UChicago Immediate Neighborhood in Hyde Park

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

<p>My D got into Chicago this year.</p>

<p>We have never been to Chicago before. From what I have read from CC the campus seems to be pretty good and safe. How about its immediate surrounding areas?</p>

<p>From Google map the campus is enclosed by 55th St. and 61th St. from North to South, and Cottage Grove Ave. to Blackstone Ave. from West to East. I have heard some areas in Hyde park were good, some areas were OK and others were rough a few years ago. </p>

<p>Could someone please comment on the current conditions of the immediate neighborhood around the campus?</p>

2

<p>There are literally dozens and dozens of threads on CC about the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. Essentially, as soon as one falls off the first page, someone starts a new one. If you use the search function and read a few of them, you will be exposed to the full range of opinions, informed and not.</p>

<p>As with many other things in life, your feelings about Hyde Park will depend a lot on your background and your frame of reference. If you are comparing it to the neighborhoods around other elite urban universities – places like Yale, Columbia, Penn, Hopkins, USC, UCLA, Berkeley, Harvard, Tufts, MIT, Georgetown, Emory – it’s probably lower-middle of the pack, but not unusual. If your frame of reference is an affluent suburb or quaint rural town, or a university located there (Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth), Hyde Park will seem gritty and threatening. </p>

<p>Speaking honestly, if you get uncomfortable seeing a fair number of African-Americans, some of whom are poor or look like they are, walking around the streets, then you may be uncomfortable in Hyde Park. That’s what it usually comes down to. I would add that lots of students who feel that way initially get over it fairly quickly, and come to love the area.</p>

<p>Hyde Park itself is low-key, very diverse, and generally quite affluent. It has wonderful bookstores, but not a lot of exciting retail, bars/clubs, or entertainment in general. For that you have to go elsewhere in the city – on good public transportation. Chicago the city is fantastic, but the most fantastic parts tend to be some distance from the University. If you are not willing to go there, you will miss them.</p>

<p>The areas south and west of the university are very economically depressed and monolithically African-American (with some Mexican-Americans in the north-west quadrant, and also farther to the west). They are not pleasant, happy-looking places, and students generally don’t go there, although they may travel through them sometimes, or participate in community service activities. These areas are less crime-ridden than they look, mainly because they are fairly depopulated – more actual crime happens in nicer-looking neighborhoods with more people in them. To the west, a large park separates the University from the sad-looking neighborhood beyond. </p>

<p>North of the University, there is still a lot of Hyde Park to go, and that’s pretty nice, although a little less so on the western edge of the University, and north of that is Kenwood, which is formerly affluent and rapidly becoming that way again. It’s not clear to me that there is actually a “bad” neighborhood between Hyde Park and the Loop anymore, but in any event you would have to walk a long way to find it. Kids do things like ride bikes from Hyde Park downtown along Lake Shore Drive regularly, and that’s not scary at all, but they might not want to ride straight north from the western edge of the University. In general, none of these neighborhoods actually affect students much, because they don’t spend any time there, except for riding through them on buses or trains. But students are aware that the neighborhoods are there.</p>

<p>(East of Hyde Park, if you are keeping track of cardinal directions, is Lake Michigan. It is quite pretty, though absolutely dangerous for human beings to live in without special breathing equipment. People do play on the edges of it, and on top of it if they have boats. The lake is a really nice thing about Hyde Park. There’s even a beach!)</p>

<p>The University is not set apart from Hyde Park; it is pretty much interleaved with the surrounding community. There are no walls or moats to keep outsiders away. (The interior of the buildings, of course, are very secure, especially dorms.) As with any urban campus, and any suburban one, really, there is some street crime – muggings, minor property theft (don’t bring a really nice bicycle, or leave your laptop lying around) and there are also sometimes panhandlers and con artists. As with any campus anywhere, the real dangers to students come from themselves and other students, not from predatory criminals. In the last 20-30 years, exactly one University-connected person has been killed in a street crime on or near campus. That was so unusual that stories about it were in the paper daily, and the perpetrator was caught within a couple of days. He wasn’t from anywhere nearby – he had traveled over five miles to cause a one-man crime wave in Hyde Park one night. There is probably an equivalent amount of crime in and around Harvard. But Harvard looks more affluent and whiter, so the people who worry about the neighborhood in Hyde Park or New Haven are less likely to feel on their guard in Cambridge. </p>

<p>Bottom line: If living in a city scares you, and you can’t get used to it, then Hyde Park may not be for you. If you are experienced living in gentrified neighborhoods in major cities, you will wonder why people bother worrying about Hyde Park. If you are in between those extremes, you may have some apprehensive moments at first, but if you are like most of your peers you will accommodate yourself quickly and enjoy your time in Hyde Park.</p>

3

<p>One of our children is a junior and from what he has been telling us I get the impression that he has no worries about security. He is generally a cautious kid and never ventures out too far on his own. Only couple of times he had unpleasant experiences. First it was on his way to Midway airport. Apparently, the driver made a pit stop in a gang infested neighborhood and he felt very scared. Another incident took place last summer when he was “renting” a room in an apartment north of campus (E 51st and University Ave). He was held for couple of hours by President Obama’s security folks since he didn’t have any papers/id showing that he was a legal resident in that apartment.</p>

