Scene. Late 1940s, in the midst of the Great Migration of African Americans from the south to Chicago. Upon arrival, racially restrictive covenants and redlining force the majority into a small and overcrowded area on the Near South Side, running from roughly 12th Street (now Roosevelt Rd) to 31st Street, between Wentworth and Wabash.

In the late 1940s, when the South Side Planning Board—composed of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Michael Reese Hospital, New York Life Insurance Company, and Mercy Hospital—began massive clearance projects for campus expansion and the Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores complexes, thousands of lower class Black residents were displaced southward, putting pressure on the historic racial boundary that was Cottage Grove Avenue.² When Shelley v. Kraemer struck down racially restrictive covenants in 1948, Black Chicagoans started moving into western Hyde Park in much greater numbers.³ At around this same time, the University of Chicago was experiencing unprecedented financial and enrollment woes. “By the autumn of 1953, enrollment in the College had sunk to less than 1,350 students. The entering class in that year—275 first-year and 39 transfer students—was less than half of what it had been 20 years earlier.”⁴

While Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton was overhauling the College’s curriculum, he also looked at the surrounding neighborhood as one source of the University’s troubles. Capitalizing on the panic generated after an attempted assault against a graduate student on March 16, 1952, a community meeting to address neighborhood safety was organized in Mandel Hall. It is debatable whether this was a natural gathering of concerned residents, or if it was orchestrated by the University. Later accounts from Kimpton and Julian H. Levi⁵—soon to be appointed head of the South East Chicago Commission (SECC)—indicate their ignorance:

LEVI: I paid no attention to what was going on in Hyde Park. It’s true we were living there, but I was in Europe most of the time. Curiously, Marjorie [my wife] dragged me by the ear one night to the initial meeting in Mandel Hall where the SECC was first organized. I didn’t have the slightest idea what in the world they were talking about.⁶

KIMPTON: There was a big mass meeting called for tonight that Marcia [my wife] and I plan to attend. It is concerned with the deterioration of this community and the community’s determination to do something about it, particularly in the field of law enforcement. I am not at all clear what can be done, but I am clear that something has to be done and that the University has to participate actively.⁷

However, reports made to the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, a separate organized group of HPK residents who would come to help and hinder the University’s plans for urban renewal, suggested that the University “engineered” the March community meeting in order to set up a new organization—eventually, the SECC.⁸ At this March meeting, a Committee of Five was established to draw up the game plan as to what change needed to occur in HPK. Notably, this Committee of Five was chaired by University Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton.⁹ The Committee’s planning occurred over a period of two months, from March to May 1952, when another attempted assault, this time against a faculty member’s wife, was used to assemble another mass meeting and announce the South East Chicago Commission, the main organizational force behind the coming remaking of Hyde Park-Kenwood.

KIMPTON: We used a rather sensational kidnapping and rape case to bring the community together and announce a plan for the organization of the South East Chicago Commission.

From the beginning, the relationship between the SECC and the University of Chicago was nigh untangleable. After directing the Committee of Five and establishing the SECC in May 1952, Kimpton quickly called on Levi to chair the new Commission.¹⁰ Harvey Perloff, the University’s head planner from 1952 to 1955, wrote that the University helped organize the SECC and supported it by buying up target structures around the neighborhood and, as will be discussed, leveraged its prestige against the government.¹¹ The institution also provided a significant proportion of the SECC’s funding for the first few years of its existence.¹²

Pointing to apparently rising crime rates, the University established the SECC with a few specific goals in mind, namely pushing for more aggressive police protection.¹³ It should be noted that like the motivations behind the Mandel Hall community meetings, Hyde Park crime rates are also contested: the crime maps themselves were made by sociologist Don Blakiston—who had been brought on by Levi—because the police department didn’t have them at the time.¹⁴ In addition, the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference received reports that the crime rates actually decreased in the early 1950s.¹⁵ Nevertheless, the University moved ahead with the data they had on hand. As Levi recounts, one of the first activities he was engaged in was petitioning the municipal government to establish a police academy in Hyde Park.¹⁶ While this failed, it inspired the SECC to take matters into their own hands and direct the future course of Hyde Park.

Hyde Park-Kenwood represents the first major example of urban renewal in the United States, but there were certainly instances of land clearance and construction predating the project, so what makes the Hyde Park-Kenwood plan notable? It was unprecedented in its focus on revitalizing older communities that had not yet deteriorated into “slum” conditions, in order “to start a continuing process of rebuilding and modernization, which would remove the need for wholesale tearing-down and building-up.”¹⁷ This shift from slum clearance to community conservation is reflected in the legislation that was passed at the behest of the University and subsequently utilized by its newfound planning department. 

