkle. He came to Hyde Park before urban renewal and saw its effects firsthand. For 25 years he led the congregation at KAM Isaiah Israel, a synagogue across the street from Obamas' mansion. (Recently, the Secret Service contingent has been using its bathrooms.)

"You can't say Barack's a product of Hyde Park. He's not really from here. But everybody saw the potential early on. We had a party for him at our house when he was just starting, back in the Nineties. I said right away, "Here's a guy who could sell our product, and sell it with splendor!"

I asked him what the Hyde Park product was. "People think we're radicals her, wild-eyed!" he said. Bill Ayers -- I know Bill Ayers very well. Bill Ayers is an aging, toothless radical. A pussycat. And his wife, too. I sat on a commission with his wife a few years ago. My god, she was more critical of the left than I was! The two of them, they're thoroughly conventional, just very nice, well-educated people from the neighborhood."

As it happened, I'd spent the evening before reading Ayers' blog, and lingered over a manifesto he posted in early April, after his friendship with Obama became national news. "I've never advocated terrorism," Ayers wrote, "never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently." Capitalism, he went on, "is exhausted as a force for progress; built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated adn a world revolution-- a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity adn love," and so on. Just another guy in the neighborhood.

But back to the product Obama could sell? "The thing is, it's not what you might think," Rabbi Wolf said. "It's not radical, its' not extreme. It's rational, progressive philosophy based on experience. You see it here. this neighborhood is genuinely integrated. We did it here, we really did it! Not just talk about it. Look around. And Barack and his family fit right in. This is their neighborhood."

As he walked me to the door he mused about the urban renewal that created the new Hyde Park. He said he he'd always been ambivalent about it. "Even at the time, you could see the university was saving us, and it was destroying us," he said. "it was keeping us afloat, but it was also taking away old characteristics, the old buildings, the old trees, the old roots. But it made the neighborhood different, unique. you notice there's no class conflict here." He twinkled. "That's because there's only one class-- upper!"

The irony would be funny if it weren't so jarring: Black America, after 400 years of enforced second-class status, offers the country a plausible presidential candidate, and what's the charge made against him? He's an elitist.

Hyde Park may be partly responsible. Obama does show signs of having imbibed its view of America beyond the moat. David Mendell, in his indispensable biography Obama: From Promise to Power, quotes a co-worker of Obama: "[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day. The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions. ...That was scary to him." In his own memoir, Obama depicts his mother fleeing the "smugness and hypocrisy" of her small Midwestern town -- a town that Obama visited for the first time this year, campaigning. Only a lack of familiarity with the benign flow of middle-class American life could inspire cliches like these.

"I never had roots growing up," Obama has often said. It's the theme of his life, as he himself tells the story. He even wrote a book, a small masterpiece, about his tortured attempts to locate himself in the larger world. From Hawaii to Indonesia nd back to Hawaii, then to Los Angeles adn Manhattan and Cambridge, Mass., and finally to Hyde Park: He's never lived in a part of the country that's like 90 percent of the rest of the country. This struck me one afternoon when I drove from Obama's house to Trinity United Church of Christ, the now-controversial church where he worshipped for nearly 20 years. It's a long drive, 30 minutes or moe. Whether you take the freeway or the surface streets, the route jolts you from the manicured quiet of Hyde Park through one bombed-out neighborhood after another. Then you arrive at Trinity, hard against the roaring freeway, at the edge of a district of blond-brick bungalows, some tidy and trim, others obscured by weeds, the shutters off their hinges. After services, Obama would get the family back in the car and go home.

Hyde Park's the neighborhood he returned to, the place he'd chosen to live, and its roots were torn out 50 years ago. A college town, it has all the churning and transience the phrase implies. Everyone seems from somewhere else. The Armours, the Swifts, and all the other first families of Chicago left long ago [not entirely true]. The working men and their families, who replaced them, were driven out by the university. The poor were secured at a safe distance. Inside, harmony reigned between black and white residents, but the whites drawn by the university were often here only temporarily, and the blacks who moved here have the same sense of displacement, even if they arrived from another neighborhood nearby.

