Greetings from the bubble

I’m finally moved in, staying near the University of Chicago (where I’m starting next week) on 51^st.  I’m a quick walk from Lake Michigan, a quick bike ride from campus (on biker-friendly roads!), and my bedroom window looks out at some beautiful houses I thought were breathtaking, but soon learned are to be found all over Hyde Park. 

View from my bedroom window

With no shortage of cute, precocious toddlers in expensive strollers eating organic yogurt, and 20- and 30-somethings relaxing with books (required or pleasure reading, I wonder?) on the grass, Hyde Park seems a bit like the American dream, slightly oriented to the left.

But as I jogged to the lakefront trail this morning, I passed someone sleeping under a worn blanket beneath the pedestrian overpass, and a middle-aged black man slowly walking down the trail with tired bundles and a tired face. 

Hyde Park is a bit of an island, like many university communities, and you don’t need to stray too far to wear away at that satisfying suburb feeling that all is right with the world.  The neighborhood is littered with bike frames with stolen wheels and wheels with stolen frames.  Even in the locked bike room of my University housing apartment building, I’ve seen a lonely wheel or two.

Ever since I signed up for my U Chicago email address, I’ve been receiving warnings and incident reports from the university;  muggings, break –ins, be-smarts, don’t-go-here-or-theres, and lock-the-door-behind-yous.    A Chicago graduate I met in Ukraine told me to choose an apartment “as far north as possible,” and I did.

I am not saying I’m not “safe” here – I am.   I’m just thinking about the bubble.

Standing on the lakefront trail, to the left is a compact view of the Chicago skyline.  In front of you is Lake Michigan for as long as you can see.  And to the right is an industrial cluster pumping brown and gray.

Taken from my phone - a not so great photo of downtown from the Lakefront Trail

Is this what it is like to be a suburb dweller?  A most likely white, anything but lower-class American, with places to go and things to lose?  Living in your own space, with a cute breakfast place down the street, and a great locally owned shop where you can buy organic flour and hear hipsters make jokes about egg brands, secure in your morning coffee and daily newspaper delivery, but not-so-secretly terrified to slip past this street or that, where life is inconceivably different and you do not belong?

Bumper stickers are slapped on stop signs and poles, with the face of a young black child and the words “Don’t shoot, I want to grow up.”

Perhaps I've just gotten used to European crime rates.  When I moved to Istanbul I lived for a week in the Tarlabaşi area, a poor neighborhood with a bad reputation.  When I told my Boğaziçi friends I was living there, they all made me promise I would move.  “It is such a bad area!” they would say.  Knowing nothing about the city, and finding a better deal, I did move, especially after walking by a group of sex workers near my door one night on my way home.

In Istanbul terms, this was a bad neighborhood.  But not that bad – foreigners are moving in by the day, and the municipality has plans to kick out and clean up.  My German roommate stayed in the flat and said the whole year he lived there, he was the victim of only one crime:  someone stole his trousers out of his window while they were drying.  Maybe for Istanbullus, Tarlabaşi is dangerous.  But relatively speaking, Tarlabaşi is pretty tame.  Poor, but tame.

But here in Chicago, and in many places throughout the US,  a bad neighborhood is, well, bad.  David always jokes that he will never come to America because he’s afraid he’ll be shot.  In my first weeks back in America after more than 4 years abroad, I can feel what his joke is getting at.  I feel perfectly safe in my semi-permeable Hyde Park bubble.  But I suppose that is just what it is.  Not just in terms of crime, but in everyday life.  How much of America lives like this?

As a foreigner and a traveller, you can move through places and communities with a certain degree of fluidity that is hard to find at home.  With low crime rates and your well-honed travel smarts, you want to go everywhere, you don’t believe all the stereotypes about lower socioeconomic groups, or racial, ethnic or religious minorities.  You can accept the hospitality of a poor family in a village and end up chatting for hours, feeling right at home, but when you tell your city Turk friends about it, they may seem a bit uncomfortable, or jokingly ask how you possibly could understand “that dialect they speak there.”

But now I am “home,” and I realize although I’m new in town, my world is very different.  I have a place, and that place is in the bubble.