The next president of the United States lives in a stately red brick house on South Greenwood Avenue, across the street from a synagogue, just over the Hyde Park border in a tony section of Kenwood.
For anyone who has tried to catch a glimpse of the Obama family abode in recent months, that’s about all you get. Concrete barricades and around-the-clock security prevent anyone from driving or walking down Barack Obama’s block. Since the election, cars are barred from going down a three-block stretch of Hyde Park Boulevard, across the street from which pedestrian tourists futilely angle for a decent photo of the now-historic home.
Obama’s historic presidential campaign has put Chicago in the spotlight, and the glare shines brightest in the Hyde Park area, which has seen an influx of guys in flak jackets, foreign media and tourists looking to buy Obama souvenirs in his very own neighborhood.
Now that the Illinois Tourism Bureau has updated its three-day “Presidential Trails” getaways to include Obama’s haunts, Hyde Park-Kenwood can expect the attention to swell.
“This is a huge opportunity for us to characterize just what’s special about Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, and to not be a flyover for people who only care about what’s on the coasts,” said Bob Rosenberg, associate vice president for communications at the University of Chicago.
So what is so special about Hyde Park?
Residents say it’s the diversity, the intellectual rigor, the civic engagement, the small-town vibe.
“I always felt like I was a Hyde Parker, not a Chicagoan,” said Hyde Park native Laurel Stradford, owner of What the Traveler Saw, a store on 55th Street that sells accessories from Stradford’s world travels.
People are friendlier, more willing to chat, more eager to get to know their neighbors, Stradford said. When she lived downtown after grad school, “I don’t think I got to meet half a dozen people,” she remembers.
The “Cheers”-like sensibility thrives in the racially mixed community. Hyde Park’s population is equal parts black and white and has a sizable Asian presence — an anomaly on the South Side, which is overwhelmingly African-American.
And while many of its neighboring communities are impoverished and struggling to climb out of decay, Hyde Park boasts multimillion-dollar homes and a robust middle class along with low-income residents in public housing. A study released this year by DePaul University declared Hyde Park the most income-diverse neighborhood in Chicago. (Not that it isn’t pricey; a typical one-bedroom rents for $900 a month, said James Daughrity, a sales and leasing consultant at Apartment Finders’ Hyde Park office. The median cost to buy a condo or townhouse is $205,000, according to the Chicago Association of Realtors.)
Hyde Park’s diversity is a major selling point.
Heather Dalmage, sociology professor at Roosevelt University, moved to Hyde Park specifically so that her young children, who are of mixed race, could grow up in a diverse environment.
“When you’re a mixed family, you can’t live in a whole lot of places comfortably,” said Dalmage, who is white and whose husband is black.
Hyde Park has “a different sensibility,” Dalmage said. “You have more freedom. You’re less likely to be stared at, or for people to make comments.”
Still, tensions exist.
John Edgerton, a University of Chicago Divinity School student who grew up in Hyde Park, notes that while the neighborhood is diverse, the university is mostly white (just 7 percent of undergrad students were black in 2007), and fear of crime among some students lines up along racial lines.
“Because we are positioned amid very depressed areas, there is a great deal of fearfulness about crime and violence that is being blamed on surrounding black communities,” Edgerton, 26, said. The murder last year of Senegalese grad student Amadou Cisse happened in Woodlawn, just a couple of blocks south of the Hyde Park border.
Gabriel Piemonte, editor of the Hyde Park Herald, remembers his own hesitance about moving to Hyde Park from Rogers Park nine years ago.
“All of my friends were like, ‘You can’t live on the South Side. You’re not going to like it,’ ” Piemonte said. But the fine bookstores and beauty of the lakefront’s Promontory Point drew him in, and “over time, it was the people,” Piemonte said.
“This is the kind of place where you can sink your roots,” Piemonte said. “This is a neighborhood people care about and are committed to.”
People care a lot, and any proposed changes tend to provoke lengthy debate among residents with differing ideas about how things should be. (“Probably,” Piemonte says, “we’re a neighborhood that takes itself too seriously.”)
Duane Powell, who works at Dr. Wax record store in the Harper Court shopping center, misses the days when people from all walks of life filled the courtyard to play chess late into the night and teach young people the game. The chess tables were removed in 2002 because of concerns the area was drawing drug and gang activity.
“The only thing they got rid of was the thinking people,” said Powell, 37, who moved from Hyde Park to neighboring Washington Park in 2004.
The clash of ideas is Hyde Park’s strength, said the U. of C.’s Rosenberg. One of the frustrating things during the presidential campaign was that Hyde Park and the university were consistently characterized as either a haven of the liberal elite, or a resting place for neoconservative thinking, Rosenberg said.
