<p>I just talked to an alumni of UChicago and they indicated to me that UChicago is in Hyde Park which has a high violence rate (getting mugged, jumped, beat up). But they said that there is a huge police force there so there's nothing to worry about.</p>
<p>This is a huge conercn for me. Can any current undergrads/alumni HONESTLY explain these allegations.</p>
<p>Hyde Park is a rich-ish area of Chicago, and is therefore one of the safer neighborhoods of Chicago, but almost everywhere in Chicago is semi-dangerous. People get mugged all the time, but it’s usually because they weren’t smart about where they went at night. Don’t walk around alone in the middle of the night, or even just with a friend. Groups of 3 or more is best.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago has the second largest private police force behind the Vatican, but they can’t prevent everything. So it’s best to use common sense. There are a number of ways to get around at night if that’s your thing, including Safe Ride (a.k.a., the Drunk Van) and shuttle buses that leave the Reg every 20 minutes. If you’re smart and use these, you likely won’t ever have a problem.</p>
<p>Also, the area around campus is very safe, and so is the area between 55th and 57th streets all the way to the lake. Although it might not be the smartest thing to do, I often walk alone along 56th in the middle of the night to get home, and I’ve never had a problem. Most of the muggings I’ve heard about happen between 50th and 54th street (i.e., the student ghetto) or between 58th and 61st. (No one should have any reason to go anywhere beyond those streets, and probably shouldn’t.)</p>
<p>So during the spring my family and I visited U of Chicago. We got lost somewhere around there and the neighborhoods were pretty beat up. Depending on where you go, you could wind up in a pretty ghetto area. We saw some drug deals go down too, and some close fights. We also saw this dude who was obviously ridiculously hide and ran in front of a bus.</p>
<p>Hyde park is rich? What? What part of it? I might not know a lot about Hyde Park, but from what I saw, it is extremely poor. But, when you get to the university, it is super-nice. Even the neighborhoods surrounding the campus are pretty nice. But a few streets over is a whole 'nother story</p>
<p>Most top private schools in urban areas have problems with crime, and counter it by employing large police forces. Chicago, Penn, Columbia, etc. all do this. If crime is a huge concern for you and you just don’t feel comfortable in an urban area, I recommend that you don’t consider schools located in Hyde Park, or West Philly, or Morningside Heights.</p>
<p>Hyde Park is one of the wealthiest areas in the southside. Lots of mansions, houses and condos for the well-to-do (i.e. Obama). That having been said, the areas surrounding Hyde Park, particularly to the south and west, are definitely lower income. I think it’s a bit rash to say that students shouldn’t go here or there (I worked in Woodlawn for three years, and everyone I met was friendly enough), but following the common sense rules laid out by phuriku and the university during O-Week and beyond is a necessity.</p>
<p>Both CTDreyer and phuriku are correct. Hyde Park and Kenwood are middle-to-upper-class neighborhoods in the South Side of Chicago. This is reflected through its crime rate in comparison to the rest of the city.</p>
<p>[Crime</a> in Chicago](<a href=“http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Chicago_violent_crime_map_2006.png]Crime”>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Chicago_violent_crime_map_2006.png)</p>
<p>As a wimpy white girl from the suburbs, I’m really kind of the perfect target for a variety of violent crimes, and in the four years I was at the school (just graduated this June and am heartbroken to be leaving) I’ve had more than my fair share of stupid late-night alone-and-helpless journeys through the streets of Hyde Park. I talked to a good deal of homeless people on these midnight walks, and passed a fair number of young local teens who may well have been up to no good, but while I always wondered just how safe I actually was, within Hyde Park I was never in four years approached for anything other than spare change or my phone number.</p>
<p>My dormmate was almost mugged once, but she’d taken Krav Maga and ended up kicking her mugger down a flight of stairs without loss or harm to herself. A friend handed over the $10 in her front pocket to a man threatening her with a knife, garnering a startlingly polite “Thank you!” from the immediately fleeing man and saving her just-cashed paycheck and credit cards in her back pocket. Another dormmate was punched by some rowdy teens on the Midway, but they really seemed to want a hit and run and he sustained just a light bruise.</p>
<p>It’s a city, of course it’s dangerous, and police can’t be everywhere at once. But if uselessly oblivious, completely defenseless li’l ol’ me can make it through college there without incident, I’d say the area is really not so bad. Most of the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Hyde Park are pretty run down, but the University itself rests in its little bubble of blue lights and gentrification, shuttle buses and police escorts (seriously - anytime you feel unsafe, you can call the University Police and they’ll drive alongside you until you get where you’re going), so even where that danger seeps in you can protect yourself as thoroughly as you’d every care to. Most of the time, following the common sense advice of traveling in groups after dark is enough to keep you unmolested, though, and is a great excuse to keep hanging out with people who may otherwise be too shy or awkward to come up with a reason. Downtown, I was never so sure about. The bus stop over at 55th and Garfield, sketchiest place I’ve even been, even with the better lighting and renovations (Boyfriend got punched in the face there this spring, part of some teen’s gang initiation or something). Even a few blocks south of campus, I’m not sure I’d venture by myself. But Hyde Park itself I became confident in - and not that I’d recommend this sort of recklessness, but I never had that cockiness punished… just hit on.</p>
