Chicago is regularly billed as a city of neighborhoods, but there’s an unfortunate tendency to find dozens lumped together in the phrase “South Side.” In addition to masking the distinctions between neighborhoods south of the Loop, it implies a totally unwarranted dismissal of more than half of the city’s area. There is life south of Roosevelt Road, and it isn’t limited to the South Loop and Hyde Park. Music has a strong presence, from Pilsen’s loft venues to the blues clubs of Grand Crossing. And for art, Pilsen and Bridgeport are home to many galleries and performance spaces. Then there’s food. It should be no surprise that an area as large and diverse as the South Side should host more than a few great restaurants. Curious palates will find some of the city’s best Mexican, Chinese, Lithuanian, barbecue, and more. And for a night out on the town, there are options ranging from South Chicago’s neighborhood bars to the South Loop’s new African-themed nightclub the Shrine. Read the rest of this entry »

Hyde Park can sometimes seem like its own little world. In fact, it hosted one near the beginning of its existence: The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which attracted over 20 million people in six months, was held on the Midway Plaisance and in Jackson Park. Meanwhile, at the western end of the Midway, the nascent University of Chicago had just completed its first year of classes. Over the next 60 years, the rest of the neighborhood grew up around the expanding university and the hotels, transportation network, and neoclassical museum left behind by the World’s Fair. In the 1950s, two more events changed the course of the neighborhood forever: urban renewal and integration. Disturbed by the level of crime that came with Hyde Park’s status as a South Side entertainment destination, the University, in cooperation with the city and the federal government, managed to level almost all of the bars, nightclubs, and music venues that formerly lined 55th Street. Meanwhile, neighborhood residents united in the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference to try to ease the transition to a racially diverse neighborhood. From the looks of today’s Hyde Park, they seem to have succeeded: Where racial succession, riots, and gang warfare devastated other South Side neighborhoods, Hyde Park is a stable, tight-knit community that was ranked the third most diverse neighborhood in the city by a 2008 DePaul study. North of Hyde Park Boulevard lies Kenwood, a neighborhood whose leafy southern half, south of 47th Street, includes mansions and celebrities (Louis Farrakhan, Barack Obama) that are often grouped with Hyde Park. Read the rest of this entry »

South of Hyde Park stretch two lakefront neighborhoods with very different histories. Woodlawn was once a prosperous neighborhood, helped along by the World’s Fair of 1893 and the El tracks that connected it to downtown. In the 1940s and ’50s, integration brought a sudden demographic shift, and after the 1968 riots that raged across the West Side, the remaining white-owned businesses decamped for the suburbs. The neighborhood’s further decline lead to a rash of insurance arsons in the ’70s and ’80s, and 63rd Street, once one of the city’s major retail corridors outside the Loop, became a patchwork of empty lots. Today it’s on an upwards trend, with new housing developments, University of Chicago campus buildings, and a new coffee lounge opening soon at 63rd and Woodlawn Avenue. Across 67th Street is South Shore, a middle-class neighborhood centered along 71st Street and blessed with two lakefront attractions, Rainbow Beach and the South Shore Cultural Center, a former country club bought by the Park District for public use. Read the rest of this entry »

