Ghosts of Obama's Hyde Park Manse

Because he is the first African-American president, Barack Obama's Hyde Park home is destined to become a national landmark like his idol Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield. But perhaps even Barack and Michelle themselves don't know that the spirit of social justice inhabited that house at 51st and Greenwood well before they did.

When I lived there off and on between 1969 and 1973 the mansion, owned by Lutheran Urban Ministries and overseen by the unconventional Rev. George Hrbek, was a hub of social activism. As you entered the house from the front door, the reception area on the left had been turned into a community meeting room with inspirational quotes, if my memory serves, from Albert Camus, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Bible painted on the walls above the fireplace. On Sunday there were "joyous celebrations" in that room accompanied by guitar instead of "church services."

A grand stairwell on the right led to the upper floors, which were divided into separate rooms where I lived along with the Hrbek family as well as a struggling director who often staged Edward Albee plays at the Lutheran School of Theology campus, down the street near the University of Chicago. At the back of the 6000 square foot mansion on the first floor was a large kitchen and dining area, where we ate collectively, with another, less grand, stairwell leading up the back as well as down to the considerable basement (which I now gather is a "wine cellar").

I first came to the house in the summer of 1969, when I was 16, as part of an "urban encounter" program which sought to sensitize white suburban youth to the plight of the black inner city. We attended rallies protesting police brutality after the killing of Fred Hampton, the Chicago Black Panther leader who was a friend of Hrbek's. We wrote grant proposals to the Joyce Foundation for People Against Racism, canvassed the housing projects and studied the failures of urban renewal. On Saturday mornings we went to Operation PUSH to listen to Jesse Jackson preach "I Am Somebody." During one period we would hold sit-ins to block the aisles of supermarkets as part of the United Farm Worker's grape boycott, organized in those days in Chicago by Eliseo Medina. There was one episode, supremely ironic in light of the current owners, in which local black power advocates demanded that, "if you white liberals are so big on social justice, 'give' this mansion to us." Hrbek, of course, blew them off and threw them out.

On some warm summer evenings we'd climb out onto the roof top from the third floor windows and listen to the gunshots around the neighborhood, heeding the word-of-mouth warnings that we should stay off the streets because the Blackstone Rangers were going to rumble. In those days their reach included the area down to the high school toward Lake Michigan. (Though the area between 51st and 47th streets is lined with stately homes, the ghetto used to abruptly begin right across the 47th Street dividing line. Now I gather the dividing line has become
somewhat gentrified.)

Other nights, after returning from Harper's Court where we got ice cream and browsed the bookstore, we'd sit on the steps of the Isaiah Synagogue across the street on Greenwood and wait for Muhammed Ali to walk by on his regular visits to Elijah Muhammed who lived then around the corner, where, as I remember it, he built identical houses for his three sons.

I lived in the Greenwood house again off and on when I became editor of "The Bridge," the youth newspaper of the Lutheran Church Missouri-Synod. By that time I, like others in the house, was involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement, particularly in the defense of the Harrisburg 8 -- the Berrigan brothers, who were Catholic priests, and a handful of activists accused of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger. I used to escort around town one of the defendants, Eqbal Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar at the University of Chicago whose office was in the famous Robie House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright. A controversy similar to that which later swirled around Obama and another University of Chicago scholar, the Palestinian Rashid Khalidi, swirled in those days around Ahmed. I remember driving him once to a North Shore temple where he tried, to no avail and much abuse, to make the Palestinian case that being anti-Zionist was not the same as being anti-Semitic.

There is a final irony to my time living in the house the Obamas would occupy. My room was the front room on right hand side on the second floor overlooking Greenwood toward the synagogue. One freezing winter day in the early 70s when the future looked bleak, I gazed out the window at the bare, black branches of the trees lining the street, dusted with snow against a slate sky. I said to myself: "History is never going to come to this place, I've got to get out of here and go to California, where the action is."

Comments

[helpusa]

I'm visiting Chicago for Christmas, I may just take a look at what is destined to be a new city's attraction,
the home of PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA and FAMILY. I'm yet not tired of saying it and reading it.

[fignozzle]

great story!

[SusanHR]

Before the Lutherans, the house belonged to the uncle of Leopold (as in Leopold and Loeb). The uncle donated it to the synagogue across the street (then Isaiah Israel, now KAM Isaiah Israel). At some point during the 1950s the house was the South Side Jewish Day School, a predecessor of the current Akiba Schechter Jewish Day School, now at 53rd and Cornell. After the Lutherans and before it became a private home again, it housed the United Chinese Churches of Chicago.

[tovangar2]

Wow! Where did you find out this fascinating history? That house sure has seen some traffic.

[ReElectNoOne]

Quite Interesting. Check it out on Google Earth for a great roof-top view of the house and neighborhood.

Just download the free program if you don't have it and paste this into the "Fly To" location:

E Hyde Park Blvd & S Greenwood Ave, Chicago, Cook, Illinois 60615

http://earth.google.com

This is one cool program to explore the world and educate yourself and your children !

[pesjohn]

i might as well correct you now, because someone inevitably will: "harper" not "harper's" court.
hyde park and kenwood are places that seem to be caught in rather unforgiving economic cycles that prevent consistent economic development. people will chime in and say it has changed, it has been gentrified, but i can't think of any other urban college neighborhood that has such a hard time supporting local businesses, protecting citizens, and maintaining a stable housing market. around the corner from obama's home is a relatively new but empty shopping complex that the coop has been unable to lease for years. the main streets (53rd and 55th) are littered with vacancies. and always have been. the degree of physical violence reported on those and many other streets is astounding. with friends who have been raped at gunpoint, carjacked, and mugged at all hours of the day. and while there are stretches of beautiful properties around the university and in obama's kenwood, they have been unable to support a stable and attractive housing market. the culprit behind all three of these plights in the university, which has treated locals as enemies and has been the worst landlord and steward of that neighborhood.

