In the city with the greatest number of theological schools in America, the neighborhood with the biggest fraction of these is Hyde Park. Besides the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, it is home to five of the eleven members of the Association of Chicago Theological Seminary (ACTS), a consortium of seminaries whose students can cross-register and share academic resources. Within ACTS, the Hyde Park Cluster of Theological Schools forms an even closer community, fostering collaboration and dialogue among its six member schools. Hyde Park may be dominated by the UofC in terms of educational institutions, but its theological seminaries deserve just as much renown.

In the coming years, though, the neighborhood’s high concentration of seminaries will drop, as two of them move a few blocks south to the community of Woodlawn. The Meadville Lombard Theological School plans to move to 62nd Street and Ellis Avenue in 2011, and the Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) will relocate to 60th Street and Dorchester Avenue in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

Between the struggling economy, the threat of global warming, and the growing desire to know exactly what goes into our food, it’s a good time to get back to basics. Last spring, Hyde Park resident Pam Birnie began turning her backyard into a highly productive vegetable garden. With no real experience at gardening, Birnie and her husband Rori cut out large swaths of the lawn, filling in topsoil mounds to plant a number of different vegetables. They grew everything from asparagus to zucchini, including eggplants, lettuce, cucumbers, and carrots. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall they reaped the benefits with meals of heirloom tomatoes and a variety of peppers. “There is nothing as tasty as vegetables still warm from the sun,” Birnie says.

After reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp, Birnie was astounded by the dirty secrets of our food production and transportation. With some vegetables hailing from as far away as New Zealand and Chile, the amount of energy used to transport most foods from farm to market is shocking. Read the rest of this entry »

“Every single play I direct brings up the question—why do we do plays?” says Anne Bogart, the founder of New York’s SITI theater company. “Radio Macbeth,” the company’s work now showing at Court Theatre, is no exception. Set in the 1940s, the play follows an ensemble of actors rehearsing for a radio performance of “Macbeth” in an empty theater. With multiple layers of performance going on throughout the play, the question arises as to what exactly the audience is watching: a performance of “Macbeth,” a performance of a company performing “Macbeth,” or a performance of the inner workings of the SITI ensemble on top of these other layers. Is it about Shakespeare’s famous work, or the experience of being an actor? Read the rest of this entry »

Reminding us that Barack Obama once dismissed Bill Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” the Weekly Standard last June asked what kind of a person lives in a neighborhood like that. The Washington Post’s coverage of Hyde Park celebrates the proximity of an Aveda salon “only steps” from a payday loans franchise. And in a video debate on the New York Times’ website, a pooh-poohing Eli Lake wonders how many hacky sack stores the neighborhood supports.
Is that really our Hyde Park they’re talking about? Drum circles, organic gardens on every corner, munificent racial tolerance, and, as the Standard put it, “‘cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard’”? Read the rest of this entry »

In the middle of “The Breakfast Club,” popular high school girl Claire (Molly Ringwald) is in Saturday detention and opens up an expensive looking Bento box filled with sushi for lunch. Judd Nelson’s “bad boy” character, John, looks disgusted and asks what she is eating. No longer is sushi a meal for popular and rich high school girls. Sushi has become one of the most popular Japanese exports to reach America. Although some say that it is hard to find good, quality sushi in the landlocked Midwest, that does not mean that there is a dearth of it, either. The sushi craze has reached the city of Chicago and most recently Hyde Park, where two new restaurants have recently opened on 53rd Street to compete with 55th Street’s Kikuya. Read the rest of this entry »

Deno Yiankes was disheartened to learn that he could not stay close to his ailing father in the University of Chicago Hospital. Without friends or relatives who could house him in Hyde Park, he had to commute each morning from his hotel in downtown Chicago to pay visits to his bedridden father. As president and chief operating officer of the rapidly growing independent hotelier White Lodging, Yiankes claims that this experience inspired his company’s investment in the UofC’s plans to build a hotel where the abandoned Doctors Hospital currently stands. However, inspiration alone may not be enough to see a Marriott replace the allegedly historic hospital. Read the rest of this entry »

A hallway on the second floor of the Hyde Park Art Center contains a little piece of nature, tucked away. Turning the corner into the space outside the Black Box Gallery, the viewer sees what at first appears to be large photographs of verdant, leafy trees covered in vines. Upon closer inspection, the foreground of vines and leaves turns out to be mostly thick globs and lines of paint. For her exhibition, “They Call Me Theirs,” artist Catherine Forster printed out video stills of natural scenes, painted them, then digitized and reprinted them. In some of the inkjet prints, the paint closely mimics the natural contours of the image, while in one spectacular triptych from the “Hanging Garden Installation,” “Hearts,” a giant smear of paint with rich yellow, green, and orange streaks covers up almost all of the duller green scene behind it. Somehow the colorful smear seems more natural than the mostly obscured trees. Read the rest of this entry »

Six months ago, Andrew Cone was working at a hedge fund and making bank. But he was bored. As the recent University of Chicago grad puts it, “I’m not that much into sitting in front of a computer making money based on abstractions.” Now, jittery from lack of sleep and sporting a greengrocer’s apron, he paces around his new store and chats up the curious folk who wander in. Open Produce, Hyde Park’s newest (and quaintest) produce mart, has been open for business for about a week. Read the rest of this entry »