King College Prep High School
4445 South Drexel Blvd
Chicago, Illinois 60653
Phone: 773-535-1180
4445 South Drexel Blvd
Chicago, Illinois 60653
Phone: 773-535-1180
Friday, November 5, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
Chicago and the Opium of the Developers
posted by chicago pop
Fantasy Real Estate: Chicago's Latest Virtual Reality Game.Beautiful Renderings Cost Nothing and Keep Stakeholders In a Trance -- But For How Long?
To read the news about all the great development projects the Chicago city council is approving, you wouldn't think that home foreclosures and unemployment continue to be a record highs, that state and local government are running enormous deficits, and that the numbers on all of these might shoot up to even greater heights if, as it very well might, the economy tumbles into a "double-dip" recession.
If you are a bureaucrat in the City Department of Planning, or a city council member in a city that has no money, and you therefore have nothing to do, but are still getting paid (somehow) to show up, it can't hurt to approve grandiose projects that will get Blair Kamin and the Tribune all excited, even if there's no realistic way some of these things will happen in less than 10 year's time -- 20 year's time if we're pessimistic. That's the kind of hole we're in. It's about this big:
Glory Days Gone Past, or, Chicago's Real Estate Crater
[source: Curbed Chicago http://chicago.curbed.com/archives/2010/10/09/chicago-spire-developer-hit-with-77m-foreclosure-suit.php]
Other cases abound. Remember the exotic 90 floor Shangri La Hotel on Wacker and Clark, the one that is now an empty 26 story shell that will most likely be the first Loop building to be demolished in almost half a century? "Solstice in the Park," the cutting edge green building that was supposed to go up on the corner of Cornell and 56th, doesn't even have a hole in the ground, though it is probably demolished in concept. Optimists will note that it is apparently still listing 8 units for sale, with construction to start "in 2012".
The new blog Curbed Chicago gives a sense of the split personality that still pervades Chicago's real estate world, with posts detailing the ever bigger graveyard of pre-crash projects like the New City "mixed-use development [that] was to have 490 residential units and 370,000 square feet of retail" at North and Clyborn, alongside euphoric posts and splashy renderings of what we supposedly can still expect "as soon as the market turns around," as if the Great Recession is just another downturn and we just need to wait for consumers to start spending again.
"The Next Generation" of Downtown Development
[source: Curbed Chicago http://chicago.curbed.com/archives/2010/11/01/the-next-generation-of-proposed-office-towers-in-the-loop.php#more]
The above monster, together with three others, adds "more than 2.5 million square feet of commercial space" to the market in Chicago, suggesting just how far some of the local real estate moguls still have to fall to get to post-crash reality. Loathe to sacrifice the model that has driven its success since the reign of the first Mayor Daley and his famous commitment to the downtown business elite, for these guys it is still onward and upward. Witness the Tribune Blair Kamin in a review of a recently approved "plan" for the vast (bigger than the Loop) abandoned US Steel Yard:
Plans for the old US Steel Yards: $98 million in pre-project infrastructure approved by City Council (from what pot of gold?); $4 billion final cost
[source: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2010/09/the-new-plan-for-old-lakefront-steel-works-its-bold-strokes-are-worthy-of-burnham-but-god-or-the-dev.html]
I am imagining it, and that's likely all I will be able to do as far as this project is concerned for about another 25 years. Reality check, anyone?
So when I see glossy renderings for more local projects, like the Vermilion Development Inc plans for Harper Court (12-story, 150,000-square-foot office building, about 100,000 square feet for retailers and parking for 435), or even the more humble "Shops and Lofts" at 47th and Cottage Grove, which will supposedly host an Aldi and 140 units of affordable and CHA rental housing, I have to wonder.
The truth is, and it hurts to say this, as much as the University of Chicago wants to build out the neighborhood at Harper Court and 53rd, they may have missed their chance. That chance was a 20-year window of opportunity that, for some reason or another, was squandered in the likes of Doctors Hospital type fiascoes in which a major institutional power got its arse whooped in the valleys of the local neighborhood Afghanistan. We are likely to live with things as they now stand until our kids move away to college, we move out of the neighborhood for other jobs, or we are dead.
