I don’t think it is about race.
From my visit, it appears that UChicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood is majority black, yet clearly feels quite safe, and the crime stats bear this out. Other parts of Chicago have a much higher violent crime rate, many of which also happen to be majority black.
@JBStillFlying There aren’t any UCPD officers stationed on Cottage Grove. I don’t think Cottage Grove even has blue lights. And obviously they aren’t on the trains. It is well lit though, that is important.
UCPD is stationed where they are to watch the streets. It’s been pretty well-established since even before Jane Jacob’s pointed it out that the security in a city can most effectively be created with eyes on the street, and they don’t want to take any chances that there isn’t someone there. Cottage Grove is a major thoroughfare with street-centered development and a major train station, they don’t need UCPD to stand there cause there are usually pedestrians.
Anyways, crime and racism can exist together. They usually do.
@hebegebe Hyde Park is [not majority black](Hyde Park, Chicago - Wikipedia). Hyde Park is also heavily segregated*, and it’s absurd how many people say they feel “least safe” in the parts of Hyde Park that actually IS majority black.
*See this map that BBCode, though you have to copy/paste it cause bbcode keeps misreading the link: http://www.city-data.com/#mapOSM?mapOSM[zl]=14&mapOSM[c1]=41.790768787851285&mapOSM[c2]=-87.59159088134766&mapOSM[s]=races5&mapOSM[fs]=false
Oh, found a link that works: http://statisticalatlas.com/neighborhood/Illinois/Chicago/Hyde-Park/Race-and-Ethnicity
Ridership on CTA has been higher in recent decades than, say, 30-40 years ago. Haven’t looked into why that is but there’s obviously a correlation with a decreased crime rate over the past 20 or so years so. @HydeSnark, what you are probably way too young to realize is that crime on the south side was a LOT worse than it is now. People have short memories. I know that the Orange - which must go through some “sketchy” areas - is fine but that’s a line that was installed long after we left Chicago. Green was avoided for a reason that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with safety. When the AA assistant to the dept. head who grew up in the area tells the grad students to avoid the green line, she probably knew what she was talking about. You can put away some of that “snark” now 
Thank you for the statisticalatlas link. It appears to include the UChicago student population in its overall figures given its strong white and asian representation among college age students. In my impression of the neighboring areas being majority black, I was excluding the student population.
My impression on Hyde Park safety was based upon me driving around for an hour or so in the blocks around UChicago. As a parent, safety is important to me. While some of the areas I drove through felt poor, none felt unsafe. This was a contrast to say, our visit to Johns Hopkins, where things got sketchy pretty quickly off campus.
YTD Crime stats for Hyde Park
I want to echo everything @HydeSnark is saying. The Green Line is fine! I’ve taken it at just about every hour of the day: 3 am departures to catch a Greyhound downtown, 5 am departures to work on a political campaign last fall, 11 pm arrivals after visiting friends on the North/Northwest Side, and everything in between. Woodlawn is (gasp) 85% black, and less well-off than Hyde Park and Kenwood. It also has 20,000+ residents, most of whom are doing their best to work, bring home a paycheck, raise kids, etc. - normal stuff. That means lots of “innocent bystanders,” with a stronger sense of community than most neighborhoods I know, and plenty of people who will step in as long as a situation doesn’t involve guns. It also means most people on the El have better things to do than risk arrest for a cellphone they’ll fence for $100.
I did see a drunk jerk hassle his girlfriend one time, not too far from the Cottage Grove stop. Back home (3x Chicago’s median income, no crime, 2.5 kids and a dog in every household) I have seen several drunk jerks hassle their girlfriends. Another time, near the same stop, someone offered to sell me weed. Back home and at UChicago, the marijuana trade is thriving. I have never felt unsafe in any part of Chicago - and I’m a short, not-very-athletic white kid with the street smarts of a lemming.
Ugh! @Chrchill, I’m assuming you’re as smart as any student in the (extremely impressive) class of 2021, but saying “don’t go South of 61st” or drawing some equally arbitrary line is absurd. Most shooting victims are involved in gang violence, and half the city’s homicides are concentrated in 8 zip codes - none of which are close to the university.
My residential head has a fantastic story about this arbitrary line. As a first-year, many moons ago, he attended a mandatory O-week session on staying safe at the university. This exchange followed:
-Former cop and then-head of security: “I suggest you never venture south of 60th Street.”
-RH: Raises hand
-Head of security: “Yes?”
-RH: “I live on 71st. How do I get home?”
