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Hyde Park
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Neighborhood Promotion and Neighborhood Map Thumbnail
Explore This Neighborhood
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Hyde Park continued...
On a wall, framed, are a pair of tickets for a 1928 football game between the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. Not mentioned: The Maroons beat the Fighting Illini 40-17 that day before 48,714 in Stagg Field. The U of C dropped big-time football after beating Illinois one last time in 1939 -- and we'll get to Stagg Field in a bit.
Walking south on Woodlawn - Hyde Park is a wonderful walking neighborhood of shaded sidewalks and grand residences - apartments soon give way to houses, many built around 1900. At the northeast corner of 58th Street is one unlike the others.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house for the Robie family. Completed in 1910, Robie House is considered by many Wright's quintessential Prairie Style residence. There are tales here, beginning with the Robies moving out in 1911; guided and self-guided tours tell some of them, all irresistible to anyone who cares at all about architecture or stained glass or uncomfortable chairs.
Across the street is the home of the University's Booth School of Business - interesting to nonstudents because it's a virtual mirror image of Robie House, only larger and in poured concrete instead of brick.
Stroll south to the end of the 5800 block, and we get a first look at the Midway - formal name, the Midway Plaisance - a parkway, with its own history, that connects Jackson Park with Washington Park. Jackson Park, much of it within the Hyde Park boundaries, is home to the Museum of Science and Industry and, before that, was site of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The Midway was..."the midway," with all the freak shows and distractions of the time.
Washington Park is home to the DuSable Museum of African American History and Lorado Taft's massive sculpture, "Fountain of Time." (You can walk there from here. Remember what we said earlier about "neighboring communities"? There's more to come.)
Look right, and you see the University's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, a spiritual center, performance venue and yet another architectural jewel. Walk west to the end of the block, take a right onto University Avenue - and soon the University's quadrangles open to you, on your left, in all their Oxfordian splendor.
Across from the Quad, at the southeast corner of University and 58th Street, is the Oriental Institute. A research institution linked to, among others, the fictional archeologist "Indiana" Jones, its museum is in some ways a junior version of London's British Museum. See it. Its rooms are filled with artifacts of ancient civilizations, including a huge sculpture of King Tut.
Continue north on University and, a few yards up the next block, look left and see the Regenstein Library. Here sat Stagg Field; in 1942, almost exactly a year after Pearl Harbor, scientists created the world's first nuclear chain-reaction. A Henry Moore statue near the spot commemorates the event that launched the atomic age...
All this - and we've only just tickled Hyde Park.
The University of Chicago dominates the community economically (it owns much of it) and culturally (the neighborhood is noted for its tolerance and civility, in a way an extension of the school).
The resident college community brings with it an interest in the arts. The Smart Museum and Renaissance Society are home to world-class paintings, drawings and sculpture; the Court Theatre is home to first-rate productions of all kinds, from Shakespeare to musicals.
Restaurants range from La Petite Folie (classic French) to jazz-inspired eclectic (Park 52) to Middle Eastern comfort food (The Nile) to Caribbean-Cajun (Calypso Cafe, with some menu items from the departed Dixie Kitchen added) to down-home cafeteria (Valois, a Hyde Park institution and an Obama breakfast choice) and an art cafe (Medici on 57th, another Obama favorite).
And this, not surprisingly, is a community of independent bookstores, new and used, including Frontline Books & Craft, on Harper Avenue, one of only two African American bookstores in the city; and on 57th Street, O'Gara and Wilson Ltd., a used bookstore that's been here seemingly since Gutenberg was a boy and a Hyde Park gem.
Using Hyde Park for orientation, there's theKenwood neighborhood immediately north, site of President Obama's Chicago home (you may be able to get a distant peek; Secret Service personnel won't let you get too close) and yet more amazing houses, one a former home of Muhammad Ali and two early Frank Lloyd Wright designs.
Washington Park, directly west, contains not only the DuSable Museum and "Fountain of Time" but some of the best work of famed park designer Frederick Law Olmsted and Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham. Woodlawn's churches and redevelopment are a gateway to Grand Crossing's Oak Woods Cemetery, final resting place of, among others, Olympic legend Jesse Owens, Chicago mayor Harold Washington and thousands of Confederate soldiers who died at Camp Douglas, a Union prisoner of war camp. That camp was not far north of Kenwood near the present Bronzeville neighborhood, Chicago's former Black Metropolis, a onetime jazz and blues mecca enjoying a rebirth.
For more information about Hyde Park, contact:
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University of Chicago Campus Map