Such gaps in the geological record of American real estate are not unheard of. Around 50th and Cornell, near the popular Istria cafe, there are a cluster of high-rise buildings built in the 1920s. They are gorgeous and speak to the confidence of the age that built them, loaded with the kinds of finishes and craftsmanship that you don't find in residential buildings today. Most of these towers only have windows on two or three sides, because the developers expected neighboring towers of equal ambition and height to go up beside them.
Those other towers never materialized, and the window-less building faces are now mute brick walls to the rest of the neighborhood. The next buildings to appear were built roughly a quarter century later, in the 1950s.
We may be looking at something comparable this time around, and it's not clear that Antheus or the University of Chicago or anybody else will be able to convince enough Sam Zell-type testosterone jockeys, shell-shocked banks or private equity high-rollers to put money into projects that will add hundreds of condos or offices that, right now, no one wants. The suburban empty nesters that were once selling their split-level homes to buy condos in the South Loop probably aren't going to make any moves for a while.
So, by all means, make no small plans, as is only right in the city of Daniel Burnham. But someone should do us the favor of explaining how all of this stuff will get built in an economy that is not going to reset at "2006" anytime soon, if ever.
If you are a bureaucrat in the City Department of Planning, or a city council member in a city that has no money, and you therefore have nothing to do, but are still getting paid (somehow) to show up, it can't hurt to approve grandiose projects that will get Blair Kamin and the Tribune all excited, even if there's no realistic way some of these things will happen in less than 10 year's time -- 20 year's time if we're pessimistic. That's the kind of hole we're in. It's about this big:
Glory Days Gone Past, or, Chicago's Real Estate Crater[source: Curbed Chicago http://chicago.curbed.com/archives/2010/10/09/chicago-spire-developer-hit-with-77m-foreclosure-suit.php]
Other cases abound. Remember the exotic 90 floor Shangri La Hotel on Wacker and Clark, the one that is now an empty 26 story shell that will most likely be the first Loop building to be demolished in almost half a century? "Solstice in the Park," the cutting edge green building that was supposed to go up on the corner of Cornell and 56th, doesn't even have a hole in the ground, though it is probably demolished in concept. Optimists will note that it is apparently still listing 8 units for sale, with construction to start "in 2012".
The new blog Curbed Chicago gives a sense of the split personality that still pervades Chicago's real estate world, with posts detailing the ever bigger graveyard of pre-crash projects like the New City "mixed-use development [that] was to have 490 residential units and 370,000 square feet of retail" at North and Clyborn, alongside euphoric posts and splashy renderings of what we supposedly can still expect "as soon as the market turns around," as if the Great Recession is just another downturn and we just need to wait for consumers to start spending again.
"The Next Generation" of Downtown Development[source: Curbed Chicago http://chicago.curbed.com/archives/2010/11/01/the-next-generation-of-proposed-office-towers-in-the-loop.php#more]
The above monster, together with three others, adds "more than 2.5 million square feet of commercial space" to the market in Chicago, suggesting just how far some of the local real estate moguls still have to fall to get to post-crash reality. Loathe to sacrifice the model that has driven its success since the reign of the first Mayor Daley and his famous commitment to the downtown business elite, for these guys it is still onward and upward. Witness the Tribune Blair Kamin in a review of a recently approved "plan" for the vast (bigger than the Loop) abandoned US Steel Yard:
Plans for the old US Steel Yards: $98 million in pre-project infrastructure approved by City Council (from what pot of gold?); $4 billion final cost[source: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2010/09/the-new-plan-for-old-lakefront-steel-works-its-bold-strokes-are-worthy-of-burnham-but-god-or-the-dev.html]
Imagine: Sleek residential high-rises lining a vast industrial slip where ore boats delivered the raw materials for steel-making. A new park built over the foundations of a massive open hearth. A broad extension of South Shore Drive that would be an urban boulevard. Parks and alleys that would channel stormwater into Lake Michigan instead of the city’s sewers.
