Sunday, August 15, 2010

Progress Report

posted by Elizabeth Fama

A certain eagerly-anticipated new market/cafe on 57th Street will be having a soft opening sometime this week. These photos are only one day old, and already the interior is much more tidy and the shelves and refrigerators more stocked than this quick view suggests. Watch this space for a complete review when the store is fully armed and operational.


Mural on entry-way wall


Space for 8 tables.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Harold Washington Park Advisory Council Forming

Harold Washington Park

Harold Washington Advisory Council is having a kick-off meeting on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 6:30PM at the Hyde Park Art Center to discuss the establishment of an official Park Advisory Council for the Harold Washington Park.

All playground users, tennis players, nature lovers, walkers, and model boat fans are urged to attend to discuss the park area from 50th to 53rd Streets, Hyde Park Boulevard to Lake Shore Drive. We need you! Help make your park a better park.

For more information, call 773-752-5438.

Elm Park Bike Safety Clnic: August 21, 2010




Good idea. And one more thing: if you're riding a bike and are over 12 years old, please get off the sidewalk. It's the law.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Dreams of Her Father: Rebecca Janowitz's Hyde Park

posted by chicago pop




Rebecca Janowitz's recent book, Culture of Opportunity. Obama's Chicago: The People, Politics, and Ideas of Hyde Park, exemplifies its title. With the election of superstar Barack Obama to the Presidency in November, 2008, the opportunity was ripe for someone to make the most of Hyde Park's new-found fame and to clarify for a curious world, once and for all, just what bound the new President to his adopted neighborhood. Someone had to do it. Ms. Janowitz has. But she has also done much more than that.

She is disarmingly conscious of the stakes of her enterprise for the reputation of her small, relatively unknown neighborhood. She writes in the concluding lines of her book,

As Obama is judged during his presidency, Hyde Park will be judged. How helpful is the neighborhood's understanding of community, progress, and reform? In a real way, Obama's ascent is an opportunity for Hyde Park to showcase its ideals and its values, but it also creates a risk.

In my view, the gamble was well worth taking, and through her efforts the author has won for us a much-needed and densely argued book. It is not an antiquarian's collection of entertaining yarns and curious facts like much local history, but a semi-scholarly argument for what Janowitz believes to be a coherent tradition of reform that links the earliest activists of 19th century Hyde Park with its most illustrious living neighbor, the nation's 44th President.

Culture of Opportunity would be a welcome contribution to Chicago history and the history of various reform movements of the last 150 years without Barack Obama. But it is, in inspiration and conception, a book about Barack Obama, even if he himself remains largely unseen in the pages of the narrative. That is because he himself is less an actor in his own right -- it is too soon to tell, after all, what the significance of his story will be -- than a symbolic culmination of a small neighborhood's history, populated by a series of out sized figures, who between them passed along a sacred flame of justice and reform: from Paul Cornell, on to Charles Merriam, Mary McDowell, Julius Rosenwald, Leon Despres, Earl Dickerson, Paul Douglas, and perhaps most movingly, Harold Washington.

In one sense, I wish this worthy story had been told without reference to Obama. The opening chapter of the book, "Life in Hyde Park," while it succeeds in capturing certain intangibles of neighborhood life, is nonetheless preoccupied with the media controversies of Obama's campaign in a way that does not age well, nearly half-way through Obama's presidency. In the midst of an unpopular foreign war and the aftermath of the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history, the few pages devoted to distancing the President from the likes of Bill Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright seem irrelevant, more a settling of scores with forgotten right-wing bloggers or a dated marketing pitch than a solid perspective from which to launch an argument.

Culture of Opportunity is a book written by an insider who has worked very hard to promote the success of outsiders. Ms. Janowitz, unlike President Obama or several of the other star politicians she catalogs, is a native Hyde Parker who, as the dust-jacket blurb indicates, "has been active in Hyde Park affairs and in Chicago-area public service most of her adult life." Indeed, much of her argument is structured around the idea that Hyde Park is a unique incubator of outsiders who have left it with an equally unique culture of opposition, for reasons of geography, demography, and institutional affiliation. It is possible to read the book and see the political destiny of 5th Ward Alderman Leon Despres -- immortal for having been the sole Alderman to oppose Mayor Richard J. Daley in his day -- foretold in the plotting of Hyde Park as a gracious garden suburb, far from yet cautiously linked to the squalor and vice of Chicago.

To Hyde Park's insider-outsider dynamic, which helped to root early Progressive, pedagogical, labor, feminist, and socialist causes in the neighborhood, was eventually added an overriding concern with racial justice. This latter concern provides the lens through which Culture of Opportunity is written, and it clearly owes much to the author's father. We are introduced to Morris Janowitz early on, who the author describes as a Jewish war veteran. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Janowitz père wrote a dissertation for the University of Chicago's Sociology Department after World War II, before becoming a professor at the same institution and pursuing research comparing European anti-Semitism and American racism. "To Janowitz ... [racists] were close cousins of the recently defeated fascists of Europe, a problem left over from the war, waiting to be solved." Something like the election of Barack Obama, which provides the book with its raison d'être,was literally the dream of its author's father.

