Student film explores UChicago’s relationship with Hyde Park

It was the use of hand sanitizer, or lack of it, that sparked the creation of a 70-minute film, “The Heart of Hyde Park: Stories of Small Businesses.” So says second-year University of Chicago student Lisa Raj Singh.

She had walked into the Pan-African art and craft gallery Kilimanjaro International on 53rd Street in 2022 when owner Rose Kyoma Garrett, aka Mother Rose, pointed to the door, signaling to Singh to put on hand sanitizer before proceeding into the shop. A confused Singh eventually figured it out and lathered it on.

A week later, Singh was back in the store. But Mother Rose was occupied when a new customer walked in.

“How do I know that it’s a new customer? Because they didn’t put on the hand sanitizer,” she said. “For a split second, I thought, ‘Is it my place to say?’ Then I ask: ‘Please kindly put on the hand sanitizer.’ Mama Rose gives me the nod of approval. And with that, we create a sort of bond and I’m back in the shop a week later.”

Kilimanjaro International has been selling art from American and African artists for over 30 years in the Hyde Park area. Mother Rose has been a mainstay of support for homeless artists, connecting homeless youth to mentors. Since Singh formed a friendship with Mother Rose, she’s witnessed “people come to her shop just to talk to her, to invite her to a wedding, to share food and invite her to dinner.”

“That is what a small business does for the community,” Singh said. “It isn’t a place on a map. It’s the very dynamic mosaic of nods and smiles and interactions that you have with one another. It’s a living thing.”

With Mother Rose as a role model, Singh, the film’s director, and several University of Chicago students collected over a dozen hours of interviews in 2022 going door-to-door to eight Hyde Park small businesses to hear their stories of success and struggle, and hear about their relationships with the neighborhood and the University of Chicago.

“The Heart of Hyde Park” premiered at Doc Films on U. of C.’s campus May 8, bringing students, residents and small-business owners out to view it. The work looks at the nuanced and complex environment that has an elite university operating in a historical Chicago community in the hope of keeping the conversation going about how college students can support small businesses in the area, said Elliot Sher, a first-year student majoring in sociology, who helped with the film. He said that after watching the film, he was most surprised by how big of an impact students can have on the local community.

Wallace Goode Jr., former executive director of the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce and former associate dean of students and a representative of the Office of Campus and Student Life, was featured in the documentary and answered questions from the audience with other entrepreneurs and community leaders at the premiere.

Goode’s advice to students: “Be careful not to let your academics get in the way of your education.” Goode was commending Singh and the other U. of C. students for offering a balanced picture of what good the university is doing in the community and where it needs to improve.

“This is the way you help small businesses,” he said at the screening. “You encourage the community to be supportive, and you encourage small-business owners to market more creatively to 18-, 19-, 20-, 21-year-olds … be more creative in helping develop that camaraderie and creative use of students and small businesses working together.”

Arnell Brady is proprietor of Brady Speech-Language Pathology, a Hyde Park business that has been going strong for 39 years, minus the 12 years Brady practiced in the Chatham neighborhood. He praised the students’ efforts with the documentary and said businesses in the area need more attention when it comes to the social, communication and sustainability aspects of the area.

“Communication is really important. And that is communicating more than just about how much the rent is. … It’s also about what you are doing for the community,” he said. “Because what I see happening is 53rd Street is getting more and more food places, and those restaurants are bringing all types of people. That’s OK, but they’re also bringing in different values. And sometimes that can be a direct clash with the community that they’re coming into and that begins to create problems with shops like mine, that are very family-oriented.”

U. of C., Hyde Park’s largest landowner, factors into the small-business equation when it comes to the impact as well. Over the years, as new businesses arrived, older businesses were relocated. Akroma Kourouma Sahan, owner of Sahan Motherland Salon & Spa, shared her 2014 story about that in the documentary. She relocated and said it wasn’t easy, but she remains in Hyde Park. She jokes that after getting a hug from former President Barack Obama, she made peace with having to move. She hopes her current landlord doesn’t sell the building to the university so she can stay where she is.

