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Hyde Park Museums Band Together to Form 'Museum Campus South'

By Sam Cholke | July 24, 2014 3:19pm | Updated on July 25, 2014 8:54am
 Go Airport Express will offer free shuttle service to six Hyde Park museums and to downtown on weekends in August.
Go Airport Express will offer free shuttle service to six Hyde Park museums and to downtown on weekends in August.
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DNAinfo/Sam Cholke

HYDE PARK — Seven Hyde Park museums are linking up to try to form a "museum campus south" and are offering free shuttle service in August to get more people to visit.

“I always looked at the museums in Grant Park and thought wow do they benefit from their proximity,” said Carol Adams, president of the DuSable Museum of African American History. “The Midway Plaisance is like an artery for us, a sort of cultural corridor.”

Fridays through Sundays in August, the DuSable and other museums will offer a free shuttle up and down the plaisance every half-hour for visitors.

The shuttles will visit the DuSable Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, the Oriental Institute, the Smart Museum of Art, the Logan Center for the Arts and the Renaissance Society on the University of Chicago campus.

The shuttles from Go Airport Express will also make two trips daily to downtown hotels at 10 a.m. and noon providing free trips down to Hyde Park and back at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.

John McCarthy, CEO of the airport shuttle service, said weekends were a slow time and it would be easy to get the vehicles over from the headquarters at 32nd Street and Racine Avenue so it worked well for the company as well.

The program is expected to cost $20,000 for banners to mark stops and the month of shuttle service. Choose Chicago, a nonprofit that pushes tourism in Chicago, is funding the pilot program.

“We will be surveying folks to find out if it’s a success,” Adams said. “If we’re going to do it all the time, we need to make sure it is a success.”

Admission to each museum must still be paid individually, but visitors using the shuttle service will be offered discounts in museum gift shops.

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