I am imagining it, and that's likely all I will be able to do as far as this project is concerned for about another 25 years. Reality check, anyone?
So when I see glossy renderings for more local projects, like the Vermilion Development Inc plans for Harper Court (12-story, 150,000-square-foot office building, about 100,000 square feet for retailers and parking for 435), or even the more humble "Shops and Lofts" at 47th and Cottage Grove, which will supposedly host an Aldi and 140 units of affordable and CHA rental housing, I have to wonder.
The truth is, and it hurts to say this, as much as the University of Chicago wants to build out the neighborhood at Harper Court and 53rd, they may have missed their chance. That chance was a 20-year window of opportunity that, for some reason or another, was squandered in the likes of Doctors Hospital type fiascoes in which a major institutional power got its arse whooped in the valleys of the local neighborhood Afghanistan. We are likely to live with things as they now stand until our kids move away to college, we move out of the neighborhood for other jobs, or we are dead.
Such gaps in the geological record of American real estate are not unheard of. Around 50th and Cornell, near the popular Istria cafe, there are a cluster of high-rise buildings built in the 1920s. They are gorgeous and speak to the confidence of the age that built them, loaded with the kinds of finishes and craftsmanship that you don't find in residential buildings today. Most of these towers only have windows on two or three sides, because the developers expected neighboring towers of equal ambition and height to go up beside them.
Those other towers never materialized, and the window-less building faces are now mute brick walls to the rest of the neighborhood. The next buildings to appear were built roughly a quarter century later, in the 1950s.
We may be looking at something comparable this time around, and it's not clear that Antheus or the University of Chicago or anybody else will be able to convince enough Sam Zell-type testosterone jockeys, shell-shocked banks or private equity high-rollers to put money into projects that will add hundreds of condos or offices that, right now, no one wants. The suburban empty nesters that were once selling their split-level homes to buy condos in the South Loop probably aren't going to make any moves for a while.
So, by all means, make no small plans, as is only right in the city of Daniel Burnham. But someone should do us the favor of explaining how all of this stuff will get built in an economy that is not going to reset at "2006" anytime soon, if ever.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Spookiest Buildings in Hyde Park-Kenwood: A Halloween Special
posted by chicago pop
If you're serious about Halloween, here is HPP's list of the top spookiest houses in Hyde Park-Kenwood. No guarantee that they're haunted, but they sure look like they ought to be (and with good reason in the case of our #1 pic below).
#1. Franks Family Mansion, 2007Kenwood Home of Robert "Bobby" Franks
Big, empty, falling-apart Kenwood mansion two blocks from the home of the President of the United States. But also the home of the poor soul, Robert "Bobby" Franks, the adolescent boy murdered by the most infamous U of C alums in history: Leopold and Loeb. Strangely enough, this tragic site was recently a preschool. The sign still hangs on a plywood board nailed over a window facing 51st Street. Very spooky.
#2. Spooky House on Blackstone & 56thThis house really does look like the classic, Hollywood version of the haunted Victorian mansion, complete with corner turret for strange lights to shine forth at night, ample attic for chain-dragging poltergeists, and an overgrown yard that will keep people from getting in ... or getting out.
#3. Spooky Apartment Building on Hyde Park Boulevardat Harold Washington Park
One day this building upped and went empty. For awhile its yard was completely overgrown, but the vegetation was recently cut back, diminishing the spookiness. It has more of a serial killer as opposed to tormented ghost vibe. Spooky, for sure.
And of course ...
#4. St. Stephens Church
And of course ...
#4. St. Stephens ChurchDown in the basement, with all the rats ... very, very spooky. And for sale.
Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween!
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Elegy Written by a Vacant Lot; or, The Lament of Hans Morsbach (A Prose Poem)
posted by chicago pop
"There is a need to have sensible local citizens to have a good relationship with the University. I am not among them."
