Abstract

In this article, I examine the historical metamorphosis of Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago (UC) which has evolved from an almost exclusively “white” middle- to upper-class railroad suburb of Chicago into a carefully controlled multi-racial, fortress-like academic-corporate neighborhood dominated and shaped by UC’s economic and political clout. For several decades, racially restrictive covenants supported by the UC kept blacks out until the Supreme Court’s ban of the covenants in 1948 eventually brought more lower-income blacks to Hyde Park. This in turn led to white flight, overcrowding, and further neighborhood deterioration. Using the social Darwinist human ecology approach, in the 1950s the UC sponsored one of the largest urban renewal plans in the nation in Hyde Park with the goal of combatting urban blight and creating an elite, middle class multi-racial community. As a consequence Hyde Park’s lower-income African American population fell by forty percent, its average household income soared by seventy percent; and with the remaining large population of well-to-do black residents it became one of Chicago’s most racially diverse yet segregated neighborhoods. Despite these efforts, by 2000 Hyde Park lost almost half of its pre-urban renewal population, resulting in further deterioration of residential and commercial areas. Once again, with substantial financial backing of the UC during the last ten years community movers and shakers joined forces to save the neighborhood. In what some have dubbed as Hyde Park’s “second urban renewal,” and using Neoliberal urban governance principles, these efforts culminated in development of Harper Court, a mixed-use, academic/corporate-commercial neighborhood block with the objective of revitalizing a blighted retail district several blocks northeast of campus. In the final analysis, Hyde Park’s movers and shakers have adopted a policy of eliminating urban blight within their neighborhood, and cordoning/sealing blight that is taking place in neighboring communities. The success of the second urban renewal plan is yet to be seen, but using comparative crime reports and socio-economic data for South Side Chicago neighborhoods I make the case that although racially mixed, Hyde Park continues to remain a physically and socially separate academic urban fortress surrounded by poor and racially segregated black neighborhoods.