Another venerable institution -- a neighborhood grocery store, a socialist experiment, an icon of my childhood -- has bitten the dust.
The Hyde Park Co-op was a cooperative grocery store started in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood as a Depression-era, working-man's alternative to company stores. It was started, in all likelihood, by U. of Chicago idealists who wanted to create a collective -- oh, and by the way, get good food at decent prices. In time, it became the neighborhood grocery store -- a place whose smells, whose characters, whose chilly charm I can still recall, and whose opaque white fluorescent lights, ensconced in a drop ceiling, made me dream of heaven.
I remember trudging alongside my mother (in those years when she wore horrible Danish clogs and sounded like a Clydesdale thundering along the cobblestones) through the aisles of that store, sweating in my corduroy winter jacket with my mittens clipped onto the ends of the sleeves. I remember the neighborhood kids who bagged groceries there, and the vast aisles of produce and the smell of wet cardboard and citrus. I remember discovering the allure of infinite food, and the colorful aisles of cereal boxes; the siren song of Captain Crunch and the grrreat, cheerful masculinity of Tony the Tiger's Frosted Flakes.
I see the Co-op, still, from a small child's perspective. When I revisit my memories of the place, they're from perhaps three feet off the ground: the shelves are enormous, the workers' green aprons look like sails on a schooner, and the cornucopia is a miracle, each aisle disappearing in a parallax of impossible plenty.
Which is, of course, no reason to keep the store around. To read the comments under the Chicago Tribune article about the Co-op's demise is to understand how far the Co-op has fallen in recent years. It was never exactly a food boutique, but commenters (many of them former U. of Chicago students forced, for lack of choice, to shop at the Co-op) feel the Co-op is getting its just desserts (pardon the expression).
Perhaps Hyde Park is, too. Now the University will rent the space to a Jewel or a Dominick's. The neighborhood that loves to be different will be a little more like every other neighborhood. And the neighborhood residents who subsist on low or fixed incomes -- well, ironically, they'll actually probably be better off.
--T.A.
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