No book can explore every dimension of a problem and still sell to general readers. Occasionally, however, unarticulated themes emerge so powerfully from the evidence itself that the reader wonders why they were not conceptualized. Morris Janowtiz is among the first of a list of persons mentioned in the book, including Julius Rosenwald, Leon Despres, Emil Hirsch, Abner Mikva, Arnold Wolf, and others, who have one thing in common: they were Jewish. "By 1950," we learn in Chapter 5, Hyde Park-Kenwood's "largest ethnic group, about 40 percent, were Jews of European descent." And again on the back book flap: "The willingness of Hyde Parkers, especially progressive Jews, to rally behind Harold Washington helped him to become Chicago's first black mayor."

As much as we might be interested to know how Obama's career was assembled and tested in Hyde Park, the details listed above point to an equally interesting question, related to the first, but neglected by Janowitz: Why is it that Hyde Park-Kenwood came to host such a influential community of progressive, initially affluent Reform Jews? Why did so many Jews stay in Hyde Park after the War and through the period of racial turnover? And how did their particular understanding of racial politics shape the larger discourse, down to the successful presidential campagin of Barack Obama?

This seems like a less than negligible question. For over half the lifetime of the neighborhood Janowitz chronicles, American Jews were less than first-class citizens, however affluent some of them became. This is well known, but the dynamics of this particular struggle are shadowed by the focus on Barack Obama as the teleology of American racial politics. Culture of Opportunity may arguably be read as the story of black emancipation as it played out in Hyde Park, through a Jewish-American lens. It would be interesting to turn the eyeglass back the other way.

And this is where the risks identified by Janowitz at her book's conclusion become most apparent. For as much as Hyde Parkers think of their community as racially "diverse," in reality, it does not reflect the changing ethnic face of America. There is more diversity within a quarter mile radius of Devon and Western, or Irving Park and Cicero, than in all of Hyde Park-Kenwood. The uniqueness of Hyde Park politics may have been instrumental in propelling Obama to the presidency, but the Hyde Park "model" -- which Janowitz carefully admits has not been replicable -- may be limited in its extension to a nation that is less and less defined as black and white. The fact that Obama chose "black" as his identity on the 2010 census reflects less the global, cosmopolitan reality of his biography, than the distillation of this experience into a much simpler -- and somewhat falsified -- South Side Chicago dichotomy.

There is some sense of this limitation in the European response to Obama, swinging as it has from initial enthusiasm to subsequent disillusionment, at least among spokespersons for various social democratic positions. In reading the comment sections of a variety of left-leaning European papers, it is not uncommon to come across statements such as: "Well, just because the color of his skin is black, doesn't mean he will change everything." At a global level, Obama's racial identity may turn out to be less important than the continuation of some of his predecessor's most controversial policies. What, then, of the Hyde Park model?

Hyde Park, drawing on its heritage and building on its precedents, helped to propel a talented black man to greatness. This is, for all intents and purposes, the central assertion of Culture of Opportunity. It is a persuasive one. Racial politics have defined Hyde Park politics for over half a century, so it only makes sense that the base of personal and institutional networks anchored in Hyde Park would serve as an incomparable resource to any liberal African American wishing to strike out on an ambitious political career. Hyde Park, much more so than the larger City of Chicago, can justifiably take pride in the role it played in launching Obama's career.

Whether the Hyde Park experience equipped the 44th President of the United States with the ability to bring change about, rather than only symbolize it, remains an open question.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Herald Goes Green, Recycles Letters to the Editor

posted by richard gill



Refer to "Letters to the Editor" in the two most recent issues of the Hyde Park Herald (July 28, p. 4 and August 4, p. 4). Each contains (in first position or as the sole entry) virtually the same letter from Graham Romeyn Taylor Jr. and Jean Taylor Kroeber. The two letters take the same position on the same subject, (Chicago Theological Seminary building) with largely the same arguments and a lot of identical phrases. Neither letter is actually written to the Herald’s Editor; each is directed to a different third party and copied to the Herald.

Now, the Taylors have the right to try hammering their position home twice in a row in the same forum. And the Herald, well it’s their silly paper, and they can print what they want, as many times as they want. But printing both letters—in consecutive issues yet—is a bit much, even for the Herald.

An example, from the letter to CTS President Rev. Alice Hunt printed in the Hyde Park Herald:

As the grandchildren of Graham Taylor, we have been disturbed to learn through friends in Hyde Park and articles in the Hyde Park Herald that as a consequence of the sale of the Chicago Theological Seminary campus to the University of Chicago, Graham Taylor Hall may be completely altered and its legacy obliterated. While we understand that the University of Chicago is now in the position of making decisions about the Seminary buildings, we feel that there are strong reasons for you to exert pressure to have Graham Taylor Hall given landmark status and to preserve it intact for both its historical and architectural significance.


