Asked to draw the boundaries of Hyde Park, many included all of Kenwood as part of the neighborhood. [DNAinfo]
HYDE PARK WOODLAWN — It’s surprising that Kenwood should have to defend its very existence as a neighborhood against Hyde Parkers.
When DNAinfo Chicago asked readers to draw the boundaries of their neighborhood, many Hyde Parkers drew Kenwood right off the map.
Agreement was nearly unanimous that the eastern boundary of Hyde Park is the lakeshore and the western boundary is Cottage Grove Avenue. But from there, two camps seem to emerge: Those who believe in Kenwood and those who don't.
Give it a shot: Draw your neighborhood:
Sam Guard, 88, says he raised his four children in Hyde Park at 48th Street and Dorchester Avenue in the 1950s.
“In those days all the people who lived on 48th Street thought they lived in Hyde Park,” Guard said Thursday. “We took the train at 47th Street and 43rd Street stop was for Kenwood people.”
A fair number of people seemed to agree with Guard when drawing their map, extending the northern boundary of Hyde Park to 47th Street. But the boundary is clearly contested with a large number of people also designating an East Hyde Park Boulevard boundary on the north.
Maybe the powers that be can settle the dispute.
“I was raised there, so Hyde Park to me goes all the way to 47th Street,” said Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th), who grew up between Hyde Park Boulevard and 47th Street, call it what you may, and who now represents the southern half of Hyde Park and South Shore.
Hairston and others claimed the Kenwood distinction is a recent invention, originating either from remap of the Chicago Park Districts regional boundaries, the establishment of the Kenwood Historic District in 1979 or some other bureaucratic change.
“In the old days it was all Hyde Park, there was no Kenwood or North Kenwood,” Hairston said.
But the woman who literally wrote the book on Hyde Park and Kenwood would disagree.
“It was Kenwood in 1858,” said Susan O’Connor Davis, author of “Chicago’s Historic Hyde Park,” an exhaustive survey of nearly every significant structure to have existed in Hyde Park or Kenwood.
She said that Kenwood, from Cottage Grove to South Lake Park Avenue and Hyde Park Boulevard to 47th Street, has been its own neighborhood separately from Hyde Park for more than 150 years.
“We do conceptually think of Kenwood as part of Hyde Park, but we don’t conceptually think of Woodlawn as part of Hyde Park,” Davis said.
Technically, the southern boundary of Hyde Park is the Midway Plaisance, putting parts of the University of Chicago in Woodlawn. [University of Chicago]
Readers seemed very split about the southern boundary of Hyde Park as well. Does it stop at the Midway Plaisance, 63rd Street or somewhere in between?
“In historical terms, it stops at the Midway, it definitely doesn’t go to 63rd Street,” Davis said.
That would technically put the University of Chicago’s Law School, Harris School of Public Policy, most of its undergraduates still in dormitories and the Logan Center for the Arts in Woodlawn.
“Once you cross the Plaisance, you’re in Woodlawn,” Hairston said.
It’s a common refrain among folks who grew up in Woodlawn in the ‘50s and ‘60s that the Midway was the dividing line that people rarely crossed from either direction. But in those days the university was also confined entirely north of 59th Street.
During the federal urban renewal projects of the ‘60s, the university expanded south of the Midway for the first time, prompting a claim among Woodlawn residents that the university was encroaching in an effort to drive out black families in Woodlawn.
An agreement was reached at the time that the university would not expand south of 61st Street, which at least conceptually if not technically pushed the southern boundary of the neighborhood one block south.
As a final note, Davis said she wanted to clarify that East Hyde Park is part of Hyde Park, not Kenwood. The small section of the neighborhood is home to the only houses from Randolph Street to Jackson Park at 56th Street to exist between Lake Shore Drive and the Canadian National Railway and Metra tracks.
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