The South Loop is a new neighborhood with a long history. Like many Chicago neighborhoods, it was first populated by poor immigrants in the mid-19th century, mainly Irish, Germans, and African-Americans from the South. Spared by the Great Fire, it became a bastion of the Chicago elite, who built magnificent homes along Prairie Avenue. By the turn of the 20th century, however, the neighborhood had become a nationally renowned haven for vice and corruption. When the city clamped down, shady characters moved out and industry moved in, setting up specialized districts like Printer’s Row and Auto Row. Reinvented once more, it’s safe to say the South Loop is currently at its highest point, literally. High-rise condos have proliferated so rapidly over the last decade—along with a doubling of population—that you shouldn’t be surprised if you notice a new one each time you visit. Industry is long gone, but still remembered in the converted luxury lofts. Many popular North Side restaurants have opened second locations in the South Loop to get a piece of the neighborhood boom, and high-end retail chains like Whole Foods have set up west of the river. The South Loop has a few excellent original spots as well—a number that will rise as the neighborhood continues to define its new identity. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago’s Chinatown lacks the characteristic bustle and grit of a major city Chinatown. The streets are broad and the sidewalks are crowded more with tourists than with old women pushing carts of chickens and bruised greens. This Chinatown is young; it developed around the intersection of Cermak and Wentworth when a red light district collapsed in the 1920s, and didn’t receive a major wave of immigration until the ’50s and ’60s. Much of the commercial space in the neighborhood is in the rather unsightly 1980s Chinatown Square development north of the old red gate.

Chinatown is a busy South Side commercial district with a CTA Red Line stop near its center, so it’s a popular destination. Students beware: This popularity can be troublesome. Chinatown Square’s Lao Sze Chuan and Joy Yee’s are both worthwhile culinary destinations, but you will probably be seated in between your ex and that kid from your humanities class. Read the rest of this entry »

Bronzeville takes great pride in its history as the “Black Metropolis.” A destination for Southern blacks moving north during the Great Migration, it became the cultural nucleus of Chicago’s African-American community, nurturing such greats as Ida B. Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sam Cooke, and Louis Armstrong, as well as the groundbreaking black newspaper the Chicago Defender. The neighborhood’s fortunes have fluctuated since its heyday, however—Chicago’s segregated housing practices eventually turned many blocks into overcrowded slums, which, in the ’50s and ’60s, the Chicago Housing Authority replaced with high-rise public housing projects such as the infamous Robert Taylor Homes. Over the last decade, the CHA has torn these down, replacing them with mixed-income developments in its latest controversial move. The demolition trend shows little sign of letting up, as Bronzeville’s proximity to the condo-rich South Loop, along with its cultural cachet, make it prime real estate for developers. Read the rest of this entry »

In the early 1850s, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway was one of several connecting Chicago to parts south, and competition was fierce. When the Illinois Central Railroad lost a court battle to cross the LS&MSR tracks with its own, it responded in true Chicago style, kidnapping a guard and laying an intersecting track in the dead of night. Within a year, a fatal collision at what’s now 75th and South Chicago occurred between trains of two other companies operating on the disputed tracks. That didn’t deter Hyde Park founder Paul Cornell from developing the marshy surroundings, and when it was learned that a downstate village was already named Cornell, the area became Grand Crossing in honor of the intersection. By the late 19th century it was home to a range of factories and their mostly German workers. Successive decades brought demographic changes, and by 1920, eight years after the namesake railroads had finally been elevated above street level, Grand Crossing was mostly Hungarian. As in many South Side neighborhoods, the ’60s were years of white flight. To the immediate south across 79th Street, the neighborhood of Chatham remained middle-class through the transition. In contrast, Grand Crossing declined. But in spite of the—let’s not mince words—sketchiness, it’s got more to see and do than most parts of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

The neighborhood is named for the Czech city from which many of the area’s late-19th-century residents hailed, but in recent years it has received attention for the effects gentrification has had on this primarily Mexican-American community. Spanish names of taquerías, panaderías, and botánicas still dominate the shop signs, but the demographics have slowly shifted as Mexicans move to Little Village to the west and college kids from both the north and south move in. One consequence of the low rents and hipster influx was the enormous growth of the Chicago Arts District along Halsted Street, which for several years was thronged with visitors on the open gallery nights every second Friday of the month. In the past two years, however, the loose-knit organization of artists and galleries has slipped, with studios and galleries unexpectedly shuttering their windows one after the other. Many have vague plans to reopen elsewhere, while some are heading directly to Bridgeport; other artists, such as Annie Novotny of Workshop (below), see potential for growth in whatever comes next. Read the rest of this entry »