-- Hans Morsbach, October 24, 2010
From: Hans Morsbach
Date: October 24, 2010 5:32:33 PM CDT
Subject: Re: [Good Neighbors] Anybody know anything about this?
I have been getting the invitation for years but have not been attending for a while. It is in the President's home and attended by folks from the University engaged in neighborhood matters and local citizens. There are fewer people I know than there used to be and I would probably feel like a stranger if I went. Somebody in the UfC's neighborhood staff has singled you out to be a significant citizen. The affair was more useful in the past when there were more UFC persons who cared about the neighborhood and lived in Hyde Park. I have a feeling that they have been replaced with folks who have a bean-counter mentality and like to convert old buildings, mess up the Point, and use the community garden as a building site. Some old UfC people working on neighborhood matters have left the Univisersity, some with bad feelings. I have been in the neighborhood for fifty years and have, at this time, no University contacts. I had lunch once with Lipinski and once with Sonya. I have no contact with anybody whom I know well enough to call and chat about neighborhood matters. I think the University is loosing its connection with local citizens. Somebody should point it out to President Zimmer. There is a need to have sensible local citizens to have a good relationship with the University. I am not among them.
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 10:54 AM, XXXX wrote:
I also received this very tersely worded invitation and had already planned
to call the University on Monday to find out more about this event. I am on
at least three University mailing lists, and it would also be interesting to
find out which one is the source for sending me the invitation.
When I find out more about this event, I will let you know.
XXXX
----- Original Message -----
To: "goodneighbors"
Sent: Sunday, October 24, 2010 05:45
Subject: [Good Neighbors] Anybody know anything about this?
Dear Goodneighbors,Subject: [Good Neighbors] Anybody know anything about this?
Came home last night to find an invitation from the "president of the U of
C"
inviting me to "a Reception in Recognition of Community Leadership". Has
anyone else gotten this? Who are we going to recognize? For what?
XXXX
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
How to Save Shoesmith Elementary School
HPP passes on the following:
Hello Shoesmith School friends and neighbors,
Thanks for your interest in getting involved at Shoesmith. There are some opportunities coming up that I’d like to tell you about:
First, Shoesmith’s Community Days will be held October 26, 27, and 28. Choose one of these days to tour the school, observe classes, and talk with administrators and each other about the school’s needs and possibilities. The goal here is to learn more about the school and to begin organizing as a community to support and improve Shoesmith.
If you’re interested, please e-mail me and let me know which day you would like to attend; we have room for around six participants per day. Stay tuned for a Community Day agenda, which should be coming to you by October 13. For now, I would recommend setting aside roughly 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. for the Community Day experience.
Second, I’m pleased to announce a great event at The Church of Saint Paul and the Redeemer on Sunday, October 17 at 3:00 p.m. Jacqueline Edelberg, author of How to Walk to School, will speak. She was instrumental in turning around Nettelhorst School on the Northside; her message is one of empowering communities to reclaim their local public schools. After that, Ellen Lorden, a CPS parent and the former community relations liaison under Arne Duncan, will speak. Ellen brings a wealth of knowledge about different public school choices, how to apply, things to consider.
Representatives from local public elementary schools—including Shoesmith—will be on hand to answer questions and chat with folks about how they can support their schools.
We think this event will be of interest to:
1. Parents considering sending their child to CPS, whether as a new student or a transfer student;
2. Neighbors who wish to learn how to work with and improve their local public school;
3. Staff at the local public schools who wish to work with their neighbors;
4. Anyone who needs a good does of enthusiasm and optimism.
I’ve attached an event flier. We definitely need help posting these. Let me know if you’d like to help or just go ahead and print and post some.
And please feel free to forward this message on to folks who might be interested!
Thanks and enjoy the weekend,
Eva Nielsen
Shoesmith School LSC, community representative
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Tell Me Who To Vote For
posted by chicago popFor once, I want you to tell me something. I want you to tell me who to vote for, or who I should want to vote for, or who I should want to have installed by appointment -- whichever may be the most appropriate scenario --as my 4th Ward Alderperson.