LEVI: Prior to this time, that agency had acted only in areas which were completely slum and blight. The proposal now urged was that slum-clearance powers be used in support of an existing community and its institutions.¹⁸

One of the University’s main tools in its quest to make Hyde Park a suitable community for students and faculty was to employ legal measures it had lobbied for itself, a process which was carefully orchestrated from the beginning. InJune 1952, very soon after the founding of the SECC, the University underwrote part of the costs of a study that was to be conducted by the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council. This study would determine what caused community disintegration and develop new legislative and financial means to support community conservation. Most notably, this study was directed by Al Svoboda, Assistant Treasurer of the University.¹⁹ The results of this study would go on to enable urban renewal and legitimize the actions of the University, so it’s important to recognize the University’s control of affairs from the beginning. The legislative recommendations made by the Council were introduced to the Illinois General Assembly in January 1953, which included the Illinois Urban Conservation Act and amendments to the 1941 Neighborhood Redevelopment Act. The former approved a wide swath of urban renewal tactics such as acquiring properties by eminent domain, relocating the former residents, demolishing the structures, and selling the cleared land to a developer, while the latter made it easier for private corporations to exercise powers of eminent domain.²⁰ The very same month that these Acts were approved, the University, the SECC, and the HPKCC requested that a study be carried out in the east of Hyde Park—Kimbark Ave to S Lake Park, E 53rd Street to 57th Street—that would determine its eligibility for slum clearance measures.²¹

The rapidity and seamlessness of the University’s actions during this early period is strong evidence that they were theprimary architects of urban renewal. Levi’s account of his actions cements this:

LEVI: I came forward with the idea of revitalizing the Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act to provide for a private right of evident [sic] domain…We had to somehow get the initiative into the University’s hands. We had to get the initiative to the point where we actually could exercise the power of eminent domain if we had to.²²

The implementation of this legal strategy occurred at the same time as the creation of the University of Chicago’s planning department. After a grant from the Field Foundation, Jack Meltzer was employed by the University as Director of the new Planning Unit; in its grant, the Field Foundation was explicit about the nascent planning department becoming a model for the rest of America.²³ Meltzer had previously served as director of planning for Michael Reese Hospital, one of the initiators of the massive land clearance project north of Hyde Park.²⁴ Within sixty days, Meltzer filed a detailed proposal for redeveloping the area that had been surveyed around S Lake Park Avenue. This area would come to be known as Hyde Park “A”.

^{Figure 1: Jack Meltzer, 1971. Courtesy of the UChicago Photo Archive.}

It was unprecedented for an institution like the University of Chicago to pour so much money and effort into such an experimental project. The school supplied $29 million to, in Chancellor Kimpton’s words, “buy, control, and rebuild our neighborhood.”²⁵ In the years leading up to the creation of the SECC and planning unit, the University had actually been rather reluctant to get heavily involved in the neighborhood: a community planning unit had been advocated for in 1948, and sociologist Louis Wirth had urged land purchasing all the way back in the 1930s, to no avail.²⁶ 

LEVI: Undertaking of the Urban Renewal planning was a major enterprise. Total expenditures by the University substantially exceeded its reimbursement under the contract.²⁷

^{Figure 2: Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (left) and University of Chicago chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton (right) at the 4th annual meeting of the South East Chicago Com- mission (SECC) held on campus in Mandel Hall, 1956. Courtesy of the UChicago Photo Archive}

What motivated an inward-looking academic institution to start organizing block meetings, petitioning the municipal, state, and federal governments, and contracting famous architects to suburbanize Hyde Park? The dire straits of the college’s coffers and enrollment numbers, combined with a legacy of secret real estate acquisition as fund-raising strategy and boundary delimiter, must be only part of the answer.²⁸ Why would the institution feel such pressure to roll-out the framework of urban renewal so expeditiously, especially beginning in the late 1940s? The intense demographic change that occurred in Hyde Park after the end of racially restrictive covenants (see Figure 3) finally pushed the University into actively creating the type of physical and social ecosystem that it thought it would best thrive in. As will be explored in the next act, the University had a long history of attempting to control the Hyde Park and Woodlawn area, but it was only in the late 1940s and ‘50s that they took a public role in shaping the built environment, even crafting a legal basis for its actions. This illusory vision was called the “compatible community.”

