Hyde Park in Context of Other Places I've Lived

unalove · July 12, 2013, 12:38am

I thought I’d initiate a thread to consolidate some of the safety and neighborhood-related questions that are bound to come up, using some of my personal reflections as a guide.

Context:

I grew up in a fairly small city that is part of a larger metropolitan area. My home city is about 20% black and about 20% Jewish, and the local high school is strong enough that students get into colleges like UChicago fairly regularly, even though high school basketball games are known for gang rivalries and guns. We’ve got mansions and a downtown that’s been trying to re-revive itself for a very long time to no avail. You may have identified my city, but believe me, Hyde Park is a palace in absolute terms compared to what my home city has to offer, but it’s not as though I haven’t seen mansions, either.

I have spend my post-graduate life in three cities: Cambridge, MA, Chicago, IL (all of the time living in Hyde Park without a car), and New York, NY. So I will compare the three briefly.

Hyde Park:

I liked it when I got to college and I liked it more by the time I left, in large part due to Hyde Park Produce getting the space I thought it deserved and the quaint Sit Down and sushi place opening up on 53rd. I liked Hyde Park because it was homey, quieter, city without being super-urban, and, most of all, scalable. Hyde Park has about 60-75% of what any student will want, and the rest of it is available by public transportation. So no, Hyde Park doesn’t have a garage where you can get gourmet grilled cheese, but you can hop on the train to Wicker Park and check it out.

I lived in Hyde Park while commuting daily to downtown Chicago for work. I liked Hyde Park for many, many reasons, including better racial and social integration than other neighborhoods, reasonable rent for unusual real estate offerings, and the fact that so many of my alumnifriends were in town. Even as a 21+ person who is single on an off, I am not much of a bar scene person, and I’ve always liked getting a good meal with friends for 12 bucks.

In terms of safety, I always kept my wits about me, so to speak, but, as I said, I’d a thousand times over wander around Hyde Park late at night by myself than my home town. In other words, there’s enough 24.7 activity to make this a fairly reasonable place for a clueless college student to live.

Cambridge, MA:

As a college graduate, Cambridge is an awesome place to live; if I were a Harvard or MIT undergraduate I’m not sure I would have been so over-the-moon. Cambridge has a lot of bums who seem to me almost proud to bum around. There are more Whole Foods stores here, I’m not convinced that Harvard or MIT kids make use of them as they aren’t close walking distance from campus. There are some bars as well, but again, I don’t think they cater to college students. There are other places that have distinct “personalities” but rather than a few places that catered specifically to vegetarians (yay Veggie Galaxy!) I found them mostly forgettable.

Cambridge is a harder city to walk in (as a whole) than Hyde Park, but that’s also because Cambridge is a city and Hyde Park is a neighborhood as a city. But I’d say that a walk from most of the Harvard dorms to Au Bon Pain and a walk from most of the MIT dorms to Beantown Taqueria is about equivalent from a University of Chicago student walking from South Campus to Medici. In other words, there are similarities among all three campuses in how the campus ends and “civilization” begins. And I have no idea how often MIT or Harvard kids go into Boston- it is near enough to be convenient but far enough to be unnecessary.

Cambridge at night, like Hyde Park at night, isn’t my favorite, but I did it without major qualms and I always kept an eye out for who else was on the street.

Not to mention that you essentially pay double for the same thing translating Hyde Park to Cambridge.

Manhattan, NY:

It’s where I feel safest and where the nightlife is the best, but it’s definitely not a place I like living in. I find New York very overwhelming, very crowded, and very isolating (at least as a 20-something, perhaps college students experience it differently.) While I had no time finding social life and social groups in Cambridge, and I had stuff in Chicago and in Hyde Park, I definitely struggle in New York in ways which I wasn’t expecting. I haven’t spent any meaningful amount of time around Columbia, Barnard, or NYU to reflect on what this may mean for a college student, but I’m throwing it in there for comparison’s sake.

These descriptions are of course very subjective, but I did want to draw attention to the inherently subjective nature in which we think about a neighborhood being “good” and how sometimes impressions and experiences (good and bad) transcend data. I’m sure I’ll add more thoughts later.

Mutti2012 · July 12, 2013, 10:51am

Unalove, just want to say as a parent of a member of the Class of 2016, it’s great to see you back on this forum. I read many, many of your past posts when I was acquainting myself with (and reassuring myself about) my S living in Hyde Park. He had a great first year btw. I’m sorry you’re finding NYC a bit of a social challenge. My recently graduated D is living there now with a lovely growing social circle; I wish I could introduce you :). Hang in there and I hope it gets better (or you can move yet again to someplace that suits you better.) I’ll be checking back for your insightful posts; thanks again.

unalove · July 13, 2013, 12:20am

Good to hear- I’ve actually had younger cousins and the like show me my own posts for my opinion on them. Can you imagine how tempting it was for me to turn myself in then and there?

It turns out that grad schools and jobs can actually be more work than undergrad, and while I was working on my BA I kind of disappeared from here. I find that my internet hangouts tend to rotate quite a bit- I like some sites for a few weeks and then forget they ever existed, and so on. CC has a way of sucking you in and keeping you put.

New York City is just a hard place to make a home. And it’s not because I don’t have friends here- my best friend from high school is here, as is somebody I teasingly refer to as “my soulmate.”

But the difference between here and a place like Cambridge, at least from a twentysomething’s perspective, is that a young person in Cambridge is almost guaranteed to be University-affiliated. And I, being an inveterate dork, get along very well with grad students, so my “gang” included Harvard people, MIT people, Tufts people, Brandeis people, and BU people. And we could all make nerdy references or talk about math over beer and that was wonderful.

Also New York is much more professional. Not to say people aren’t smart, but that it’s harder to find a horde of dorks in a way that it isn’t elsewhere. It’s also isolating for my other friends here as well. One of my U of C friends was in New York for several years and snapped up a job offer in Chicago as soon as she got one she liked. My best friend from high school (Harvard alum, for context) mostly hangs out with her Harvard friends and her boyfriend, whom she met online. My “soulmate” (Stanford) hangs out with people he knows through his hipster bar. Neither are really branching out of their comfort zones, and for me I almost don’t know where to begin.

But before I forget! Once upon a time I spent a great deal of time in Evanston, I do have a fondness for Evanston! I believe that in terms of amenities like shopping and restaurants, NU students have a sweet deal, as sweeter deal than any other college campus I’ve been to, as much as it may pain me to say it ;-)

But my larger argument: if parents are scrutinizing the University of Chicago’s “urban” campus, they should be sure to apply the same scrutiny evenly across many campuses and cities (lovely Evanston included) that may not appear to be or be reputed for being “urban.” And if I were a parent sending my kid to a city school anywhere else but NYU, I think I’d have concerns about them being on fairly isolated streets at night.

Hyde Park in Context of Other Places I've Lived

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