<p>This is…a problem. This totally makes me re-think applying to UChicago. Obviously, everywhere you go there’s going to be crime, violence etc. I understand that but the way it’s being described is really turning me off. I’m not expecting to stay in my dorm or the campus for the whole 4 years without leaving.</p>
<p>Anymore thoughts guys? I’ll take everything into consideration. Thank you guys for commenting. I know I can always count on you guys for a legit answer. CC <333 LOL</p>
<p>My kids have 6+ student-years at the University of Chicago in the aggregate, and counting, 4+ of them lived off-campus (and both kids’ first-year dorms were outside of the main campus area, too). So far, neither has been a victim of any kind of crime, violent or otherwise. They walk home late at night, often alone. For a while, my daughter had a wee-hours radio show, and she used to walk from her then-apartment in the eastern portion of Hyde Park to the radio station in the south-central campus area at 2 or 4 in the morning, alone, without incident.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that Hyde Park is like Princeton or Palo Alto. It isn’t. It feels like a city; you see poor people. People do get mugged, and bikes and computers get stolen. Last year, a graduate student was shot to death a few blocks south of the campus. But that was the first university-connected murder since the 1970s. It was huge news because it was so unusual. They caught the killers within days – some teens who had travelled 5 miles from another part of the city, and had gone on a mini crime spree that one evening, with a tragic ending. Stuff like that has happened at UNC and Wesleyan recently, not to mention Virginia Tech in a completely “safe” community. </p>
<p>As others have said, the University of Chicago is not so different from Penn, Columbia, Hopkins, Yale, even Harvard and MIT. At all of them, and at Princeton, Stanford, Williams, Dartmouth, too, you far more likely to be harmed by a fellow student than by the townies.</p>
<p>Remember, also, that a research university is a huge community, with tens of thousands of students and employees. When you put that many people together, there is going to be some amount of crime, too. That’s just the way the world works.</p>
<p>The question is really about you. If you are the kind of person who is going to be afraid to walk outside his dorm at night, afraid to take a bus downtown, then you probably should re-think applying to Chicago. I had a nephew who went there from a small town in Minnesota. He loved the education, but he never, ever felt comfortable in Hyde Park or greater Chicago. He felt infinitely more comfortable in Ithaca, where he went to grad school, and he was much happier there. My kids come from a city, and they were more than willing to face a small risk of being mugged rather than spend four years in a place like Ithaca.</p>
<p>^^^No I understand what your saying but honestly this scares me. I live in NYC; I know what it’s like to experience people getting beat up/crime. Heck, I even hear gun shots every night in the summer. But the way it’s being described scares me a lot. espicially the “security alerts.” It makes it seem as if every 5 hours something’s happening. I know I can’t escape crime, violence, etc. It’s life; when there’s the rick nice part of a place, there’s a poor “ghetto” part of a place. </p>
<p>My thing is, I want to have fun at U Chicacgo. Im going to want to go to the movies at night with friends, Im going to want to go to 6 flags or something like that. I don’t want to be constantly looking behind myself because of what someone may do.</p>
<p>Every university has security alerts, now. There is hyper concern about it, especially since Va Tech, and frankly e-mail and text technology make it much easier to do.</p>
<p>If you live anywhere in NYC, you will feel completely comfortable in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is like the nicest areas of Brooklyn or Queens (think Park Slope, but with much bigger houses and a lot more green), and the level of crime is similar or lower. The level of concern you are hearing is because most of the students at Chicago don’t come from NYC, or the city of Chicago proper. They come from suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and they have not lived before in a multi-ethnic urban community with huge income disparities, are not used to taking public transportation. They grow up, and learn, and wind up really liking it, but even after a couple years there they may still be a little freaked out and over-proud of themselves for coping with the dangers that were mostly in their minds in the first place.</p>
