Barack Obama, it turns out, is not the first president with roots in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. A half-dozen blocks south of Obama’s Chicago residence is a six flat building adjacent to the campus of the University of Chicago Medical Center that was a boyhood home to Ronald Reagan.
Now, however, the boyhood home is threatened by significant expansion to the Medical Center. It is likely to be torn down in the near future, although no demolition permit has been filed.
While he spent the majority of his childhood living in¬state, but outside of Chicago, Reagan lived in the apartment in a six-flat building on East 57th Street and South Maryland Avenue for one year as a child, from 1914 to 1915.
The University purchased the building in 2004, with plans to expand West Campus to the areas between 56th and 58th streets and South Drexel and Cottage Grove Avenues. The new buildings for the site include the William Eckhardt Research Center and a new child care center.
No demolition permit has been filed for that particular building, and the University has no announcements regarding this particular building, according to University spokesman Jeremy Manier. The University has acquired demolition permits for two other buildings on South Drexel Avenue.
While the conservative ascendancy that Reagan made politically successful was aided by the anti-Keynesian empiricism of the Chicago School of Economics, Hyde Park is resoundingly liberal, delivering about 95 percent of its vote to Democratic candidates. Hyde Park would be a strange place to put a memorial or a museum to Ronald Reagan, and that might be all the more reason to create it.
But, there is a Reagan Library and a Reagan Ranch in Southern California. And, two hours west of Hyde Park, in Tampico, Ill. where the bulk of Reagan’s boyhood (not just one year) was spent, there is a park and a museum at his birthplace.
Do we need another Reagan museum in Chicago at the expense of improvements to the University of Chicago Hospital?
Instead, I am led to believe that Reagan would have understood the need for creative destruction—to replace a century-old six-level with a tremendous research facility.
Yet, we would be amiss not to press for some lasting memorial to the 40th President in the Windy City, if only to correct for the sometimes absurd recipients of honors from this liberal stronghold. For this I have a simple proposal: on the opposite side of campus from where Dialogo—the statue that casts a shadow of a hammer-and-sickle every May Day—sits, the University should commission a new statue of Hyde Park’s other president, Ronald Reagan, on the corner he once called home.
And, for good measure, have the bronze Reagan shake the hand of an informal adviser of his who is sure to irk the average Hyde Parker: a bronze Milton Friedman, the Chicago School’s greatest economist.
Jeremy Rozansky is an editor of the Counterpoint at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the Student Free Press Association.
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.