This is the perfect place for a man without an identity to make one of his own choosing.

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From The New York Times, "The Long Run" by Jo Becker and Christopher Drew

When Judson H. Miner invited a third-year Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama to lunch at the Thai Star Cafe in Chicago before his 1991 graduation, Mr. Miner thought he was recruiting the 29-year-old to work for his boutique civil rights law firm. Instead, Mr. Obama recruited him. Mr. Obama made it clear that he was less interested in a job than in learning the political lay of the land from a man who had served at the right hand of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington. Mr. Miner, who has helped with the historic 1983 election of Mr. Washington and served as his corporation counsel, proved a willing tutor.

The confident younger man "cross-examined" Mr. Miner about how Mr. Washington had managed to emerge from an election riven by bigotry to form a governing coalition in which he "got along with all these different types of folks," Mr. Miner recalled.

Mr. Obama, who had spent time in Chicago as a community organizer in the 1980s and already knew he wanted to run for office, openly weighed the pros and cons of working for the law firm. On the one hand it was beloved by many of the city's liberal and black leaders for its work on issues like voting rights and housing equality. On the other hand, the firm had clashed with Chicago's powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley, who presided then and now over the city's sprawling Democratic organization.

"During the course of our talking, it came out that people who knew he was having lunch with me were trying to convince him that this was the worst place for him to go. He shared t his with me - he was amused," Mr. Miner said, laughing. "This isn't where you land if you want to curry favor with the Democratic power structure."

It was, however, exactly where an aspiring politician might land if he happened to want to run for office from Hyde Par, a neighborhood with long history of electing reform-minded politicians independent of the city's legendary Democratic power structure. Mr. Obama chose to put down roots in the neighborhood after graduating law school and marrying Michelle Robinson, a Chicago native and fellow lawyer.

A tight-knit community that runs through the South Side, Hyde Park is a liberal bastion of integration in what is other wise one of the nation's most segregated cities. Mayor Washington had called it home, as did whites who marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. land wealthy black entrepreneurs a generation removed from the civil rights battles of the 1960s.

At its heart is the University of Chicago; at its borders are poor, predominately black neighborhoods blighted by rundown buildings and vacant lots. For Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii to a white Kansan mother and an African father and who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, it was a perfect fit.

"He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park," said Martha Minow, his former law professor and a mentor. "It's a place where you don't have to wear a label on your forehead. You can go to a bookstore and there's the homeless person and there's the professor."

Mr. Obama quickly grounded himself in the community. He led a successful drive that registered nearly 150,000 black voters for the 1992 campaign. He became a part-time professor at the University of Chicago Law School. And, in 1993, he finally decided to join the law office of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.

The choice sent a signal that Mr. Obama was "allying himself with the independents, which is what you have to be if you're going to be elected from the Hyde Park area," said Don Rose, a longtime Democratic political consultant.

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Power comes to Hyde Park. Crain's Chicago Business, November 17, 2008

By Steven R. Strahler, November 10, 2008. http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=31750

Hyde Park, a neighborhood that sets itself studiously apart, soon will be shoved into the international spotlight.

With local resident Barack Obama headed for the White House, the South Side home to such disparate institutions as the University of Chicago and Sister Rose Garrett's Kilimanjaro International craft shop confronts the unappetizing prospect of going mainstream. An enclave that nurtures its outsider sensibility, treasures its political independence and prizes its ethnic diversity now will be known globally as the home base of the world's most powerful an.

In other words, Hyde Park is fated to become identified with something many in the neighborhood have long fought: the established order.

"My guess is, it won't sit particularly comfortably," says Obama neighbor David Vitale, a former banker adn Chicago Public Schools executive. "When you own it, it's different than if you're pecking at it."

Hyde Prk will gain cachet as a place to live, but at the cost, some Hyde Parkers fear, of becoming a version of Lincoln Park, with more Starbucks, Gaps and residential teardowns.

"The Obama Water Park? No! People haven't thought enough about (commercialization), and maybe they should," says Ruth Knack, president of the Hyde Park Historical Society [who tells this writer she said nothing of the kind].