Because, as we all know, Toni Preckwinkle is on her way up and out, on to higher things. Last Saturday the Tribune endorsed our wonderful 4th Ward Alderperson in her race for President of Cook County Board. Good-bye old-time black South Side Democratic machine, hello black Hyde Park reformer. We wish her the best of luck, but are mostly sorry to see her go because we have no idea what the hay is going to happen to our dear 4th Ward, which we'd prided ourselves on telling people was an island of sanity next to an atoll of utter, involuted stasis, careerism, and mammoth, out-of-control community organizations (the 5th Ward) and flanked, until quite recently, by the carnivalesque hats of Dorothy Tillman.
So who are all these folks clamoring to take all my phone complaints at the 4th Ward office? There's George Rumsey, who seems like a nice enough guy, with a soft spot for mums and bulbs, and a chip on his shoulder the size of the old US Steel yard for the University of Chicago; then there's some radio guy Norman Bolden whose claim-to-fame is that he owns a block of 43rd Street; and of course State Representative Will Burns is Preckwinkle's anointed successor, who looks like a clean-cut kind of guy, but I've never heard of him.
Have I missed anyone? Surely I have. Someone help me out here.
Because, as we all know, Toni Preckwinkle is on her way up and out, on to higher things. Last Saturday the Tribune endorsed our wonderful 4th Ward Alderperson in her race for President of Cook County Board. Good-bye old-time black South Side Democratic machine, hello black Hyde Park reformer. We wish her the best of luck, but are mostly sorry to see her go because we have no idea what the hay is going to happen to our dear 4th Ward, which we'd prided ourselves on telling people was an island of sanity next to an atoll of utter, involuted stasis, careerism, and mammoth, out-of-control community organizations (the 5th Ward) and flanked, until quite recently, by the carnivalesque hats of Dorothy Tillman.
So who are all these folks clamoring to take all my phone complaints at the 4th Ward office? There's George Rumsey, who seems like a nice enough guy, with a soft spot for mums and bulbs, and a chip on his shoulder the size of the old US Steel yard for the University of Chicago; then there's some radio guy Norman Bolden whose claim-to-fame is that he owns a block of 43rd Street; and of course State Representative Will Burns is Preckwinkle's anointed successor, who looks like a clean-cut kind of guy, but I've never heard of him.
Have I missed anyone? Surely I have. Someone help me out here.
Hyde Park Oktoberfest!
Hyde Park Oktoberfest: It doesn't get any better than this.Hey, there's a beer festival in Ye Olde German-Towny Hyde Park, complete with Bavarian views of alpine Lake Michigan, lots of jugs, lots of beer, some of it in jugs, and plenty of volkstümlich Gemütlichkeit of the kind only available in the neighborhood of Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama. What the hell, it's a beer festival, people. There used to be Germans down here. Use your imagination.
Details:
Festivities along 53rd Street between Dorchester and Kimbark avenues include a beer garden, food vendors, live music from classic beer hall, brass bands like Akasha, Full Circle, and L.V. Banks, plus arts and crafts and export-oriented, precision machine tool technology, a pumpkin patch, and Germanic, beer-related kids activities, like bobbing for apples floating in large tubs of beer.
Where: Saturday October 9 11AM- 7PM
Cost: IT'S FREE!!!!
Event Phone Number: 773-324-6929
Cost: IT'S FREE!!!!
Event Phone Number: 773-324-6929
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Filling Empty Buildings with Art: Good Idea
posted by chicago pop
Not a bad idea at all.
From the Hyde Park Alliance for Art and Culture's news blog:
From the Hyde Park Alliance for Art and Culture's news blog:
Coming to 53rd Street … Art Here Art Now
September 4, 2010
Most of us have a fairly romantic view of the life of artists. The picture that comes to mind is often bohemian, carefree and set apart from society. But the actual life of artists is vastly different. Like anyone else whose job it is to produce – artists need space.
