Harper Court Was, and Is, A Bad Idea

Harper Court is a failure. By the measures of its own founding mission to "further trade and economic development of the Hyde Park-Kenwood area," or to assist with the "continuation in the community of artisans, craftsmen ... of special cultural or community significance" it has failed from the very beginning. The artists and craftsmen it was intended for didn't move in. It is as much a product --in the very design and layout of the buildings -- of a 60s worldview as the Urban Renewal programs against which is was a response. Those who are attached to Harper Court are in love with its mission, and blind to the empirical fact that the site and the institution have not met their own goals nor met the pressing and changing needs of the community.

Harper Court has failed in its mission to "further trade and economic development." There are now more low-rent, vacant storefronts in Hyde Park than can be filled with tenants, while Hyde Parkers are still unable to shop for essentials in their own neighborhood. In light of the large sums of consumer dollars that are spent outside of the neighborhood, it is clear that Harper Court has not alleviated the drought of retail amenities that afflicts the neighborhood. Subsidizing small business does not economically benefit those who are burdened with frequent and costly voyages outside the neighborhood to procure quality food and clothing. In fact, it ignores this very real problem in the pursuit of an ideological chimera, and aggravates strucutral disadvantages that disproportionately affect the poor and minorities. The object of any redevelopment project or corporation should be to help draw money to our neighborhood, and above all to keep neighborhood money in the neighborhood. That is the best way to preserve the distinctiveness of Hyde Park and pursue social justice.

Harper Court was also intended as a refuge for artisans displaced from land clearance programs under Urban Renewal. Here its failure is even more apparent. Hyde Park currently has a thriving artistic culture, and it has nothing to do with Harper Court. Two self-governing artistic institutions have made Hyde Park their home, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Experimental Station. Evidently, for neither organization was the physical layout, location, or mission of Harper Court attractive. The failure of Harper Court in this respect is a symptom of its top-down, utopian-style approach to community planning. A philanthropist and some well-meaning activists thought they knew what artists and artisans wanted. They were wrong.

Beyond the empirical failures, the approach of Harper Court to commercial revitalization is backwards. Focusing on and subsidizing local businesses in fact guarantees that we have no businesses. The fixation on getting "local" businesses and keeping out "chains" is an aesthetic and ideologically-driven one that is uninformed as to the nature of entrepreneurialism and small-business dynamics. To get "local" businesses, you first of all need local entrepreneurs, and to judge by the number of empty storefronts, Hyde Parkers aren't jumping at the opportunity. Even if such entrepreneurs could be found, allowing their operations to be subsidized would not guarantee that the real -- as opposed to imaginary community in Hyde Park -- gets what it needs.

The preference for "local" businesses typically stands in opposition to a distaste for "chains." This stance quickly becomes problematic. The natural tendency of a good business is to grow. As soon as you have more than one branch, you are technically a chain. Several of Hyde Park's most well-known "local" businesses are now chains: the Medici, Toys Etc., the Seminary Co-Op, Powell's Books. Istria, if it ever manages to open its Cornell Avenue location, will then be a chain, and may expand into the rest of Chicago. Intelligentsia, the much-loved, Chicago-based purveyors of fine coffees, now has branches in the Loop and is opening in Los Angeles.

The fixation on subsidizing "local" business assumes that the best of everything can be found in one very small neighborhood, and that it is therefore justifiable to keep non-local things out. This gets the cause-and-effect of vibrant neighborhoods backwards. Local neighborhoods, the kinds that people love to live in and that others come to visit, don't emerge out of purely local conditions. They have strong economies that draw in outsiders, both to open businesses and to patronize them.

The most distinctive neighborhood shopping districts in Chicago have very few chains: Damen in Bucktown between North and Armitage; Armitage and Halsted in south Lincoln Park; and Central Street in Evanston. All of these shopping districts are full of local businesses. Hyde Park should be trying to replicate these areas, not tinkering with a flawed and obsolete redevelopment concept.

But Harper Court isn't only flawed in terms of its redevelopment track record. It is flawed in the very nature of its layout and buildings. Harper Court looks like a ski lodge in Aspen, not like a part of Hyde Park. More generally, Harper Court embodies the 60s era of urban design, when the whole trend of things was to close oneself off, to look within, to establish buffers between a given site and the "outside." This was the spirit that animated the design of Urban Renewal itself, a spirit that was shared by the design of Harper Court.

Harper Avenue was cut off, making the complex difficult to access, find, or even see. The very idea of a "court" was foreign to Chicago, based as it is on a grid of walkable pedestrian thoroughfares with storefronts coming to and meeting the lot lines. Everything about Harper Court is intended to isolate it -- never a good idea for business. It is of the same vintage as the State Street pedestrian mall, and about as effective. City leaders had the good sense to reopen State Street, and it has flourished. The whole trend of modern urban design is to connect places, not to cut them off.

Harper Avenue should be reopened. The buildings of Harper Court, which should have outraged preservationists when they were first built, did not and still don't fit with the period architecture that surrounds them. They should be torn down and replaced. This site is too small to house the large number of tenants for which it was intended. Modern retail demands larger spaces for fewer tenants. Whatever assets belong to the Foundation should be liquidated and transferred to a Hyde Park Trust for the Arts. These monies could then be used to fund juried, competitive, competitions in the arts, which would sponsor projects in the neighborhood and throughout the City. By being juried and competitive, but based in Hyde Park, it would bring the best of the City and the nation here, instead of making public art the object of public committees devoted to local clients.

We don't need more top-down economic and cultural central-planning posing as community control. Merchants and shoppers are part of the community too, and right now they are not sufficiently represented.