Why Hyde Park Progress?

Why Hyde Park Progress?

Simple. Two comments recently overheard in local cafes sum it all up. From a visiting Bay Area academic: "This isn't much of a neighborhood." From a young faculty member of the Social Sciences Division of the University: "It's great for kids, but is basically boring."

I have a home here, am raising a kid here, and went to school here. I occasionally teach for the University. And I think the neighborhood needs to change. I know there are plenty of people who agree. But these are feelings and sentiments that aren't represented by the "establishment voice" of Hyde Park, which is comprised of the Hyde Park Herald, the Hyde Park Historical Society, and various other caretaker community groups. These groups have a demonstrated record of preserving the status quo. They have a poor record of improving on it.

The residents of this neighborhood who feel these institutions do not represent their voice share a few things in common. Above all, they feel that Hyde Park and its surrounding communities need more retail and commercial amenities. This means an openness to change of several sorts: increased street life, which leads to greater neighborhood safety; greater mixture of land uses, together with increased residential densities in newer developments. Many residents agree that the Establishment paranoia regarding change, outsiders, traffic, and congestion are overblown and can be properly managed.

The current Hyde Park Establishment, which sees itself as steward of the neighborhood's essence, is in fact quite removed from it. Hyde Park was not conceived and built as an autarkic community on the model of Chavez's Venezuela or Castro's Cuba. It has been a part of the City and its economy since the development boom of the late 19th century, and was together with the South Side the home to most of the City's wealth and influence. All of this changed after World War II. Racial and social changes, together with Urban Renewal, cut the neighborhood off from its surroundings in an effort to protect it from decline.

This is the status quo that the current Establishment seeks to protect. It was Urban Renewal that drove out the businesses, dead-ended the thoroughfares, and drained the night-life and urbanity from the neighborhood. This is the heritage of which the Establishment is now the steward, and to which they offer no alternatives. The Establishment derides Urban Renewal; but they are the unwitting stewards of its bucolic legacy. Chicago is nowhere near as densely populated as it used to be. Many of its now deserted South Side thoroughfares were bustling with commerce and public transportation as recently as the early 1960s, as much of the North Side is now. The current condition of Hyde Park is a historical aberration by any measure.

Hyde Park Progress thinks there is space for a voice other than that of obstructionism sounded by "community" activism. Hyde Park Progress is a pro-development voice from within the neighborhood which argues that our quality of life is just as dependent on convenient shopping, 24-hour street safety, and urban vitality, as it is upon plentiful parkland and historical architecture, and wants to make the blending of these a priority, not a distant dream.