“Mom!” I yelled from the doorway, “I’m going to ride my bike to meet Chris, and then we’re going to soccer practice.”  “Ok, have fun, love you,” she replied from our railroad-style apartment at 52nd and Dorchester Streets in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.  Our apartment had a long hallway with rooms on one side, a living room in the front and a small kitchen and back porch in the rear.  Pedaling hard on my dark red Raleigh ten-speed bike, accelerating, my friend Chris Fitchen and I rode West on 55th Street towards our home soccer field in Washington Park, very aware I was venturing beyond the outer Western edge of the island.  Hyde Park started with 300 acres purchased in 1853 by Paul Cornell, a real estate speculator, who hoped to bring to vacationing city folks living 7 miles North in the city center the cooler lakefront summer weather.  I realized early on that I lived on an island.  As a little kid, I probed and explored my island’s boundaries going everywhere on my bicycle.  Later, in high school, still on two wheels - a used bright orange Honda motorcycle purchased clandestinely without my parent’s knowledge and with a $400 loan from my Sister Leah – on two wheels I always had speed, mobility, freedom.  

 

“Woosh” a gust of wind blows hard from my left. I’m a block from the site of the first human generated nuclear chain reaction, sunlight gleams off the large bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, which appears to grow and expand as if nuclear fission was occurring there at that very moment.  Pedaling on, I cross King Drive, my head now on a swivel as Chris and I enter a danger zone, the scary memory of recently being chased by a large group of kids on bikes still fresh and raw.

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As a boy exploring my island and its boundaries meant adventure and some risk as roving groups of boys were often out hunting for bikes to steal.  Riding two up on Sting-Ray bikes, high handlebars, vinyl banana seats, vise-grip pliers clamped to the seat post perhaps to steal wheels off parked bikes; a perceived and real threat. The neighborhood was anchored by the grey stone Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago to the West, their grotesque gargoyle statues glaring menacingly from rooftops belying their utilitarian purpose of diverting rainwater away from the stone facade. The edge of my island to the South is 60th Street with the tough Woodlawn neighborhood beyond, bordered by the long Midway Plaisance, a vast green space running East-West for over a mile, which was one of the main exhibit sites for the Columbian Exposition.  The Midway was a mile-long tree lined park through the University of Chicago campus, running from Jackson Park to the East and Washington Park to the West.  During the World’s Fair in 1893, the Midway held cultural exhibits from countries around the world, live animals, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and a massive Ferris Wheel - the first of its kind - carried hundreds of riders at a time.

 

The Eastern boundary of my island is Lake Michigan, and to the North, 47th Street.  I didn’t explore much North of 47th Street until high school, when me and friends would regularly venture beyond the Northern boundary, deep into Jeff Fort’s El Rukn gang territory to hear blues legends Lefty Dizz and Buddy Guy.  In the 1970’s the Checkerboard Lounge was a magical place, located at 43rd Street and near King Drive, down a small flight of stairs to a cramped basement bar and soundstage with a bare lightbulb overhead.  This small, simple, worn stage visited by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones on more than one occasion as they paid homage to their blues roots grounded in the Mississippi Delta style of Muddy Waters and others who fled North to Chicago during the Great Migration, away from the bigotry and oppression in the deep South.  “What the hell are you doing here!?” the cop, wearing a heavy leather jacket with brass buttons, yelled at me and my friends as we parked to head to the Checkerboard one night late.  “Are you lost?” the white cop continued,” it’s not safe for you to be here,” now sounding genuinely concerned.  “We’re ok, thanks,” we told him and once safely inside the door of the Checkerboard, we were welcomed and treated as if we were the owner’s kids.

 

While 47th Street, marked a clear dividing line to the North of my island that you didn’t casually venture past, some things were worth the risk.  In high school, seeking to purchase beer at the one liquor store that didn’t check anyone’s ID took me and friends to Drexel Cut Rate Liquors on 47th Street.  The metal gate in front of the door buzzed open, “Hi baby, how you doin’ tonight? What can I get you boys?” the friendly black woman asked from behind the tall wooden counter, gold tooth gleaming when she smiled.  Behind her on worn wooden shelves were small pint bottles of clear and amber liquids – Southern Comfort, Jack Daniels, Thunderbird wine. Below was the beer cooler which contained what we were after – Special Export, Miller High Life, or Old English 800.  Armed with a cold case or two of illicit beer my friends and I would head to the Eastern edge of the island - to the Point.

 

Heading East on 53rd Street, past Harold’s Fried Chicken Shack - the self-proclaimed fried chicken king - a half-lit neon sign blinks depicting a man in a chef’s hat carrying a cleaver chasing a chicken, past the large red brick YMCA where my Dad taught me how to swim by age 5, past Bob’s newsstand and Breslauer’s department store where I worked odd jobs in middle school. Past Valois diner where my dad and I got to know the friendly Greek cooks, where cops, pimps and drug dealers could sit side by side enjoying homestyle cooking from the steam counter.  Onto Promontory Point, or just the Point as it’s called, a large park built in the 1930’s on a landfill, and site of a former Nike missile radar base during the cold war, was a frequent refuge and hang out spot throughout my middle and high school years.  The city park: a peninsula which juts out into Lake Michigan where massive limestone boulders protect the shoreline. My friends and I frequently swam in the lake to cool off in hot weather, we climbed on the U-505 German submarine parked behind the Museum of Science and Industry to the South, and explored the Wooded Island, site of the then-controversial Columbian Exposition World’s Fair and more recently controversial site of the soon-to-be Obama presidential library.

 

Hyde Park was and is a unique neighborhood, and it was an amazing place to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s.  My island was culturally, economically, and racially diverse, intensely urban, but with ample green spaces, a world-class university and bordered by Lake Michigan, that great vast freshwater oasis that as Paul Cornell correctly foresaw 168 years ago, still cools, freshens and renews the South Side of Chicago neighborhood I grew up in.  While for many, just beyond Hyde Park’s borders straying over the well-known invisible boundaries can and does have life and death consequences.  Inner-city gang rivalries - in a macabre form of disorganized crime - control their turf through intimidation and violence block by block in Chicago.  After almost 60 years, the Checkerboard Lounge and Drexel Liquors are long gone, the Point is still one of the nicest parks in a city replete with many amazing lakefront parks, and today I regularly ride a bike and a motorcycle as two wheels are still one of the best ways to explore an island.