Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rural to urban environments. It's probably safe to say that the
Children's Gallery
is
the only place in town where kids can clamber in and out of a model ground-squir-
rel town or explore a beaver lodge from the inside.
The sunny Butterfly Cafe offers fresh, healthy meals cafeteria-style. In summer,
get there early to enjoy coffee and a muffin—and the lovely surroundings—with
joggers and other locals.
Allow 1 hour.
Fullerton Ave. and Cannon Dr.
&
773/755-5100.
www.chias.org. Admission $7 adults, $5 seniors and stu-
dents, $4 children ages 3-12, free for children under 3; free admission Thurs. Mon-Fri 9am-4:30pm; Sat-Sun
10am-5pm. Closed Thanksgiving, Dec 25, and Jan 1. Bus: 151 or 156. Free trolley service from area CTA sta-
tions and parking garages on Sat-Sun and holidays 10am-6pm Memorial Day to Labor Day; visit the museum
website for route information and schedule.
5 Exploring Hyde Park: The Museum of Science
and Industry & More
Birthplace of atomic fission, home to the University of Chicago, and site of the
popular Museum of Science and Industry, Hyde Park is worth a trip south of the
Loop. You should allow at least half a day to explore the campus and neighbor-
hood, one of Chicago's most successfully integrated; set aside a full day if you
want to explore museums as well.
SOME HYDE PARK HISTORY
When Hyde Park was settled in 1850, it
became Chicago's first suburb. A hundred years later, in the 1950s, Hyde Park
added another first to its impressive resume, one that the current neighborhood
is not particularly proud of: an urban-renewal plan. At the time, a certain amount
of old commercial and housing stock was demolished rather than rehabilitated—
just those kinds of buildings that would be much prized today—and was replaced
by projects and small shopping malls that actually make some corners of Hyde
Park look more suburban, in the modern sense, than they really are.
What Hyde Park does have to be proud of is that, in racially balkanized
Chicago, this neighborhood has found an alternative vision. As Southern blacks
began to migrate to Chicago's South Side during World War I, many whites fled.
But most whites here, especially those who wanted to stay near the university,
chose integration as the only realistic strategy to preserve their neighborhood. The
2000 census proved that integration still works; about 40% of the residents are
white and 37% are black; there is also a significant Asian population. Hyde Park
is decidedly middle class, with pockets of true affluence in Kenwood that reflect
the days when the well-to-do moved here in the beginning of the 20th century to
escape the decline of Prairie Avenue. Among Hyde Park-Kenwood's well-known
black residents in recent years were the late Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali,
and, currently, Louis Farrakhan, along with numerous other Nation of Islam fam-
ilies who continue to worship in a mosque, formerly a Greek Orthodox cathedral,
that is one of the neighborhood's architectural landmarks. The late Mayor Harold
Washington also lived here. Surrounding this unusual enclave, however, are many
marginal blocks where poverty and slum housing abound. For all its nobility,
Hyde Park's achievement in integration merely emphasizes that even more
unwieldy than racial differences are socioeconomic ones.
Through its fight for self-preservation, Hyde Park has gained a reputation as an
activist community. A certain vitality springs from acts of coping with the world
as you find it, and it is this element that distinguishes Hyde Park from other mid-
dle-class neighborhoods in Chicago. Hyde Park is, in a word, cosmopolitan.