<p>Every time I visit him I can’t help notice how dull Hyde Park is. I don’t think there is any other college that is situated in such a boring neighborhood. This is a blessing in disguise - there is absolutely no reason to wander into the immediate neighborhoods.</p>

4

<p>Hyde Park itself comes off looking very safe compared to nearby neighborhoods or other parts of greater Chicago in this recent NY Times info. map.</p>

<p><a href=“A Chicago Divided by Killings - Graphic - NYTimes.com”>A Chicago Divided by Killings - Graphic - NYTimes.com;

5

<p>

</p>

<p>You haven’t seen a lot of colleges, then. Ever been to Dartmouth? Grinnell? SUNY Buffalo? Hyde Park looks boring compared to the areas around Penn, Columbia, Harvard, Brown, even Cornell, but in absolute terms you can easily find far more boring neighborhoods near attractive colleges.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>In fact, students wander into and through “the immediate neighborhood” – Hyde Park – all the time. It is chock full of students; half the student body lives there, not in dorms. There are coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, a bar or two, a book store or seven, and they are all well-used. There just isn’t as much to do right around the University as there is near peer universities. It’s perfectly easy, though, for students to get to the more exciting areas of Chicago, and most of them do that on a regular basis, too.</p>

6

<p>Thanks JHS for the thoughtful and detailed information. It is very helpful.</p>

<p>She is a typical teenager and will stay on the campus most of the time. Occasionally she may explore the city since she loves big city. You have mentioned the public transportation in your previous thread. I know a student can take either bus or train to downtown. I will assume returning to campus in the evening such as 8PM by either train or bus should be pretty normal. I have heard bus is safer for some reason. Could you please elaborate on the bus/train if what I have heard is true to some extent?</p>

7

<p>Thanks UWHuskyDad for the story of your son.</p>

<p>I am glad to hear overall his experience is positive.</p>

8

<p>Thanks rlmmail.</p>

<p>Indeed.</p>

<p>“Hyde Park Less than one homicide per year happened in this affluent neighborhood, which is also home to the University of Chicago.”</p>

9

<p>Students often return to campus far later than 8 pm. I think there are special university shuttle buses from the South Loop on weekend nights until 3 or 4 am, but people also use the El lines, the #6 bus, and the Metra trains. </p>

<p>The #6 bus is express from the South Loop to Hyde Park along Lake Shore Drive, so it’s fast, pleasant, and pretty. It and the Metra, however, drop you about half a mile east of most of the dorms (although some of them are much closer – Breckinridge, for example, is about 100 feet from the Metra station), so you would either have to walk – through the nicest part of Hyde Park – or take a cross-town bus or a campus loop shuttle between your dorm and the #6 bus or Metra. Same thing with the El lines, but they are to the west, in more iffy neighborhoods, or a few blocks south of the university. The 55 bus connects the campus to the Red Line and Green Line, and lots of students use it for that, but late at night you might prefer to get off the Red or Green Line train in the South Loop and take a university shuttle bus directly to the middle of campus than to ride the train down to a Garfield stop and transfer to a bus going east to campus. </p>

<p>Anyway, the Chicago public transit system works pretty well, especially in the north part of the city. When they were students, I paid for their CTA cards so they could explore the city, and they did. (What’s “typical” of a student tends to change a lot from the time they are 17 and living at home to the time they are 21 or 22 and have been living independently for several years.) One of the reasons Hyde Park is so boring is that it’s perfectly easy to go someplace else that isn’t boring at all.</p>

<p>That map pretty much tells the story, though. Hyde Park is very nice, and there are not-nice neighborhoods to the west, north-west, and south. Another reason why Hyde Park is so boring may be that the University hasn’t wanted to create a “fun zone” that would draw teenagers and twentysomethings from the surrounding neighborhoods.</p>

10

<p>Students also “wander into” the neighborhoods around Hyde Park. Some of them–including Woodlawn to the immediate south and Washington Park to the immediate west–aren’t particularly safe. The people who live there could tell you that. But there’s no need to avoid the South Side as a whole, and in fact it has plenty to offer (though of a different sort from what you’d find downtown and on the North Side). </p>

<p>[Best</a> of the South Side | The Chicago Weekly](<a href=“http://chicagoweekly.net/best-of-the-south-side/]Best”>http://chicagoweekly.net/best-of-the-south-side/)</p>

11

<p>Thanks a lot JHS. I did not know there were two trains to the campus.</p>

12

<p>Good to know. Thanks dunbar.</p>

<p>I can understand Woodlawn is sort of not safe according to the “NY Times info. map”.</p>

<p>But why is Washington Park? Any unfavorable activities going there constantly? At night or in the daylight? Could you please elaborate on it?</p>

13

<p>eddi, I’m not sure what you mean. If look at that New York Times map, you’ll see Washington Park the neighborhood has one of the highest amounts of homicide. The park itself, which separates Hyde Park from Washington Park, isn’t necessarily unsafe.</p>

