University of Chicago - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

Page 11 text:

Chicago is big enough and important enough and exciting enough not to be judged by the same Charitable standards of urbanity that we apply to the average middle-sized City; it is a great city. But what does its greatness consist of? The sheer defensiveness of its boosters comes from having to boost a Second City in all the distinctions ofgreatness. He Who persists in admiring Chicago will find it hard to support his pride by comparisons with the spectacles ofothr er cities. Having no image 10 suggest to us, it can show us only the honest glamor and fascination of the complexities of big-city life in AmeriCa today: those which remain in New York and Los Angeles also. but only after the tourists go home. There is in the muddled aspirations and problems of Chicago something representative of much more than Chicago. Chicago: the Great American Logical Contradiction. City of monotony and conformity which nevertheless has at least one of everything and everyone. The city which never plans ahead and is always there tomorrow. Chicago: City of the American Shoulders, huddling ner- vously in the middle of our age, good and bad. It has every- thing: sixty storeys and tenements; rich, poor, and middle- middle; white and black; right and wrong; a university. m til Mwmi. my aimwni 4 t Mus M! W- 54 : -mgmm o rim 46mm 0mm WW

Page 13 text:

We live on an island. The dry land that connects us to the what-it-is we call the world, is a fiction. ls Hyde Park alogical extension ofWood- lawn. Kenwood. or South Shore? Does it belong to the Loopthat we can see looming through the north- ward smog? Or South Chicago? We have more in common with the lake. Hyde Park is integrated, more or less. Praise it for its advances, or cas- tigate it for its hypocrisy; compared to almost any other community in the country, it is still a rare neighbor- hood indeed. Here. Education is not just the traditional rite of passage the com- mon man subjects himself to; in one way or another, most Hyde Parkers believe it to be a real thing in its own right. Those mythopoeic authorities, Pths, are your neighbors. Ten bookstores for 40,000 people. Aca- deme is here and now; and a strange isolated world it is. Is Hyde Park part of Daley Chica- got or Dirksen Illinoist 0r Johnson America? Dissent is conformity, the status quo daring. Thus we show what we knew any- way: Hyde Park is strange.