“We are all those things and more. We are acceptant of all the different voices,” Rosenberg said, noting that Obama embodies those values.
“It’s our sense of pragmatism, our openness to diversity, that make this place special.”
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Nerd alert
What Hyde Park lacks in flash, it makes up for in brain power. Forty-four percent of Hyde Park residents have graduate degrees, compared with 11 percent citywide. The University of Chicago has spawned 81 Nobel Prize winners, including seven current faculty.
“It’s nerdier than other places,” Erin Lane, 30, said as she played with her two-year-old son at 57th Street Books. “You can’t buy towels or underwear here, but you can go to, like, seven of the most incredible bookstores.”
Indeed, Hyde Park lacks some conveniences. There are no big-box stores nearby, mostly because there’s no space for them. There’s no commercial movie theater. Before Treasure Island replaced the struggling Hyde Park Co-Op earlier this year, many people felt they had no grocery store.
To the chagrin of some university students, nightlife pickings are slim.
“It’s just kind of boring,” said Thomas Marks, 25, a student at the University of Chicago Law School. The popular watering hole Woodlawn Tap, a college dive on 55th Street informally known as Jimmy’s, gets old, he said. Not everyone likes Valois Cafeteria, a Hyde Park institution open since 1921, where professors rub elbows with homeless people, and where a heaping plate of baked chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and biscuits costs just $6.63, including tax.
Hyde Park is getting some hipper options. Chant, a year-old restaurant and lounge on 53rd Street serving “global cuisine with an Asian twist,” features jazz and blues performers on the weekends. Jerry Kleiner, the restaurateur behind Opera and Marche, opened the colorful Park 52 on 52nd Street six months ago, complete with enormous orange lampshades and $18 seared tilapia.
“We want to give the community a touch of downtown,” said Park 52 general manager John Nowowiejski. “People have been craving this.”
— Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
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COLLEGE TOWN
The University of Chicago plays an integral role in shaping the neighborhood.
4,901
Number of undergrad students, almost all of whom live in the Hyde Park area
9,820
Number of graduate students, about half of whom live in the Hyde Park area
1,800
Number of full-time faculty members, about 60 percent of whom live in the Hyde Park area
253
Acres of university-owned property in the Hyde Park area
Source: Bob Rosenberg, associate vice president of communications for University of Chicago
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Hyde Park by the numbers
It has long had a reputation as a highly educated and racially diverse community, far safer and more affluent than many of its neighbors on the South Side.
Here’s a snapshot of Hyde Park, officially defined by the city as the area bordered by 51st Street to the north, 60th Street to the south, Cottage Grove Avenue to the west and Lake Michigan to the east. All figures are based on 2008 population estimates, except where otherwise noted. Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
POPULATION
Hyde Park 29,469
Chicago 2.9 million
GENDER
Men 49% (Chicago: 49%)
Women 51% (Chicago: 51%)
INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTS
U.S.-born 82% (Chicago: 75%)
Foreign born 18% (Chicago: 25%)
RACE/ETHNICITY*
White Non-Hispanic
39% (Chicago: 28%)
Black 39% (Chicago: 35%)
Asian 13% (Chicago: 5%)
Hispanic 5% (Chicago: 30%)
Other 6% (Chicago: 20%)
* Numbers add up to
more than 100 percent
because respondents
could choose more than
one race/ethnicity.
AGE
Children
(under 18) 13%
(Chicago: 25%)
Adults
(18-54) 67%
(Chicago: 56%)
Seniors
(55 and older) 20%
(Chicago: 19%)
CRIME*
Murders 0 (Chicago: 442)
Criminal sexual assault 10 (Chicago: 1,599)
Robbery 176 (Chicago: 15,426)
Aggravated assault 27 (Chicago: 6,283)
Aggravated battery 36 (Chicago: 11,145)
Burglary 176 (Chicago: 24,766)
Theft 775 (Chicago: 83,118)
Motor vehicle theft 131 (Chicago: 18,607)
Arson 1 (Chicago: 700)
* Incidents reported to police in 2007.
EDUCATION*
Less than high school
6% (Chicago: 25%)
High school 8% (Chicago: 22%)
Some college 16% (Chicago: 20%)
Associate degrees 3% (Chicago: 5%)
Bachelor’s degree 23% (Chicago: 17%)
Graduate degree 44% (Chicago: 11%)
* Highest level of educational attainment among people 25 and older.
HOUSEHOLD INCOME
Low-income (under $35,000)
40% (Chicago: 38%)
Middle-income ($35,000-$99,999)
40% (Chicago: 45%)
High-income ($100,000 and up)
19% (Chicago: 18%)
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME*
$40,855 (Chicago: $40,811) * 2005 estimates
Sources: Metro Chicago Information Center, Chicago Police
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