Other residents are unsettled by the notion of Mr. Obama's election boosting the city's chances of hosting the 2016 Olympics, which would transform the borders of Hyde Park like nothing else since the U of C campus emerged from the 1893 Columbian Exposition. "I've said I'm going to boycott" the Olympics, says 100-year-old former Alderman and Obama supporter Leon Despres.

Not everyone shares Mr. Despres' worries. "I don't see anything but good news for Hyde Park," says Robert Fogel, a U of C economics professor and Nobel Prize winner who says a for-sale sign lasted only two weeks on a house on his block, not far from Mr. Obama's "It's nice to have as one of your neighbors the president of the United States."

Margie Smigel, a principal with MetroPro Corp. who brokered the sale of Mr. Obama's property nearly 20 years ago, says local property values will benefit from the neighborhood's new status. "It will give 'permission' -- 'Oh, Obama lives there,'" she says of the thinking of potential buyers who previously would not have considered Hyde Park.

Other economic benefits could follow as tourists find their way into the neighborhood. While nobody expects Hyde Park to turn into an urban Crawford, Texas, or Plains, Ga., some local businesses are ready to cash in on its proximity to power.

Kilimanjaro, International, which sells African antiques, fabrics and fine art from a storefront on 53rd Street, capitalized on the Obama phenomenon by hiring workers to produce Obama-related merchandise. "He's already creating jobs," owner [Sister Rose] Garrett says. Her shop, though, is an example of the one-of-a-kind Hyde Park retailer that might be at risk from neighborhood gentrification. Earlier th is year, it moved from a U of C-owned parcel down the street that the university has attempted to redevelop for six years.

Local aldermen are ambivalent about the U of C's performance as landlord and divided about how Hyde Park's heightened visibility will affect it. "The University's actions and non-actions are separate from the election of Barack Obama," says Alderman Toni Preckwinkle (4th), while Alderman Leslie Hairston (5th) says, "I just think it will speed things up." University officials did not return phone calls.

It's not clear how often Mr. Obama and his family will return to Hyde Park. Many neighbors already are up in arms about security measures that have blocked streets and alleys near the Obama house.

Hans Morsbach, who has owned Medici restaurants in Hyde Park since 1962, says that while there could be an Obama effect on his business, "I'm not counting on it."

Then there's the possibility that Hyde Park's close-up will reveal fault lines in it self-image. "Yeah, white folks and black folks live on the same block, but they ain't talking to each other," said the Rev. Jesse Brown of the First Baptist Church of Chicago, three blocks from Mr. Obama's house.

[Comments posted to the article include an objection to accusation by Rev. Brown the whites and blacks don't talk to each other, a nostalgic recollection by a former but frequently returning Hyde Parker that despite all that's gone, he still loves the Hyde Park that remains-- and hopes it doesn't morph into what he says Evanston has homogenized into.] Top

 

Diversity is.... Open Produce store

From 5th Ward Report, autumn 2008

Beginning in late September, people passing 1635 E. 55th St. during the evening might have gotten quite a surprise--the brightly lit and painted new Open Produce with customers shopping inside. Beyond featuring healthy food, the proprietors envision adding value to their environment.

"We live next door," explains Andrews Cone, who launched Open Produce with Stephen Lucy. Both are recent University of Chicago graduates with roots in Hyde Park. "We felt the area needed a place like this, especially one with these hours." The store is open every day rm 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. [except Wednesdays?]

Cone acknowledges some residents have warned him about security issues. "We're not concerned. We believed having businesses open later at night helps keep the neighborhood safer. It helps create a community presence and energy, so people aren't running inside when it gets dark. They should have the convenience of being able to pop in if they need an onion or some lettuce-- at affordable prices, with friendly service."

The small storefront market caters particularly to vegans, vegetarians and those desiring organic and natural dry goods. It also carries spices and sauces used in Chinese and Indian dishes, as well as fresh bakery goods from the Medici restaurant and New York City Bagel Deli. "What's striking about Hyde Park, as compared to other parts of the city, is that there are lots of different people who actually mingle." notes Cone. "We want our products to appeal to that cross section and for them to feel comfortable here."