Curbed Cup 1st Round: (6) Hyde Park vs. (11) Rogers Park

The Curbed Cup, Curbed Chicago's annual Neighborhood of the Year tournament, is kicking off with 16 'hoods, which will square off in a series of one-on-one matchups. Voting for each matchup will close in the breakfast hour of the following day. We'll showcase two first round contests per day through the week with results reviewed on Friday. Let the eliminations begin!

Hyde Park had another big year by anyone's yardstick, with the completion of the Harper Court/Hyatt Place office, retail, & hotel complex on 53rd (pictured), the breaking of ground for Jeanne Gang's City Hyde Park apartment tower, and the momentum behind other game-changing proposals like Vue53 and Gang's U of C dorms. We'd better mention also the recently completed Early Childhood Learning Center by Valerio Dewalt Train, surprisingly adult and very welcoming. The common denominator in a lot of this is U of C, institutional muscle that many South Side neighborhoods lack. But that same muscle may end up driving out local small business, particularly on one or two main corridors.

Rogers Park is such a large and diverse place that when we try to picture "change" or "evolution", the images are usually of lakefront residential renovations or CTA-adjacent development. The former is fulfilled by the work of Col. Jennifer Pritzker & Tawani Enterprises, who've in the course of one year reopened the gut-reno'd Farcroft Apartments, restored Wright's Emil Bach House, built apartments alongside the Morse Theater, and begun work on Sheridan Road's dastardly "car tower". Non-Pritzker projects do happen here from time to time as well, and a 29-unit townhouse cluster financed by Loyola and the cluster of apartments and new retail accompanying the Loyola Red Line Station rebuild are 2013's chief examples. Waiting in the wings is a possible hotel extension of the Loyola townhouse complex, eyeing the corner of Sheridan & Albion. Be alarmed or excited with the action on the avenues, there's justification for both.
·Curbed Cup 2013