I’ve had an Instagram account since early 2017, but I’ve never really used it until recently. Post-Pandemic, we’re all trying to make sense of the new New and most of us are restricted in our travels. Hyde Park is bizarrely landlocked—you need a car or public transportation to get out of here (although, technically, you could walk alongside Lake Shore Drive all the way through, I suppose). Frankly, given how badly the rest of the city is doing in terms of masking and social distancing, I am, for once, glad for our relative isolation. There’s a Marshalls here, finally, and a Michaels, hurrah, so at least we no longer have to leave the neighbourhood to find ordinary items like bras and socks. And while the food is still generally horrible (as I’ve said here, Hyde Park is where food goes to die), we do at least have more options for groceries these days. It’s nothing like the north side, where produce isn’t just fresh but delicious and you can find the basics for nearly every cuisine you could think of. But, in truth, the food and friends who live there are among the few things I really miss about the north side, with its seeped-in-the-concrete racism.
Mind you: Hyde Park is extremely weird about race. Mike Nichols once said that “Hyde Park is where black and white unite against the poor” and that history of class earnestness combined with raw, naked racism is still evident in daily interactions today. If you’re read as Black, Black baristas at Starbucks and clerks at Whole Foods will treat you like dirt—I and others, including Black friends, have had the latter snip and snap at us if we were children, while they went on to treat the more Asian-seeming and white customers with all the courtesy they deserved. Combine this with the usual and ubiquitous racism from white people that’s a Chicago specialty, and it’s all the sort of thing that makes lefty race-conscious brains melt. All of this is particular to a in a neighbourhood that justifiably takes pride in a long and complex history of an integration that’s still rare to see in the rest of a city where even casual friendships between Black and white people are not that common. Hyde Park is also one of the last neighbourhoods in Chicago—perhaps the last one ever—with such a large number of residents who actually grew up here, and many of them actively choose to return after leaving for college and jobs elsewhere. That makes for a unique and lovely sedimentation of local history and memory and a great many arguments about, among other things, what restaurant or business was where, and whether or not it was good as some remember. Just say the words “Ribs N’ Bibs,” the name of a now-gone place, and arguments will rage for days.
But as with integration, the forces of gentrification here are intense, made even more so by the advent of the Obama Presidential Center, a private endeavour on the part of the Obamas that’s designed to push out more of the poorer residents and attract only the moneyed students and wealthier Chicagoans. It should be noted that the OPC is not a presidential library in the traditional sense; Rick Perlstein’s account of how it landed on Chicago is still a must-read. Talk to a certain kind of Hyde Parker— long-term upwardly mobile or upper class residents—and you hear nothing but praise for the changes that have been promised by the OPC, changes that will include higher rent-paying tenants and people willing to buy houses at inflated prices for the prospect of living in what they hope will become a neighbourhood like Lincoln Park on the north side (on the gentrification of that, you should read Daniel Kay Hertz’s The Battle for Lincoln Park). Talk to another kind, long-term residents like Jack Spicer who have been part of the progressive-left cadre in the neighbourhood, and you get a different response. The conflicts and conversations can’t be easily slotted in terms of race or class, and the frictions make this one of the most bewildering but also one of the most interesting neighbourhoods to live in.
And then there’s the architecture. The University of Chicago is the overlord here, the biggest employer and landlord. Built in 1890, it was deliberately modeled after Oxbridge, in a style I like to call Ye Olde Englande Maybe, full of grandiose Gothic architecture and gargoyles. While it’s oddly odd, it’s also oddly beautiful and the houses here are often gorgeous, expansive Victorians (the sort that no newer faculty, even at the University of Chicago, will be able to afford in coming years as academia goes to hell). Here and there an imposing Brutalist marvel like the Regenstein library (to which mere mortal HP residents are denied admission, even though it’s our money that actually pays for it — take it from, hey, Forbes) rise up to confound our aesthetic expectations.
Which is to say: I love walking in this neighbourhood, with all its convoluted and complicated histories, and I’ve grown to love the freedom of Instagram, of not having to use my words as much. I’ve long wanted to work in and with art and haven’t, for a host of complicated reasons, so IG is my attempt to both record and transmit the world as I literally see it and as I tentatively take steps to making other kinds of art. There’s also the matter of my cane, on which I’ve been dependent for a while and I’ve decided to not let it mark my mobility (without it, I’m not quite able to make it for more than a couple of blocks). It helps my legs and everything else to walk more and to my own surprise, I’m sometimes out for as long as three hours, with many breaks in between, something I can do easily in a place with lots of parks of all sizes where I can sit down.
In my wanderings, I like to note the architecture, certainly, which is everywhere, but I also enjoy the details of whatever is around me and making connections or jokes about what I see, and taking photos from odd angles. I’ve had a couple of friends ask if the image that accompanies this essay was an embedded fish fossil: it’s actually the pattern of a worker’s sneaker, after they stepped in dry plaster and then walked onto the concrete. It has no doubt been rubbed and washed away since then, but I loved that for a brief moment I saw what I recorded, the fish-like structure, and that people can also see what I visualised at the time.
I’ve been discovering some amazing artists and art-makers and archives of images on Instagram, and I take inspiration from people like my friend Betsy Rubin (@betsyrubin), whose eye I’ve learnt a lot from, and my friend Gautham Reddy (@gaumure), who’s been creating an amazing and growing set of images related to South Asian art and literature. There are lots of others I’m discovering every day (you can see them in my list of people followed). My own handle is @bekargyan, which is Hindi for Useless Knowledge, also the name of my upcoming podcast. More on that later.
On that note: happy viewing!
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
