Chicago, like other large American cities, expanded rapidly in population in the late nineteenth century. Not all of the growth was confined within municipal boundaries. Taking advantage of swift streetcar and railroad transportation, the middle and upper classes in increasing numbers abandoned urban neighborhoods for the comforts of suburban communities established five or ten miles away from the city center.
Real estate developer Paul Cornell sensed the importance of this trend and was one of the first in Chicago to promote the lure of suburban life. Planning an ideal commuter village, Cornell bought 300 acres of vacant lakefront land south of Chicago in 1853. Sixty acres were given to the Illinois Central Railroad on the condition that it extend its lines to the new community and build a station at what was to be called Hyde Park. Cornell provided his embryonic village with a church and public parkland. He also built a resort hotel on Lake Michigan at 53rd Street, where vacationing Chicagoans could take in the fresh air and scenery and learn the advantages of purchasing a lot in one of Cornell's nearby subdivisions.
Early residents of Hyde Park and its sister suburb to the north, Kenwood, were quick to provide their communities with the embellishments of a cultivated life. The Hyde Park Literary Society was formed along with the Kenwood Social Club, the Kenwood Tennis Club, the Lyceum, and the Philosophical Society. The Rosalie Music Hall on 57th Street offered a venue for various public meetings, lectures, concerts, and plays.
Within a few years, Chicago had grown large enough to absorb many surrounding suburbs, and the Town of Hyde Park itself was incorporated within the city in 1889. Now more an urban neighborhood than a suburban village, Hyde Park nonetheless maintained many of its distinctive characteristics. The great South Park system designed in its original form by Frederick Law Olmsted gave Hyde Park a magnificent green belt stretching along its southern periphery from Washington Park through the Midway Plaisance to Jackson Park on the lake. The World's Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park and along the Midway in 1893 brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to the south lakeshore, bringing with them a real estate boom and substantial residential and retail growth.
The opening of the new University of Chicago in 1892 on the southern edge of Hyde Park assured the community of an additional promotional advantage. Like Lake Forest, Evanston, and other Chicago suburbs, Hyde Park could now benefit from the prestige of an institution of higher education.
The increasing attractiveness of Hyde Park-Kenwood led many Chicago's of wealthiest businessmen, including University trustees Martin Ryerson, Harold Swift, and Julius Rosenwald, to build impressive homes in the area. They were joined by prosperous middle class families and by the great majority of University faculty, who were attracted by comfortable homes in an appealing neighborhood within walking distance of the campus. Their houses were frequently designed by firms with distinguished national and regional reputations: Frank Lloyd Wright, George W. Maher, Holabird and Roche, Wilson and Fox, Marshall and Fox, Alfred Alschuler, and Solon Beman among them.
Some of the architects who designed the University's Gothic buildings secured commissions for other work in Hyde Park. Henry Ives Cobb, the University's first architect and the creator of its campus plan, built three houses in Hyde Park in the 1890s, one for President William Rainey Harper. Dwight H. Perkins, whose "Prairie Gothic" design for Hitchcock Hall incorporated ornamentation based on Midwestern fauna, produced three Hyde Park residences. Howard Van Doren Shaw, the fashionable architect of many North Shore estates and the University's Quadrangle Club, executed more than fifteen commissions in the neighborhood, many of them sophisticated adaptations of traditional English manor houses.
Horace B. Mann, one of the principals of Mann, MacNeille & Lindberg and a brother of a University physics professor, led his firm to design four separate complexes of linked rowhouses that came to be called "professors' houses." Bordering shady Hyde Park streets and incorporating all the amenities of comfortable upper-middle-class life, these rowhouses epitomized the successful integration of a large university into a prosperous residential neighborhood.