<p>OK, I think you’re maybe misunderstanding either the size of campus vs. size of Hyde Park, size of neighborhoods vs. size of Chicago, or something. University police patrol from 39th to 64th and Cottage Grove to Lake Shore, over 5 square miles of areas to explore nearby… staying within that range is not really the same thing at all as staying on campus or in your dorm, and considering what lies outside immediately outside that range feels less like a restriction than a natural scope of interest issue. There are tonnes of other interesting, varied, and similarly safe neighborhoods spread throughout the 234 square mile footprint of this enormous city (for comparison, the <em>entirety</em> of the state of Rhode Island is only 1545 square miles, less than 7 times this), all accessible by public transit - necessary at these scales, and not restrictive in the least, simply convenient (consider - it’s 8 miles to downtown; do you really want to <em>walk</em> that?). Any city school is going to encounter urban levels of crime: if you want to be in a city, and take advantage of all the awesome things going on in it, you have to use a little common sense. I never found Hyde Park or Chicago in general to be especially violent, though - there are much more dangerous cities out there. At least there’s something to do off campus in an urban setting!</p>
<p>ETA: this response was started before the last 3 posts were made, and may seem somewhat irrelevant as a result. You’re from New York? If you’re used to hearing gunshots nightly, Hyde Park is going to feel like a happy little suburb to you with a few weeks.</p>
<p>HAHA thanks guys. I guess I’ll just man up. It’s life you know? There’s always going to be crime and violence so yeah. I guess I see whta you guys are saying. Street smarts is always key. </p>
<p>I WILL still apply to UChicago; Mission Accomplished. Haha, thank you guys!</p>
<p>Two examples of perspective mattering:</p>
<p>Years ago, when my girlfriend (now wife) was preparing to start law school at Penn, I had a friend who had recently graduated from Penn undergrad. His father was a well-known professor there, but he had grown up entirely in the 'burbs. He described Penn as a fortress besieged on all sides, where crossing 40th Street was taking your life into your hands. It was a completely ridiculous, immature description, true to his emotional experience but not to any set of objective criteria. When we got to Philly, the area west and southwest of Penn out to at least 49th Street was perfectly nice, and better than that in places. We lived there for 13 years without worse than the occasional car break-in.</p>
<p>During the first Gulf War, our neighbors in West Philly got all in a tither because their daughter’s high-school orchestra was planning a trip to an amateur orchestra festival in Vienna, which was on a State Department watch list for inadequate airport anti-terrorism measures. Now, the particular high school in question (from which my kids later graduated) is in a truly bad, high-crime neighborhood. Three POLICEMEN have been killed within a three block radius of it in the past two yars. Yet 2,500 kids took public transportation to that school every day, including their daughter and everyone else in the orchestra. I don’t know if you could have found a dozen people in Vienna – or Beirut, for that matter – who would have felt comfortable taking public transportation to or from this school. But the parents whose kids did that every day were worried sick about terrorists in Vienna. The unknown always seems scarier than the known.</p>
<p>Just to add, beatfreaks, that every single city experiences higher crime rates during the summer. My understanding is that during a given academic year, students at the University of Chicago receive no more than two to three security alerts. The University is actually buying out some of the land in the South Side to revitalize Hyde Park.</p>
<p>I think the University plans to eventually just buy all of Hyde Park.</p>
<p>Ah, yes, West Philly…when I first met DH, he was in a summer sublet at 42nd and Walnut, and that was pushing it. Three years later, we lived between 46th and 47th and between Baltimore and Chester while he was in law school and it was fine – for a while. Then crack moved into the neighborhood.</p>
<p>S1 is a rising second year and is not a big burly guy (AT ALL). No problems at all, and he lives on the southeast edge of campus.</p>
<p>Use common sense. Carry a whistle. Don’t walk alone at night.</p>
<p>Counting Down and I lived a block apart, but apparently never met. We moved out in the middle of the crack era. Nothing bad had happened to us, but one of the things motivating the move was a sense that we didn’t want to push our luck. The area is really nice now, though. It is juuuuust outside the boundaries of the Penn elementary school district, which knocks some of the value out of the houses, but the whole area has really firmed up. 42nd and Walnut is nicer now, too; there’s a big cineplex and Whole Foods on Walnut between 40th and 41st, now, and a superfancy privately owned dorm (apartment building catering to well-heeled students) on the other side of 40th, and then the school is a block away.</p>
<p>Which pre-school did you use?</p>
<p>Got to be a ****load of these threads already. Are there any students who do the opposite and go where they are not supposed to?</p>
<p>^ what do you mean by not suppsed to? We’re allowed to go wherever we want.</p>
<p>… well, ok, pending legality, I suppose. In which case, yeah, I’ve got a bunch of friends who are really into the locked-off steam tunnels, scaffolding, and other building-climbing opportunities, and others who train-hop for a hobby.</p>
![http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Chicago_violent_crime_map_2006.png]Crime](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Chicago_violent_crime_map_2006.png%5DCrime){kind=link}
