A glimpse of Penn's future?

CHICAGO -- Lost in Hyde Park and looking for Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House this weekend, I came across a gigantic banner, University of Chicago Parents Weekend: A View from the Inside. As I walked around the massive, sparsely populated stretches of campus without finding my cherished Wright building, I remembered not applying to the school because it was, as my counselor put it, in "America's worst ghetto." (Yet, she prodded me to apply to Penn....) Chicago's majestic university grounds, with its Gothic buildings and the Rockefeller chapel that gives Chartres a run for its money, is not exactly the decaying neighborhood that I had been told to expect. That was until I crossed 61st Street. Within 10 minutes, I saw three university security officers. The fourth stopped to ask if I knew where I was going and advised me to return to campus as "directly and quickly as possible." It was obvious from his reaction that my present location, though only two blocks from the pristine well-fortified campus, was not kosher. Chicago, like Penn, Yale and USC, finds itself in the awkward situation of being a multibillion-dollar institution in an impoverished inner city. Chicago, unlike Penn and Yale, has decided to barricade itself in to create a safe community for its students, faculty and staff -- but only after several attempts of varying success to improve the surrounding area. An interesting twist, because after the crime panic of 1996, Penn cited Chicago as the model it planned to follow to make the campus safer. The problem started soon after the University of Chicago was founded by John D. Rockefeller in the then-upscale suburb of Hyde Park after the 1893 World's Fair. The Fair disrupted the natural growth of the community, its massive pavilions altering the neighborhood's ability to expand south. The transformation of the pavilions into a campus was done in protest of a community that, rightly, saw such massive construction as detrimental to property values. The ensuing departure of educated professionals and small tradespeople in the 1940s and '50s was seen as a call to action by administrators. To stabilize and enhance the neighborhood, the university acquired neighborhood residential buildings for use as student housing and partnered in the building of new shopping centers. Urban renewal quickly rose to the top of the university's agenda, similar to what we have experienced at Penn during the tenure of Judith Rodin. Chicago, like Penn is attempting to do now, created its own police for the campus neighborhood, created a community improvement district, built a local school, redeveloped area retail and bought enough residential properties to become the largest landlord in the area. Today, Hyde Park is home to more than 65 percent of the university's faculty and nearly all of its students and boasts a "lively" cultural community. The plan on first glance seems to have worked. Hyde Park is a multicultural neighborhood -- even Louis Farrakhan lives there -- where on Sunday morning one can see parents and children playing in the leaves on their walk home from some flavor of religious services. This is the ideal that Rodin must have envisioned when Penn embarked on its massive construction projects. Admittedly, Rodin's efforts have greatly improved the appearance of Penn's campus and our borders with West Philadelphia. Within a year, if all goes well, we should witness the opening of the inaugural Sundance Cinemas, the yuppie.com grocery store and the Left Bank (which coincidently is on the right bank), all of which should make Rodin's dream of turning Penn into a cultural destination for Philadelphia-area residents a reality. However, we must look at the example of Chicago to see the potential failings of our current efforts. If Rodin succeeds in building her community adjacent to campus, she will also succeed in pushing the problem areas farther away. Although Penn will keep expanding and improving the neighborhood, whatever it does short of building a fence -- as Chicago has done -- will not keep the campus periphery safe from crime. Penn and Chicago's problems fit within a greater framework of urban decay. West Philadelphia and Chicago's South Side are in dire of need of more substantive employment than the entry-level service jobs currently available. In the November issue of Philadelphia, Rodin is called the de facto "mayor of West Philadelphia" and "Philadelphia's second mayor." President Rodin should use her honorary title and her position on Sam Katz's Greater Philadelphia First, the city's premier business organization, to bring the types of jobs to West Philly that will make deep economic impact so that Penn will never need to build a fence at 45th Street. If she doesn't manage this part of her plan, it won't matter how many suburbanites come to Penn for dinner and a movie. The lack of campus safety that she is trying to combat will only be moved further away and not necessarily solved.

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