Improvements in street car lines and more frequent rail service assured Hyde Park's connections with downtown Chicago. By the mid-1920s, the Illinois Central Railroad was running 165 trains daily to and from the neighborhood. Except for the area immediately around the University campus, Hyde Park's population was increasingly diversified. First- and second-generation German, Irish, Czech, Italian, and Polish immigrant families moved into the small workers' cottages vacated after the Columbian Exposition, while African-Americans found housing in restricted areas near the Illinois Central tracks and along alleyways. German and Russian Jews, who had migrated south from the Loop through a succession of neighborhoods, settled in Hyde Park-Kenwood in large numbers and by the end of the 1930s made up forty per cent of the neighborhood's population.
In the early decades of the century, Hyde Park also became a magnet for writers and artists, many of them representing Chicago's cultural avant-garde. In a cluster of wooden buildings along 57th Street and Stony Island Avenue formerly used as souvenir stands during the world's fair, a group of young bohemians congregated around the make-shift residence of writer and artist Floyd Dell. Among the others who became fixtures of this lively artists' colony were Margaret Anderson, founder of the influential Little Review; Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry Magazine, an assertive voice for modern expression; sometimes controversial realist writers and poets such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg; and journalists like Ben Hecht who were both participants in and publicists for the new movements in the arts.
Members of the University were among those who frequented the 57th Street colony and attended its readings and informal discussions. Writers Robert Herrick, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Morss Lovett, all members of the faculty, found common ground with social, intellectual, and literary concerns of the Chicago bohemians. Divinity School professor George Burman Foster was often seen in the 57th Street shopfronts, where he acquired a non-academic following as a champion of the philosophy of Nietzsche.
The University, for its part, offered frequent public lectures, concerts, and educational programs and made Hyde Park-Kenwood an attractive neighborhood for professionals with intellectual and cultural interests. Theodore Thomas and Frederick Stock, the first two conductors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, were among them. Many of these commuting professionals made their homes in high-rise luxury apartment buildings and residential hotels constructed between the Illinois Central tracks and the lakeshore or in substantial houses on side streets near the University campus.
Clarence Darrow, America's most celebrated defense attorney, lived in the Midway Apartment Hotel on 60th Street near Stony Island Avenue from his early days of practice as a corporate lawyer until his death in 1938. Among his notable cases was the 1924 defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Kenwood youths who were convicted of the premeditated murder of Bobby Franks, a neighborhood schoolboy. For Darrow, the University and the Hyde Park community provided an ideal intellectual environment in which to learn and test unconventional ideas. His home was a gathering place for University scholars and others who constituted an informal "biology club" that met to discuss current developments in biology, psychology, anthropology, geology, astronomy, and biblical interpretation.
Based perhaps on their spirited encounters in the biology club, Darrow and George Burman Foster met in 1919 for a series of public debates on religion at the Garrick Theater in Chicago's Loop. Later, in the 1930s, Darrow debated one of the University's most popular lecturers, his long-time friend, anthropologist Frederick Starr, on the topic, "Has the Human Race Justified Its Existence?" The biology club also served as a source of support for Darrow in 1925 during the famous "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee. Backing Darrow's successful defense of John Scopes and evolutionary theory were expert witness statements prepared by three friends on the University faculty: zoologist Horatio H. Newman, educator Charles H. Judd, and anthropologist Fay-Cooper Cole.
From 1920 through the era of urban renewal in the 1950s, Hyde Park began to experience the changes that were affecting all large cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Shifting patterns of economic growth, the burgeoning of far-distant suburbs, the great migration of African-Americans from the rural South, and the incipient flight of middle- and upper-class whites from the city all started to have their cumulative effect. Throughout these decades, Hyde Park maintained its reputation as a lively neighborhood that offered gracious living, a diversity of services, and the opportunity for spirited encounters with the latest in the arts and entertainment.
Muriel Beadle, in her memoir, Hyde Park: The Renewal Years (1964), described the University's neighborhood as having "a kind of mystique that has long affected ... residents, a certainty that its atmosphere is unique, that life is better and more stimulating than anywhere else." A leader in urban development in Hyde Park, she recounts how this feeling of distinction contributed to neighborhood renewal efforts. "It was the preservation of this `other world' that engaged the emotions and the energies of residents of Hyde Park-Kenwood and gave them the will to do what they have done."
