Public policy idea: Rename all of Chicago "Hyde Park," end all crime.

While I've been living in Hyde Park for only a few days, I have spent a lot of hours over the past several years reading maps of Chicago's Community Areas and neighborhoods. As friends scattered from Evanston and around Chicago years ago, I got to learn more about Chicago's neighborhoods, both the real and the ones invented by realtors (see, e.g., Bucktown and its environs and most anything with "west" in its name). But something I've only recently noticed is how so much of the South Side is now apparently "Hyde Park." This week I've heard places as far north as 31st St. referred to as Hyde Park, places as far south as the 80s (!) and west to the highway are now also apparently part of the magical, ever-expanding Hyde Park neighborhood. Most interestingly, all of these references were approving ones, praising the virtues of so-called Hyde Park, even when my interlocutors were referring to Bronzeville or Woodlawn or Kenwood or whatnot. 

What the heck is going on here? A friend suggested that, to get white people to visit, you have to refer to anything north of 90th St, east of the highway, and south of Roosevelt St. as "Hyde Park." If even our President lived in Hyde Park, it can't be a bad place to be, right?! (Never mind that the Obamas' house is actually on the southern edge of Kenwood and not in Hyde Park.) The power of the Hyde Park name isn't surprising given the Obama and UChicago connections. And Hyde Park's reputation as a bubble on the South Side is deserved. But that the name alone, when applied to sundry South Side street corners, can so effectively transport literal South Side locations out of the lore of the "South Side" and into places (white) people would want to visit has been, I'll admit, a strange thing to witness.