“The university obviously has huge investment in this community, but is there an investment of any greater value than the family who has lived here for 30 years?” Goode asked. “They’ve invested everything in this community. The university has invested a lot, but they haven’t invested everything. So who has greater claim? Thirty to 40 years investing everything or the university investing millions?”

“It’s a complex equation for many small businesses,” said Phil Moy, executive director of the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce. “There’s issues of capital funding, staffing — who’s gonna work your night hours if you’ve been there already 12 hours a day? Do support the small business owners. … Take the time to visit the business corridors here in Hyde Park. Not only on 53rd Street but 55th Street and 57th. They put a whole lot more effort in than some of the big box stores.”

Leslie Roberson, proprietor of Black Beauty Collective, said having spent 16 years in human resources prior to becoming a full-time entrepreneur gave her insight into what it takes to get hired by larger companies. She said if students aren’t engaging with the Hyde Park business community, they are missing an opportunity.

“If you’re a finance major, a marketing major, you can use the things that you’re learning in school to engage with these businesses because you will be able to see actionable steps that you’ve taken to grow a business and you can tell that story when it’s time to interview for your first role,” Roberson said. “If you are not engaging with these businesses that are at your footsteps, you’re doing yourself a disservice.”

Joyce Feuer, owner of Joyce’s Event & Party Planning, said over her 24 years of operating a business in the area, she’s seen many Hyde Park businesses come and go. But she would like to see the mingling of the student population with small businesses start at student orientation or during campus tours when prospective students visit with their parents.

“Yep, they’re gonna find the Five Guys, they’re gonna find the Stan’s Donuts, but they’re not going to find Busted Bra down on 53rd Street because it’s a little unknown business that serves a huge population of people,” she said. “You can give them all the burgers and fries you want, but there’s a lot more that Hyde Park has to offer. Using places like the South East Chicago Commission, the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce, those kinds of organizations bring students, interns and volunteers in, it shows on the streets.

“The music fests are not just for 20-somethings,” Feuer said. “The university has helped to bring music to Harper Court. Some people love it. Some people hate it. There’s always going to be controversy, but the real question is how to get the students, how to get the employees of the university to look around to what is in their backyard.”

“The Heart of Hyde Park” took a long time to come to fruition, Singh said. She said a member of the filmmaking team conducted a survey of over 200 students prior to filming and the results showed the vast majority tended to shop at Target and other big corporations. That is coupled with a general apathetic culture on campus about small businesses, Singh said. She hopes to turn around that mindset and to learn from people who are living a daily experience not in a classroom. The sociology and data science major wants students to be aware of the implications of being a student at U. of C. and how that affects the Hyde Park business community.

“For example, previously I worked with an administrator to organize a food crawl in Hyde Park, where 100 students got to sample foods at five different small businesses,” Singh said. “That’s kind of the goal: to inspire a series of projects where people themselves feel empowered to collaborate with small-business owners because there’s so much we can learn from them.

“How can we cultivate a culture where a first-year comes to the University of Chicago and thinks it’s the norm to spend their weekends on 53rd Street and not just downtown,” said the native of Chhattisgarh, India. “How do we create a culture where a first-year thinks about: ‘Let me think about consulting for Mr. Brady. Let me ask him about sociolinguistics research. Let me think about working with someone with advertising.’ That is the type of culture we want to create. The one thing we can do is learn from the people who call Hyde Park home for so many years, so that we can learn to call Hyde Park home ourselves.”

Watch “The Heart of Hyde Park: Stories of Small Businesses,” at bit.ly/heart-of-hydepark-film. Students Lade Tinbu, Abena Karhan, Daniel Kind, Reese Villazor, Luke Kalaydijan, Christina Gao, Anthony Menjivar and Ermelinda Calderon also worked on the film.

drockett@chicagotribune.com