Enter Art Here Art Now…
… which represents the confluence of desires to see artists at work in the community. The result is a shared work space featuring three artists in the throws of their creative process. Beginning on October 1, Melissa Weber, Cydney Lewis, and Marty Burns will occupy the corner storefront in the building at 53rd Street and Harper Avenue in Hyde Park on Chicago’s Culture Coast. The studio will be open for visiting and interacting with all three artists as you watch their creativity in action every Saturday, in October, from 1 to 5pm.
The idea is not to present a finished product; it’s more for people to see how things change and to see what gets created.
In addition, Art Here Art Now will feature art installations from local artists Andre Callot, Danielle Paz, Jillian Soto and Peter Zeigler available for viewing any time in the windows along 53rd Street.
Art Here Art Now is a project initiated by local artist and Hyde Park Art Center board member Melissa Weber and is presented by HyPa and the University of Chicago.
Melissa said she is really excited for Hyde Park because this project is a great example of what needs to be done with space in the neighborhood and what art can bring to the neighborhood – making art accessible and part of people’s lives.
Give a New Name to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club: Take the Survey
For over a century The Hyde Park Neighborhood Club has provided much needed programming, service and training to our community. As we enter our second century we are taking a look at what we do and how we can continue to serve the youth of the Hyde Park Neighborhood.
As the needs of our community change we want to make sure our name reflects that of our renewed mission and clearly communicates our continuing dedication to your children. Hyde Park Neighborhood Club has evolved, grown and changed names before.
Please help us make an informed decision and let us know what you think of the current name, suggestions for potential replacements or just give us your thoughts about our organization.
Take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HPNC_Survey
As the needs of our community change we want to make sure our name reflects that of our renewed mission and clearly communicates our continuing dedication to your children. Hyde Park Neighborhood Club has evolved, grown and changed names before.
Please help us make an informed decision and let us know what you think of the current name, suggestions for potential replacements or just give us your thoughts about our organization.
Take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HPNC_Survey
Thoughts From East Hyde Park
posted by richard gill
Two community relations officers of the 21st Police District attended the September 15 meeting of the East Hyde Park Committee. The 21st regularly sends officers to these meetings, to answer questions and discuss various issues.
This valuable service may no longer be available, because the district's community relations staff is being reduced from six officers to two. The reason for this is understandable—the officers are being reassigned to patrol duties as part of an effort to have more police presence on the street. But it short-changes community relations work, which is critically important in a big city.
This move illustrates just how tightly stretched the Chicago police are at this point. The root problem, of course, is money, and the city has none. There are places to look for money to hire more police. A good start would be reducing the number of political wards from 50 to 20, which would save the pay of 30 aldermen and perhaps 100 ward staffers. Then, take away, or at least reduce and restrict, aldermanic "menu" money, some of which is put to good use, but much of which is frittered away on stuff that just helps aldermen get reelected. (Can you spell "Free Parking and Positive Loitering?")
Two community relations officers of the 21st Police District attended the September 15 meeting of the East Hyde Park Committee. The 21st regularly sends officers to these meetings, to answer questions and discuss various issues.
This valuable service may no longer be available, because the district's community relations staff is being reduced from six officers to two. The reason for this is understandable—the officers are being reassigned to patrol duties as part of an effort to have more police presence on the street. But it short-changes community relations work, which is critically important in a big city.
This move illustrates just how tightly stretched the Chicago police are at this point. The root problem, of course, is money, and the city has none. There are places to look for money to hire more police. A good start would be reducing the number of political wards from 50 to 20, which would save the pay of 30 aldermen and perhaps 100 ward staffers. Then, take away, or at least reduce and restrict, aldermanic "menu" money, some of which is put to good use, but much of which is frittered away on stuff that just helps aldermen get reelected. (Can you spell "Free Parking and Positive Loitering?")
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 ParkHarold 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,
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.
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.
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