Before 1950, ninety per cent of the University's faculty lived within walking distance of campus, but after that point a steady decline set in that lowered the number to seventy per cent by 1964. For members of the University community who were committed to remaining residents of Hyde Park-Kenwood, renewal offered the prospect of stabilizing an unpredictable pattern of mobility that threatened the character of the community.
By the late 1940s, economic and demographic changes had worn the social fabric of Hyde Park-Kenwood, raising fears that the neighborhood would be undermined by the deteriorating property and flight of residents that were already widespread in the surrounding areas. Maintenance of commercial and residential buildings had been postponed during the decade of the depression and the years of World War II. Buildings formerly occupied by middle- and upper-class families had been subdivided into small one- and two-room apartments and allowed to decline. As the density of poor residents rose, so did the problems of poverty and crime.
At the University, administrators faced a sixty per cent drop in student applications in the early 1950s and increasing difficulties in recruiting faculty. Rumors spread that the University was considering moving its campus out of Hyde Park. The Board of Trustees and administrators decided to intervene aggressively in the neighborhood before, as President George W. Beadle was to put it, "they...ended up with a $200 million investment in a slum, without anybody to do research or any students to educate."
Organized action to improve the neighborhood was launched in 1949 with the formation of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference (HPKCC). Drawing heavily for support on local churches and synagogues, the Conference chose a Unitarian minister as its first chairman. From the start, the Conference also maintained an interracial membership and addressed the tensions of race relations along with the problems of housing and crime. The emphasis of its programs was on assuring the neighborhood's future as a stable, prosperous, and integrated community.
In 1952, the University made its principal commitment to neighborhood renewal. A mass meeting called to discuss crime resulted in the appointment of a Committee of Five headed by University Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton and including community leaders such as Rabbi Louis L. Mann of Sinai Temple. The Committee in turn proposed the creation of a new coordinating organization to deal with the problems of Hyde Park and Kenwood as well as Oakland to the north and Woodlawn to the south. Accordingly, the South East Chicago Commission (SECC) was formed with Chancellor Kimpton as its chairman and Julian H. Levi, a corporate attorney and brother of Law School dean Edward H. Levi, as its executive director. The goals of the SECC were to increase police protection, enforce building codes, promote residential stability, and draw up a plan for the redevelopment of Hyde Park's most seriously deteriorated areas. Although the HPKCC and the SECC were often at odds over matters of policy, they shared a common interest in confronting controversial issues such as poverty, crime, residential displacement, urban planning, and racial integration, which few other urban communities in the early 1950s had addressed. With a grant from the Field Foundation, the University and SECC created a plan for redevelopment of an extensive area of Hyde Park centered on 55th Street and Lake Park Avenue. This plan was approved by federal, state, and city governments and received the strong support of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The initial stage of work, demolition of older substandard buildings, began in May 1955. By the summer of 1958, large tracts of land had been cleared, and construction got underway on new apartments, townhouses, and a shopping center.
The Hyde Park neighborhood redevelopment project was expensive and inevitably imperfect. Over 15,000 neighborhood residents were displaced as buildings considered substandard were torn down. Some of Hyde Park's historic nineteenth-century housing stock was lost, and the character of entire blocks and streets in the heart of the neighborhood was completely altered. The cost of the entire redevelopment effort in the area surrounding the University campus exceeded $300 million. The federal government, which regarded Hyde Park as an important testing ground for emerging urgan renewal strategies, provided $46 million for development projects. The University invested $29 million, and an additional $250 million was secured from private investors.
As one of the earliest massive efforts to reshape an American urban neighborhood, the Hyde Park-Kenwood renewal program received its full share of social, political, and architectural criticism. Some of the old, familiar graciousness and raucousness would have disappeared over time and could not have been preserved in Hyde Park any more than in any other vigorous city neighborhood. Yet, working in concert, Hyde Park residents and the University were singularly successful in constructing a formula for an economically stable and racially integrated community and in confirming the University's commitment to remain an urban institution.
THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY:
A Centennial View of the University of Chicago