If you’re still in the arbitrary-dividing-line business, be very afraid of (extremely gentrified) 55th Street and its surroundings. It seems like half the security alerts the UCPD sends out involve students on their way to off-campus housing, usually on 54th and Drexel/Cornell/Maryland.
For 1,000 of us, I’d call going to class a compelling reason.
BTW, regarding those current stats of the ethnic diversity - permanent residents of HP were definitely majority black back when I lived there. I’d be a bit wary about anything claiming to the contrary because they might be counting all the students. OTOH, things might have changed due to the undergrad program tripling in size which brings in additional employees, business/retail opportunities, etc. Chicago, and likely HP, went through a whole revitalization from the early '90’s on. We left HP in '92 and I had totally lost touch with that neighborhood - and the south side - until fairly recently, although when I ran the Chicago Half in 2011 I couldn’t believe how nice the area around Jackson Park had become! We used to golf down there a lot in the early 90’s and it was very sad to see all the run-down and dilaptitated buildings that had obviously been really lovely once upon a time.
@DunBoyer - my one experience on the L being hassled by a drunk was on the Evanston Express. He was reported and hopefully arrested. Professional man. Got off in Wilmette - not exactly known for its “dangerous” residents!
It’s great that the Green Line is fine. My D17 will hopefully be using the Green or the Red to get to her uncle’s place up in Lincoln Square. She’s very excited about the “free” CTA passes (ahem - cost is included on the tuition bill) and plans on using public transportation as much as her schedule allows. We’ve always encouraged our kids to live w/o car while in college and well-functioning public transportation is a must.
Those who know the longer-term history of the area (including the “bad old days”) are asking reasonable questions and it’s not a good idea for memories to be short (lest the peeps in charge repeat the errors of the past). However, it’s very encouraging to see that they truly are “bad OLD days” and not how things are currently.
“Those who know the longer-term history of the area (including the “bad old days”) are asking reasonable questions and it’s not a good idea for memories to be short (lest the peeps in charge repeat the errors of the past). However, it’s very encouraging to see that they truly are “bad OLD days” and not how things are currently.” This.
Looking at actual crime statistics from Chicago, it looks like Woodlawn is just as safe as Hyde Park, but east and southeast of Washington Park there is a sharp rise in crime.
I lived in Hyde Park for 3 years and in downtown Chicago for 4. (Late 80s and early 90s.) I was the victim of violent crime once on Ingleside between 60th and 61st at 9 p.m. (being dropped off by U of C shuttle that let me off at 61st and Ingleside) and once in the Loop at about 11 a.m. going up the escalator from the subway. In both cases, I had been moving around the same area for years before crimes occurred. (The student who lived in my Hyde Park apartment before I moved in had been robbed at gunpoint coming from his afternoon class to the apartment at 4 p.m. (in winter), so it’s not like I wasn’t forewarned, but after a few years of nothing bad happening, you do start to relax a bit.) There’s no way I could have prevented the Hyde Park crime, other than never ever walk a half block alone after dark (which I did only very rarely) or not live in my assigned apartment (which would have put me at greater risk, probably). Or possibly, I guess, insist that the U of C shuttle driver wait on the corner for 2 minutes until I got inside (but if that was necessary, why didn’t they do it without being asked?). I could not have avoided the Loop crime, except by always paying for cabs to and from the airport.
We are white. Our DD goes to a high school that is majority African American; some of these students are middle class but most come from impoverished families. She has never been the victim of any crime, at school or otherwise. We live in an area where there are not-extremely-rare gunpoint robberies between her school and our house, and if she gets out of school activity after dark, we almost always arrange a ride home for her.
Before she leaves for Chicago, I will tell our DD to be cautious and go slow in exploring new areas, plan in advance as much as possible, try to stay alert, trust her gut if something feels unsafe or not right, and when it comes to safety, not worry about offending anyone.
@DunBoyer Your presumptuous personal comment aside, rules of thumb are useful. I said three block south of the law school. Meaning below 63/65 street. You will I trust conceded that in any major urban area there are presumptively safer and less safe areas. That does not mean the presumptively safe areas are fool proof or the presumptively less safe areas are a preordained war zone.
Students don’t use the 63rd/Cottage Green Line because there isn’t enough stuff around there for people to happen to be in the area. But this will change. Woodlawn is just starting to develop due to the Obama Library ($500M) and the Tiger Woods championship golf course ($30M, combination of two existing golf courses). The impact on the neighborhood is going to be unprecedented – gentrification on an accelerated scale. Real estate developers are already flocking in and announcing new projects.
