Exciting Area around Campus

Cue7
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:37:42 +0000

Unalove - yah Hyde Park and West Philly have some big differences. In West Philly, you have maybe 25k+ students in the area, it’s not a particularly affluent area, and the faculty is sorta fanned out in Center City, the main line, etc.

With bigger colleges in the area, you have more of a consumer base for the urban outfitters, Gap, Limited, etc. For the U of C, I’d guess that you have maybe 9k students who live in the Hyde Park area, and then another 3k or so who live elsewhere in Chicago. Instead of a thousands and thousands of students, you have a much more affluent population in the Hyde Park/Kenwood area, and most choose to live in HP because it’s the way it is. They would resist the 12-theater movieplex, loud irishpub, and seedy undergrad dive bars (all present around UPenn) pretty strongly.

Still, at the same time, I wish Hyde Park would gain more amenities. I’m not talking a massive movie megaplex, but maybe a nice CVS right near the quad, a Chipotle maybe somewhere very near campus, maybe one more “undergrad” kinda bar… It’d just enhance campus life a little bit.

Right now, Hyde Park seems to be filled with bookstores, coffeeshops, nicer sit-down restaurants, and that’s about it. It’s a perfect parent-friendly a neighborhood, and I’ve grown to like it a lot more as I’ve gotten older, but it’s sorely lacking in what it offers students. It’s funny because the U of C environs is the ONLY place I can think of where the neighborhood does not seem AT ALL affected by the tastes and culture of a young student body. West Philly, the area around Columbia, Evanston, etc. etc. ALL seem to feel the impact of their respective student populations. Hyde Park, however, seems to be impervious.