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Discussion of the role of the University of Chicago in reshaping the racial geography of the city's South Side is a reminder of the role of "meds and eds" in postwar urban change.
-Thomas Sugrue, "Revisiting the Second Ghetto"
The superficial claims of policing the campus and Hyde Park hides the reality that we live in a distrustful, colonial social order. Our colonial status is ensured by the distrust between temporary settlers (that's us the students) as a precious set of imported individuals, and the native "other" (often called community members), the dark peoples, savage and unknown.
-Ashley P. White-Stern, "University Benevolence Does Not Compensate for Lasting Inequality"
On Historic Preservation and Cultural Piracy
On the eve of the new millennium, South Side Chicago's infamous Douglas and Grand Boulevard neighborhoods were putting on their fancy clothes. Renovated hundred-year-old greystones and newly built condominium developments slowly outshined vacant lots and run-down store-fronts. Under the larger heritage tourism banner of "Restoring Bronzeville," neighborhood boosters trumpeted the emergence of a cultural corridor along Forty-Seventh Street, housing a string of coffee shops, restaurants, public art and monuments alongside renovated historic buildings.1 At the center of urban revitalization stood the famed Checkerboard Lounge. Black residents hoped to renovate this historic blues venue as the signature showpiece of a "new Bronzeville," but inadequate funding and municipal divestment in the neighborhood made this desire a near impossibility.2
Then in November 2003 the University of Chicago (U of C)-sometimes derided as the "800-pound gargoyle"-stepped in. The U of C not only bought but relocated the Checkerboard from 43rd Street to a university-owned building inside the Hyde Park neighborhood's Harper Court shopping district. Outraged, "Restoring Bronzeville" advocates immediately charged the U of C with "cultural piracy." University officials and Hyde Park's neighborhood boosters quickly shot back that their acquisition was not only a simple economic transaction between owner and seller but also an act of black historic preservation of a venue neglected by its own community. At the same time, officials were clear that the primary function of the Checkerboard was to "spawn an entertainment district" that could benefit university life for the U of C in its Hyde Park neighborhood.3
Far from a neighborhood squabble, the "Checkerboard controversy" is part of the larger...