^{Figure 3: A graph of racial change published in Julian Levi and Al Svoboda’s book “The Neighborhood Program of the University of Chicago,” comprised of statements the two men made to the Board of Trustees in 1961.}

LEVI & SVOBODA: The purposes of the Neighborhood Program of the University of Chicago are the two aims recognized by the Congress and the President of the United States in the enactment of Section 112 of the Housing Act of 1959:²⁹

1. The need for campus expansion.
2. The necessity of ‘a cohesive neighborhood environment compatible with the functions and needs of such an educational institution.’³⁰

The concept of a “cohesive neighborhood” encapsulates the complicated motivations underlying the University’s involvement in urban renewal. To the public, a compatible community was presented as a utopian, middle-class, interracial community, a city on a hill that could provide an example to the rest of the tumultuous city.

PERLOFF: Fully recognizing the urgent need for housing of lower-income Negro families, it can be forcefully argued that, given the existing racial tensions in our urban centers, it is even more important to develop relatively stable bi-racial communities which can set a pattern for healthy inter-racial living and which can provide leaders who know how to communicate and work with members of other races.³¹

For instance, the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, which came to function as the University’s and the SECC’s connection to Hyde Park residents, had a strong emphasis on creating an interracial community of high standards, which the University of Chicago ostensibly signed onto.^{32 33} Outside of the direct glare of the public eye, however, university officials were more candid about their motivations, which unequivocally prioritized the University’s interests. In a 1994 oral history with Julian Levi, he recounts:

LEVI: There’s no reason under any circumstance that the University ought to be doing any of this unless its academic mission is involved. We’re not a public improvement organization. We’re not supposed to be a developer. We’re not interested as a good government association. The only standard you ought to apply to this is whether the University of Chicago as an academic entity requires a compatible community. Second of all, you’d better understand what “compatible community” means, unpleasant as it is. 

Not even Levi could comprehensively explain what a “compatible community” meant to the University because it encompassed myriad priorities. The University had a long history of shaping its surroundings, stretching basically back to its founding. After the economic depression following the 1893 World’s Fair, the University turned to real estate as a safe form of fund-raising. Usually, this meant quickly razing existing tenements on newly acquired land (often gifts from donors) and erecting new buildings, which enhanced the value of adjacent properties that the University owned.³⁴

In an era where the in-migration of Black residents meant declining property values, the University’s need to maintain its real estate investments led it to sponsor racially restrictive covenants throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, with total contributions amounting to nearly $84k from 1933 to 1947.³⁵ However, its tendency to keep its land holdings secret by holding titles in the name of individuals meant their involvement in these covenants was often obscured.³⁶

Once the University could no longer legally bar Black residents from moving into Hyde Park,³⁷ they instead turned to tailoring the neighborhood to well-educated, upper-middle class residents: the prime demographic the University was trying to attract. To create this “compatible community”—a community that could reverse the downward trend of the University and harness its post-atomic energy prestige to grow it into the future³⁸—the University had to solve a number of pressing problems, including dwindling enrollment from the elite high schools in the region, an atmosphere of danger that deterred female students, and limited property for expansion.³⁹ The University envisioned a chain reaction: by building family-oriented, suburban-style housing, they could encourage a certain economic class of residents (mainly white) to stay in Hyde Park, which would support safe, quality neighborhood schools, in turn providing a strong stock of students for the College. And at the same time, this renewal process would allow the University to maneuver land dealings and acquire property.

^{Figure 4: Kimpton (left) and Levi (on steps) on a neighborhood bus tour (1953). After an earlier bus tour for Trustees “through typical colored neighborhoods” in 1944, a $500,000 revolving fund was established for “area protection” (Hirsch 147). Courtesy of UChicago Photo Archive.}

LEVI: We’re confronted with one other thing. There’s no way in the world that we can look at this thing on the basis of racial exclusion. We’re going to have to look at it on the basis of an economic screen. We’ve worked with Perloff and with Hauser on this. You can develop what they think is a successfully integrated program provided that you have the proper economic and social compatibility. But, again, that’s going to be awkward because it means, among other things, that there’s no room for public housing except on a very limited basis.⁴⁰

