Scary Hyde Park
Andrew Ferguson leads you on a tour of Hyde Park, which is supposed to persuade you of…well, I’m not quite sure what, but I suppose it must be an attempt to make you think that Hyde Park is a frightening and alien landscape. I won’t pretend that Hyde Park isn’t quite unusual in some ways, since it is an area tied to a major research university in the middle of the South Side, but as a place of exceptionally far-out left wingery it is frankly nothing compared to Berkeley or the People’s Republic of Madison. Obviously, because of the demographics of the South Side and the culture of at least some parts of the University Hyde Park is quite far to the left politically, while the neighbourhood’s churches range from the predictably liberal Protestant to the charismatic evangelical. Support for Obama is ubiquitous here, as you would expect, and many students have been serving as campaign workers for him. But it isn’t as if he overshadows everything here, either. My limited connection to Obama’s presence in the neighbourhood was once over four years ago when I was stopped on the street by a man with a petition to get Obama on the ballot when he was running for Senate, but as a New Mexico voter I coudn’t sign it. Aside from the typical yard signs and buttons, you might otherwise not know that you’re living in the heart of Obama country if you happened to be visiting.
There is also something about Hyde Park that Ferguson misrepresents when he says:
Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store.
This is misleading, since it treats the arrival of Treasure Island as an all together new development, when it serves as the replacement for the Co-Op that finally closed down earlier this year. His following description of the Co-Op is likewise misleading, and it suggests that he never actually visited it when it was still open and fully functioning. He refers to its “empty shelves and accumulated gunk [that] attested to its Soviet-like disdain for market forces.” Ooh, Soviet-like! That’s scary! True enough, the Co-Op operated at a consistent loss and was finally forced into bankruptcy, but before its demise became known its shelves weren’t empty and I cannot recall seeing any “gunk” accumulated there. If you go to the Treasure Island today, you will find a store that looks almost identical in every respect to the one it replaced (though their wine selection is at present worse).
Ferguson also invokes Brookline as a symbol of Dukakis’ alienation from the rest of the country, which is strange, since I’ve been to Brookline and found it quite normal as well, at least as suburbs go. They have a Greek Orthodox seminary in Brookline, which I found to be an impressive institution during my brief visit there last year. Perhaps it’s a measure of how long I’ve been here, but as “rootless” as modern Hyde Park may be, or as recent as its current character may be, it is more of a neighbourhood than most of the other places I’ve been in Chicagoland.
To the extent that it remains un-yuppified, Lincoln Square is still a pretty good neighborhood. Cute, quaint family-owned shops include a toy store, an amazing German delicatessen/butcher shop, and an apothecary filled with smells divine (that, I contend, one need not be gay or female to appreciate).
Sorry to hear that the wine selection had declined!
Yeah, the wine selection is worse, but now we don’t have to go downstairs for liquor!
Once again the Right bizarrely trots out Dukakis as a symbol of something he wasn’t. Dukakis is in no way a typical Brookline resident – the typical Brookline resident is Jewish for one thing. Brookline is not Cambridge or Berkeley – it votes heavily Democratic sure, but these are mostly limousine liberals not leftists – wealthy attorneys, psychologists and hedge fund managers, with an admixture of 20-something yuppies enjoying a last safe taste of city life before they move out to the suburbs. Joe Lieberman would, and does, feel very comfortable in a place like Brookline. Denis Kucinich would not.
Good point about the liquor. There is an upside there, I suppose.
“The Right” isn’t trotting out Dukakis as a symbol of anything. Ferguson is. I didn’t know whether Dukakis was typical of Brookline or not, but the point here is to challenge the claim that Brookline is so very odd and bizarre.
A larger point that I ought to have made is how these sorts of anthropological field trips are condescending and often inaccurate when they are carried out somewhere the country by some East Coast pundit, whether it is Hyde Park or somewhere in rural Kentucky.
I agree with Ferguson that Brookline is certainly not a typical American suburb – most American suburbs don’t celebrate Israeli independence day as a major event. But Dukakis is hardly a typical resident of Brookline so it’s a weird juxtaposition for Ferguson to make. For an “East Coast” pundit Ferguson’s understanding of Massachusetts seems as shallow as his understanding of Illinois.
I graduated from U of C in 1995, but lived there for one additional year. The problem with Hyde Park is not its left leaning politics, which had little practical impact on day to day life in town, but for a young college guy, it was a pretty boring neighborhood. In the years since, high end dining has entered the area, along with the re-opened Checkerboard Lounge blues club. Current students at U of C have far more social options than I did.
I’m sure that’s true, and it’s not as if the place is exactly overflowing with a lot of places to go even now. Almost everything closes around 10:00, so you’re right that it’s pretty boring. But then I suppose I don’t mind living in a boring area.
[...] Scary Hyde Park 7 Daniel Larison, KXB, vanya [...] [...]