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What my Mother Knew About Hyde Park,
Hyde Park, Chicago, is probably the strangest village imaginable. It is part of the city of Chicago and is only a ten-minute automobile ride to downtown, the Art Institute and Millennium Park, yet it continues to have a very small town atmosphere. It’s probably because it’s near the University of Chicago, The Museum of Science and Industry, The Oriental Institute, and magnificent Lake Michigan. I have lived here for more than 50 years. I grew up on the North side of Chicago. At that time, north side folks and south side people rarely mixed. My parents thought that by moving south I was leaving town. The North side refers to the same city, but in many ways, it isn’t. Many fine restaurants and the best shopping in the city are on the North side. Much of the excitement and entertainment is also north. We don’t have a really good deli and we have only a few good restaurants. There isn’t a lot of fashion here, nor are there ‘fashionable people.’ What we have in abundance are bookstores, great people and a lot of community spirit. This neighborhood has not even had a major chain supermarket. In fact, for the past 75 years, the community’s supermarket has been the Hyde Park Cooperative Society. The Coop began in December 1932 as a buying club in an apartment above a bookstore near the University of Chicago during the Great Depression. It closed in January of this year with a New Orleans style funeral. You can read all about it and its sad demise at Coop History Most of my neighbors are professors, employees, or students of the University of Chicago. Most of the shoppers at the coop were these people, and when there is a new, replacement supermarket in the neighborhood, I imagine they will continue to shop there. I don’t think you can tell the difference between a Nobel Laureate and any of the other customers you might see there. One day when my mother was visiting from the North side of
Chicago – a neighborhood where people spend a lot of time and money on appearance. I took her shopping at the coop and pointed out several ordinary looking shoppers that I knew were Nobel Prize winners or otherwise well known in the scholarly community. None of these people were well dressed and you would never be able to guess at their prominence by their appearance. She looked at me and said in her thick Hungarian accent “Oh, in my neighborhood everybody looks like somebody, and they are nobody. In your neighborhood everybody looks like nobody, and they are somebody!”
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Contributor's Note
My Mother died in 1996 at the age of 101 but she had her wits about her till the very end.
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http://www.julierichman.com
| http://www.siempreflamenco.com
| http://www.hydeparkhistory.org
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