[LeftCoastOracle]

Nice walk down memory lane but I suspect it's less likely Obama's Chicago "manse" will become a national landmark than the home in Hawaii where he was born and/or grew up.

[zeezan]

It would probably be pretty difficult to turn the small apartment in Hawaii where Obama grew up into a national landmark.

[greenriverkate]

Being over 60, I thoroughly enjoyed this article and thinking back to the DAYS. Such memories and termoil but loved the days when we could actually get something done. However, getting politicians to listen was the biggest problem as they just thought we were dumb kids. And even know, so many of them still don't listen!

[tovangar2]

Oh man, you took me back with this article. I lived in Hyde Park in 1967 & 68 at 1718 East 56th Street in one of those great old six-flats (now long since torn down & replaced with a high rise). Hyde Park wasn't just integrated, I think every mixed couple in the city lived there. The atmosphere was wonderful. The best place I've ever lived. When you got home to Hyde Park in the evening you felt like you could finally exhale.

[lafrance]

So interesting. thank you.
Of course the rightwing loons will say it just proves that obama is a leftist radical as he lives in one of their houses. Or whatever else kind of nonsense they will come up with.
I would bet, however, that obama knows the history of the house. Not only because most homeowners are curious and neighbors are willing to share what they know about the neighborhood but, Obama being a community organizer would find it very fitting he ended up falling in love this particular house.

[suzn]

While there in school in the 80s I lived at 56th and Dorchester, 48th and Kimbark, and on the Midway. Is there a book on the history of Hyde Park? It was interesting to read about the Midway in Larsen's Devil in the White City...

[ciotog17]

Is there a book on the history of Hyde Park? Are there cheese stores in mouse heaven? You can't coop a bunch of intellectuals in an area and not expect them to write about it.

There are indeed quite a few books on Hyde Park history. The most easily available and quite thorough one is "Hyde Park" by Max Grinnell (copyright 2001), which goes back to the days when Hyde Park was a town outside Chicago. (It was annexed in 1889 and the village limits included Kenwood, Oakland, Douglas, South Shore, Chatham and Avalon Park and went as far south as modern-day Hegeswich and as far west as modern day Englewood.) It is published by Arcadia Publishing and I have seen it at major bookstores around Chicago.

You might also try "Slim's Table" by Mitchell Duneier. It's centered around the Valois restaurant on East 53rd Street (well-known for its motto "See Your Food" [and why shouldn't you?]) and gives a more down-to-earth history of Hyde Park with emphasis on the latter half of the 20th Century. The focus of the book isn't the history of Hyde Park per se but the personal history of the people the author encountered there.

If I offended anyone by omitting their history of Hyde Park, I apologize. These were the first two to come to mind.

[HunterSThompson]

(continued)

On October 28, 1971 raids occurred at three more Buffalo area draft boards ‑ at Batavia, Geneseo, and Niagara Falls. Raiders left a written note for J. Edgar Hoover, signed, "The New and Improved East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives". Through a Buffalo underground newspaper, Undercurrents (November 12, 197 1), THE BUFFALO said:


The people who paralyzed the Draft Mechanism of Batavia, Geneseo and Niagara Falls are our friends ‑ though we do not know that we will have a chance to meet them. They're our friends because their acts answer the same dilemma we have felt, namely that we have been lied to and that the lies continue, saying The country is caught in a war, rather than a crime.


See also this link for a good documentary movie of those days:

http://www.camden28.org/

[HunterSThompson]

Very nice story, Nathan. Your experience sounds very much like my house experience in Buffalo, NY 1971-1973 at 124 Jewett Parkway, the home of Ed Powell,

http://www.edpowell.org/

sociology Professor at SUNY@Buffalo. All types hung there, myself included: e.e.cummings, Ralph Nader, and of course, the FBI had telescopes located in the Frank Lloyd Wright house directly across the street and an FBI infiltrated lived in the house with us and our phones were tapped! The swimming pool in the back yard was filthy, carp swam in it and you could not see the bottom of the pool!

We made some good news out of that house; I can remember in October 1971 returning to the house after we raided draft boards in Geneseo, Niagara Falls & Batavia New York all in one night. When i returned from my Mom's house in Rochester, 2 men who were obvioulsly FBI were at my front door. I made a U turn away from the house. This was right after J Edgar Hoover announced he broke the "East Coast Conspiracy," (referring to the Berigan crowd you mentioned). The "New & Imporved East Coast Conspiracy made the headlines in October, after Camden, NJ did the previous August.

http://www.buffalonian.com/history/articles/1951-now/1960santiwar/powellbuff1965thebuffalo.html

[MaryC3]

I guess sometimes history can just show up unexpectedly.

This is a very interesting column Nathan. Thanks.

Now, if only those walls could talk....that house might just give us all quite a few really, really great stories in addition to yours.

[brokenarrow]

Thank you, this was an amazing piece. Talk about your good vibrations­..........­man, that house must be loaded with them.

[moiaussi]

Not "Black Stone Rangers".
Blackstone Rangers, named after Blackstone Avenue.
Later they called themselves the Black P. (for Peace) Stone Rangers.

[Dustee]

I didn't know the Blackstone Rangers and Black 'Peace' Stone were the same people. I wonder why they change their name, they were just as dangerous weren't they? LOL!