In short, the University had to generate the kind of neighborhood that faculty would voluntarily choose to live in, with their priority being the preservation of Hyde Park-Kenwood’s middle class character. However, in the 1950s, creating a neighborhood for the middle class meant excluding most Black residents. This was emphasized by the SECC’s commitment to enforcing building code violations. Overcrowded tenements and converted buildings were mainly occupied by Black residents who had recently left the Black Belt or immigrated from the South; by focusing on the seemingly clear-cut issue of policing housing violations and improving building conditions, the SECC and the University were able to largely sidestep accusations of racial exclusion, even if that was the actual (and intended) end result.⁴¹

PERLOFF: There are many signs to suggest that these residents would like to keep the community predominantly middle class in composition and therefore—because of the existing income patterns—necessarily predominantly white although biracial.⁴²

PERLOFF: A large increase in the unskilled, barely literate element would appear to make conditions less tolerable for the institutions and the professional groups which generally reject the idea of living in or close to slums.⁴³

All of the subsequent effects of University-led urban renewal in Hyde Park stemmed from this desire for a compatible community, from suburbanizing roads and housing types, to collaborating with other institutions, to securing room for expansion. The difficulty in discussing urban renewal, starting with Hyde Park-Kenwood, lies in its conflicting but coexisting legacies. To various people, the Hyde Park-Kenwood project was a virtuous attempt at an integrated utopia, and a shadowy institutional power grab, and a class- and race-exclusionary experiment in neighborhood suburbanization. All of these motivations existed simultaneously and were expressed, to differing levels, in the rhetoric used at the time.

Scene. May 10, 1955: the first building in the Hyde Park A project is demolished.

Hyde Park A, the area between 53rd and 57th Street along S Lake Park Ave—along with its smaller companion Hyde Park B, centered on 54th Street—was studied in 1953, planned in 1954, and federally funded by 1955. Because this area had been deemed “blighted” by the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council survey, it could be developed by a private developer and did not require broad community approval.⁴⁴ Despite apparently distancing itself from the redevelopment of Hyde Park A & B—for instance, the plan for the area does not show up in the University Planning Unit’s urban renewal map—in actuality the University had a clear hand in directly shaping the area. According to historian Arnold Hirsch, “the corporation’s plans [South West Hyde Park Redevelopment Corporation], as well as those originally devised for the Hyde Park A and B projects, were, in fact, produced by the SECC’s Planning Unit”.⁴⁵

LEVI: We deliberately picked out the heart of the area to begin with because we knew that was the strongest area, but we’ve got to get a developer that we’re totally satisfied with.⁴⁶

Furthermore, in July 1954, Kimpton and a group of trustees traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with President Eisenhower and the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Approval followed roughly seven months later.

The first goal prioritized was family-oriented faculty housing, marking the beginning of the suburbanization of Hyde Park-Kenwood.⁴⁷ In accordance with this, the construction of “low buildings; buildings tied closely to the land; [and] small individual neighborhoods” were emphasized, such as the Harry Weese-designed modernist townhouses located along E 55th Street.⁴⁸ Streets were made into cul-de-sacs or dead ends to further enhance the suburban neighborhood atmosphere.⁴⁹ The type of families meant to inhabit these new homes was made readily apparent: 46.1% of the white families uprooted by the Hyde Park A & B projects were relocated to within Hyde Park-Kenwood, while only 16.6% of the Black families were.⁵⁰

^{Figure 5: “Street Vacations and Dedications,” 1956. Atlas of Hyde Park Urban Renewal. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Map Collection.}

And then the University’s legal stratagems truly began to pay off. The 1953 amendments to the 1941 Neighborhood Redevelopment Act that Levi authored made it easier for private corporations to claim eminent domain, which is what happened in South West Hyde Park, the area between 55th and 59th Street, from Cottage Grove to Woodlawn Ave. In the early months of 1956, a group of “private” individuals formed the South West Hyde Park Development Corporation, including William B. Harrell (Vice President of the University) and two University Trustees, as well as Al Svoboda and Julian Levi.⁵¹ All of the Corporation’s stock was owned by the University of Chicago.⁵² The Corporation filed a plan in June of 1956, which had been drawn up by the University’s Planning Unit and proposed clearing and selling the land to the University to construct married student housing.⁵³ Outside of the obvious (campus expansion), all of the University’s layered motivations can be seen in the case of SW Hyde Park: much of the housing stock was dated and there was the need for physical upkeep; the area had experienced one of the highest rates of in-migration of nonwhite residents throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, and the residents of the seized land were nearly 80% Black; and modernist, suburban design principles were given top priority, with more than ⅘ of the site planned as open land for parking.⁵⁴ 

The University’s need for campus expansion coincided nicely with their desire to create borders between the University community and the rest of the city. The minutes of the Board of Trustees “indicate that land acquisitions in Hyde Park often had less to do with the need for added space than with the desire to create carefully delimited boundaries around the campus.”⁵⁵ The case of SW Hyde Park is the perfect example of this: despite administrative clamors for more graduate housing, in the end, nothing was built besides the new Stagg Field.

