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The neighborhood, which borders the lake front from 51st to 59th Streets and extends west to Washington Park, used to be a bohemian enclave, a tourist attraction for northsiders in search of a Saturday night thrill. Fifty-fifth Street was famous for its bars, where the jazz greats of the bebop era appeared; an artists’ and writers’ colony flourished here in the mid-1950s with the Compass Players and the Second City company. But there’s nothing bohemian about Hyde Park now, thanks to a university-backed urban renewal project that replaced most of the seedy, low-rent apartment buildings and storefronts with expensive townhouses and suburban-style shopping centers. The encircling black ghetto was kept at bay. Hyde Park remained a middle and upper-class preserve, and Grey Line busses began bringing tourists down to see “Chicago’s only stable, successfully integrated neighborhood.”