14

<p>Safety shouldn’t be an issue at all as long as you’re careful and conscious of your surroundings. I leave Hyde Park about once a week, sometimes more. I’ve been back on the green line at 11pm; I’ve been on the 4 bus at 4am and the 63 at 10pm. I never felt unsafe in these situations because I was in a group, and if I happen to be coming back late at night with only one other person, I try to take a safer route back as an extra precaution. The university has plenty of resources for safety and security on campus and off campus, and you can always ask people like advisors, RAs, RHs, etc for advice.</p>

<p>Yes, the neighborhoods immediately outside Hyde Park have high homicide rates and might be “scary” because they’re “filled with poor, black people,” but I don’t think that’s a healthy mentality to have. As a student and a resident of the South Side, it’s important to engage with your neighbors - and that doesn’t mean you have to give money or engage with everyone, including the people who try to bother you - but it does mean you should recognize that students and families live in the South Side, that they are even more afraid of the violence and crime in their neighborhood. Areas in the South side might be unsafe, but I’ve learned just as much from my experiences in these neighborhoods as I have in my classes, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to avoid them out of fear.</p>

15

<p>JHS Said, in quoting a previous poster:</p>

<p>“I don’t think there is any other college that is situated in such a boring neighborhood.”</p>

<p>“You haven’t seen a lot of colleges, then. Ever been to Dartmouth? Grinnell? SUNY Buffalo? Hyde Park looks boring compared to the areas around Penn, Columbia, Harvard, Brown, even Cornell, but in absolute terms you can easily find far more boring neighborhoods near attractive colleges.”</p>

<p>I certainly agree that there are other colleges located in boring neighborhoods (places like Hanover). </p>

<p>At the same time, what made UChicago peculiar was that the neighborhood was pretty dull, AND the student life atmosphere was pretty dull as well. Especially years back, there just wasn’t much going on, either within the college or in the neighborhood.</p>

<p>Of late, that’s improved, but I get the sense that student life at UChicago is probably still more muted than it is at, say, Dartmouth. UChicago is still a pretty academic place, and the school has a stronger “library culture” (e.g. students spending gobs of time in the library, the libraries become kind of an impromptu social space) than most other places. </p>

<p>Similarly, Hyde Park is improving too. More restaurants are opening up, a new movie theater opened recently, and new residences are popping up. It’s not going to be confused for Cambridge or Evanston for quite some time, though, if ever. </p>

<p>For some students, this is perfect. For others in search of more varied, vibrant student life, other places (like Dartmouth or Brown) may be preferable. Don’t get me wrong, UChicago is making strides on this front (and places like the Logan Arts Center certainly help), but it probably still lags behind its peers. Maybe 5-10 years from now that will be different.</p>

16

<p>One other note about Hyde Park - it’s very spread out. So, if you live in South Campus and want to go to Harper Theatre to see a movie, it’s nearly a 2 mile trek. There is one solitary campus bus line that heads in that direction (the #172, I believe), or you could walk (not a pleasant option during the long winter). There are generally very few cabs in Hyde Park, so a taxi isn’t a viable option. </p>

<p>Compare this to, say, UPenn. 2 miles can get you from West Philly to downtown, and there are multiple bus lines, trolleys, subway options, AND frequent cabs that allow you to make the journey. Or, if you want to watch a movie in West Philly, you’re never farther than about half a mile from the movie theater. Couple that with the fact that, on your walk to the movie theater in West Philly, you’ll pass by 10 restaurants, a half dozen bars (Cavanaughs, City Tap House, Smokes, etc.), and it’s a much different walk. The longer 2 mile journey through Hyde Park mainly features a walk past houses and quiet residential streets. </p>

<p>Also, the geography certainly changes the feel of a neighborhood. Higher density for many neighborhoods at top east coast schools does help, at times.</p>

<p>This being said, if you want to go to a bookstore on friday evening, have coffee, and settle in to read, Hyde Park offers literally tons of top-class options (Powells, Seminary Coop, 57th st books, etc. etc.). In West Philly or Providence, I can only think of a couple options, and none of the bookstores are that great.</p>

17

<p>dunbar, I was thinking the park itself instead of the Washington Park district/community.</p>

<p>Do many people play/jog/rest in the park during the day? Do many students do activities there during the day?</p>

18

<p>littlepenguin, good to know there are options of late night transportation.</p>

19

<p>We went to Philadelphia several years back. I remember there were some interesting places close to the campus - maybe walking distance.</p>

<p>Are there any traditional convenience stores like 7-11 close by the campus or on campus? Where do the students go shopping besides books? Downtown?</p>

20

<p>For convenience store type items, you can visit either one of two on-campus markets (though both are quite expensive). There is a CVS on 53rd street that those living on the north side patronize, and on the south side, there’s a 7-11 on 63rd street, which is much cheaper than anywhere else and is where I usually go (but which gets dangerous late at night). For most anything but food, however, people do go downtown.</p>