Importantly, all of this University maneuvering was done as quietly as possible. Chancellor Kimpton and SECC Director Levi—whom historian Arnold Hirsch describes as “the key determinants in defining both the goals and nature of the urban renewal process”—understood the difficult position that the University was in when it came to publicly championing integration and liberalism but privately muscling through advantageous legislation and development plans that systematically excluded nonwhite residents.⁵⁶ This tension spanned all the way back to the Hutchins’ era of restrictive racial covenants in the 1930s and ‘40s, and, according to Levi, it was a tension Hutchins felt keenly: 

HUTCHINS: You know, this neighborhood thing, as far as I was concerned was just a disaster. I was schizophrenic about it.⁵⁷

^{Figure 6: Proposed plan for married student housing located on the four blocks closest to Cottage Grove Ave. “Site Plan for South West Hyde Park,” 1956 Atlas of Hyde Park Urban Renewal.}

The University’s public relations strategy surrounding urban renewal is best summed up with the following letter from Levi to Kimpton regarding an early planning pamphlet produced by Harvey Perloff:

LEVI: This brochure will look to any outsider as an official University publication. And, of course, at that point, we get into all kinds of trouble. [He includes Perloff’s list of likely effects of urban renewal]. All of these things are good and we probably will want to do all of them, BUT not with an introduction to the public as if this was a University of Chicago project at this time.⁵⁸

The University would do what it needed to do to achieve its goals of building a compatible community, but it would attempt to portray itself in as favorable a light as possible. This usually meant distancing itself from plans like SW Hyde Park that it directly benefited from, directing what amounted to puppet corporations, and trying to persuade the city that going along with its development projects was the only logical economic choice.^{59 60}

Another strategy employed by the University of Chicago, one that would truly cement the legacy of urban renewal, was lobbying for federal legislation alongside other top tier American universities. In February 1957, Chancellor Kimpton wrote to the presidents of Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and MIT pitching a cooperative program to further federal legislation.⁶¹ These universities met in April and organized a detailed survey of sixteen major universities, which in turn “demonstrated conclusively that the lack of available land for expansion was one of the most acute problems facing each university surveyed.”⁶² With urban renewal now top of mind for major institutions, the University of Chicago sponsored the drafting of an amendment to the Housing Act of 1959 called Section 112.⁶³ Section 112 did away with planned land use restrictions for institutional projects and allowed institutional expenditures to be treated as local grants subject to federal matching, clearing the way for university-led urban planning across the country.⁶⁴ Circuitously, the University then used Section 112 to justify its own actions (see Act 3).

Elsewhere in this issue of Expositions you’ll encounter stories of the people and places that were lost to University-led urban renewal. But on the macro level, the largest impact of the Hyde Park-Kenwood project is the active encouragement and exemplar it provided to institutions around the nation.

The 1950’s remaking of 55th Street is not the end of urban renewal in the community surrounding the University of Chicago. Some of the bitterest battles would be fought in the early 1960s, when the University began making moves on Woodlawn. This next stage of renewal, which also features some of the most successful examples of organized community resistance, will be explored in greater detail this upcoming year, through Chicago Studies’ Century on 63rd Street research project. The long, tortuous battle over Hyde Park began here though, on 55th Street. All of the legislative maneuvering, carefully-timed studies, and development plans themselves were rooted in the University’s fundamental desire to create a “compatible community,” which, as we’ve seen, was portrayed in glowingly idealistic or brutally pragmatic terms depending on the audience. 

From the University’s perspective, urban renewal was successful. After hitting record low undergraduate enrollment numbers in the Autumn of 1954—the same year the new University Planning Unit produced Hyde Park A—rates have only increased.⁶⁵ Hyde Park today is a stable interracial community of high standards, described as quiet and residential, with two-thirds of University faculty living in the neighborhood. The next time you walk down 55th Street, know that it was carefully calibrated that way.

Exodos. Night on East Fifty-fifth Street. The kids are asleep in the townhouses. A group of students leave out the backdoor of Jimmy’s. A man is humming while sitting on a stump outside his tent in Nichols Park. All is quiet. Exeunt omnes.