As Woodlawn develops in the next 5-10 years, I expect that we will see more amenities (restaurants, bars, shops similar to 53rd St.) and a larger University footprint (dorms, academic buildings, offices). This will naturally relocate more students to 63rd St., along with increased UCPD patrol, enhanced safety, and more traffic to the Green Line.
Also, UberPool is dirt cheap nowadays. One recent trip from Hyde Park to the Loop cost $3.50. That’s a little bit more than taking the CTA, but way more convenient and comfortable.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more hotel rooms built/converted. When there is one available, it is way expensive.
Here’s the best solution to the lodging problem: Get a friend from BJ days To make his life in Chicago, buy a Kenwood mansion and extend an open invitation to all his pals from those days to stay with him and family whenever in the city. That was my plan - and it worked!
@TheBanker at #392 - this is great news indeed! They are combining the current 18-hole Jackson Park course with the 9-hole South Shore Links to create this new course. Have very fond memories of golfing at both. Little urchins from the 'hood would run onto the course and steal our balls, then attempt to sell them back to us at the next tee. Also, the “water hazard” at SS consisted of a dry fountain on a par 3 and if you teed off correctly you could bounce your ball off the cement and right up to the green. Occasionally we would slice and our ball would go over the retainer wall and hit the CPD parked on the other side. While gentrification is good (we’ve seen some amazing transformations in other parts of Chicago that were just plan un-livable at one point), some of that old charm will definitely be lost. LOL.
@TheBanker I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for dorms/academic buildings on 63rd. Back in the days of Saul Alinsky and his partners (most notably a local reverend whose name escapes me), the University’s idea of “urban renewal” meant clearing out poor, nonwhite people. Woodlawn residents organized to protect their community against steady encroachment by the University, the U of C agreed not to build new buildings south of 61st.
That agreement is still there, despite several attempts to flout it. Each time the University’s drawn up plans to build past 61st, they’ve been made public and the University has promptly denied any intention to act on them (In that case, why draft the plans in the first place?). The community made an exception for the Orthogenic School on 63rd, which the University pitched as a clean, new space that would be open to the community (as Logan Center on 60th purports to be). Instead, the new building has doors and windows to the north - and a wall of cement facing south. Not a very welcoming look, and it didn’t help build trust. A University-run charter school being built on 63rd, another exception to this agreement, seems like it’ll be more helpful; most places will be earmarked for Woodlawn residents, with a small share made available to top students from across the city. Still, even if things go well when the charter school opens next year, it’ll be one bright spot in a long and acrimonious history.
Maybe the community will allow new construction south of 61st, or maybe the University will back a new group of community leaders and local elected officials who promise to support the administration’s plans, but otherwise I don’t expect Woodlawn’s impending gentrification will include new construction by the University on 63rd.
Seeing that the definition of gentrification is clearing out poor people (in this case mostly black people) then I imagine once its gentrified that there will be a number of developers willing to sell land to UChicago (for a tidy profit).
@TheBanker I wouldn’t be so sure the U of C will be building dorms/academic buildings on 63rd. There’s a long history of administration attempts to push locals out, which led to an agreement under which the U of C promised not to build anything South of 61st. That agreement has remained in place since Saul Alinsky led Woodlawn residents in pushing the University to accept it. The administration has tried - and failed - to shirk its obligations through several plans to build further South, without involving the community. These plans were leaked by student activists, and Woodlawn organizations promptly raised hell - leading the University to deny it ever intended to implement said plans (Of course, why make them in the first place, then?).
More recently, a few exception have been made. One (the orthogenic school on 63rd) was billed as a space accessible to the community, but its south face is a large cement wall. Many in Woodlawn got the message loud and clear. The other, a charter school on 63rd, has reserved most of its places for Woodlawn residents. If properly managed, this project could be the first small step towards rehabilitating the University’s image.
For now, the trust just isn’t there, and I doubt Woodlawn residents will agree to construction of new dorms/academic buildings on 63rd - especially if this contributes to a jump in rents for those who live in the area, and an increase in property taxes for current homeowners. That’s why the new commercial corridor will be on 53rd (Dean Boyer has made the administration’s plans quite clear). This means Woodlawn will miss out on some opportunities, but many longtime residents don’t feel they’d benefit from the changes if they look anything like past University projects - and I can’t blame them.
@DunBoyer, if you look at a google map image of 63rd, you will see a lot of green lawn (i.e.; empty lots) east of the orthogenic school. I have looked at an older satellite image, and once where the orthogenic school now stands, there was a similar lawn not long ago. Who do you suppose is collecting these lots and seeding them nicely with lawn and why? :-?