In case you didn't get it the first time, compare the above with the letter to University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer printed in the Hyde Park Herald of August 4:

As grandchildren of Graham Taylor, we have been made aware through residents of Hyde Park and articles in the Hyde Park Herald of the University of Chicago’s purchase of the Chicago Theological Seminary campus and the proposed creation there of an expanded Milton Firedman [sic] Economic research Center...While we understand the university’s need for space and the desirability of moving with the times, it is extremely disturbing to us that the legacy of someone who was so closely associated with the founding ideals of the University of Chicago, as well as being instrumental in bringing the theological seminary national standing, should be in danger of being obliterated. We would have hoped that for both historical and architectural reasons the university would have considered this building for landmark status.
Printing one of the letters makes the point. Printing both, so prominently, is a bit of a joke. It implies that readers aren’t smart enough to read an argument once and comprehend it. It also says that nobody will recognize that the Herald is promoting its own views by seizing on someone else’s material. Were there no other letters that might have been printed, on this or other subjects? If indeed nobody thought it was worth the effort to write a letter, that’s indicative of the joke that the Herald has become.

Speaking of jokes, I did get a chuckle out of the spelling “Milton Firedman” in the August 4 letter.

Any more softballs? We’re in the batter’s box, ready to swing.

Cornell Avenue Gets a Sidewalk!

posted by chicago pop




One of the lesser-known barriers cutting off Hyde Park from the rest of the world is the absence of a sidewalk along Cornell Avenue as it runs along Burnham Park from 49th to 47th Streets.

This leafy stretch, which in summer offers the rudiments of a Madison County fantasy to motorists, has also acted as a green buffer zone between the Indian Village area and 47th Street. As anyone who drives this road can tell you, the lack of a sidewalk forces pedestrians to walk in the street year round, sharing space with vehicles often moving at high speed in both directions.

Laying down a sidewalk along this stretch is therefore a long-overdue but major improvement in pedestrian safety, walkability, and connectedness with the rest of Chicago. Bravo to whatever arm of City bureaucracy (or perhaps the 4th Ward Alderman?) is making this happen -- if they can do this, surely they can fix a bus stop that doubles as a bottomless pit!




Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Bus Stops of Hyde Park


posted by chicago pop


Don't fall in!

CTA Bus Stop, 4th Ward
51st and Cornell Avenue

Alderman Hairston Loiters, Positively

posted by chicago pop



It's time once again for the "5th Ward Report," that bulletin of momentous achievements taking place on a quarterly basis in the 5th Ward. Here's the money quote from the "Summer 2010" issue in case you didn't get a copy:

I am very heartened by the response of block clubs, organizations and individuals to my call for a schedule of weekly “Safe Summer” positive loitering activities. Our office has sponsored several events under this theme, such as the July 4 fireworks celebration and viewing party at the 63rd Street Beach.
When we read in this issue about the Alderman's efforts to promote "positive loitering," we were delighted that she had found such a felicitous phrase to describe her tenure, and wondered if it might catch on among other members of the City Council.

Yet imagine our disillusionment when we learned that "positive loitering" was not intended to describe Hairston's aldermanic activity, but that of the mysterious cohort invited to the "July 4 fireworks celebration and viewing party at 63rd Street Beach."

When you've bought city property for your own purposes, you get to control the guest list. We also suspect that "positive loitering" is the updated criminology term for "bread and circuses." The cost of such viewing parties must explain why no work has been done to repair most of 56th Street, and a good chunk of University Avenue, which continue to resemble the craters of the Moon.

With regard to the public lot at 55th Street and Lake Shore Drive, we read this:

Leslie Hairston allocated a portion of the ward's aldermanic menu money to provide some relief from [potholes on 56th Street ... NOT] pay and display boxes the Park District installed along and near the lakefront...The Ward Service Office has been issuing parking permits to residents who live near the 55th Street lot.

"Ward Service Office?" Who do you have to know to get a call back from those guys? Now Hairston's office is not only issuing invitations to view fireworks on city lots, but is also deciding just who gets long-term permits, essentially turning a public lot into a private stall for certain ward residents. Just how does one come upon this particular authority?


And finally, among the collection of other pat-self-on-back items, "5th Ward Report" does not fail to highlight the Shoreland and Hairston's (not quite clear) role in keeping it moving, quoting an Antheus representative on the “support and ongoing work of Ald. Leslie Hairston for helping preserve one of the great buildings in the ward.” Left out, of course, is whatever it was that the good folks of 5490 managed to extort from Antheus in terms of parking benefits in the little game of chicken authorized by the 5th Ward Alderman.

Some day we'll find out, but it won't be the "5th Ward Report".