Like it or not, you can’t think Hyde Park without also thinking University of Chicago. For as long as most of us can remember, this culture-rich south-side lakefront community—extending from 51st Street to Midway Plaisance and Cottage Grove Avenue to the lake—has been more like an elite college town dropped into a big and sometimes alien city than like, say, any of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods. Both Hyde Park and its neighbor, Kenwood (especially south of 47th Street) have been dominated by the university and—for better or worse—would not be what they are today without it.
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The Presbyterians refused, and the residential development proceeded without this crowning amenity. But nearly four decades later Cornell’s dream came true in a bigger way than even he could have imagined: the University of Chicago opened its doors on Midway Plaisance in 1892, and Hyde Park became the company town of one of the world’s truly distinguished universities.
While the University of Chicago is the 800-pound gargoyle, it’s not the only major force that shaped Hyde Park’s history. First was annexation to Chicago. When Cornell bought his property, Chicago ended at 39th Street. By 1861 his village was part of a township, also named Hyde Park, that extended all the way from the city’s southern border to 138th Street. In 1889 the township, which had grown rapidly but lacked adequate public services, voted to become part of Chicago, and the village of Hyde Park, whose residents were better served and mostly opposed annexation, was swept along.
In Cornell’s time Chicagoans traveled to Hyde Park for bucolic summer vacations; now it’s a five-minute zip down Lake Shore Drive from the Loop to its astounding treasures, from the mammoth Museum of Science and Industry to the mix of Gothic and modern architecture that makes up the still expanding campus, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House to the real home of the sitting American president. Today the university, which claims 85 Nobel laureates and 15 MacArthur “geniuses,” is Hyde Park’s largest landowner and business, with 15,000 students, about the same number of employees (including those at the medical center), and an annual budget of nearly $3 billion. The Court Theatre, Renaissance Society, Smart Museum, and Oriental Institute are all housed on the campus, and nonaffiliated institutions like the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Little Black Pearl art workshop (on 47th Street) benefit from its proximity, as do the annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival and the venerable 57th Street Art Fair. Hyde Parkers may pause on their way to a Doc Films screening or an Eighth Blackbird concert at Mandel Hall to chafe at the university’s immense power (currently on display in another “rehabilitation” project: the razing of the university-owned Harper Court shopping area), but they’re nearly all there because of it.
