How Correct Is This Meme About Famous Chicago Residents?
It's my publication and I can write about whatever I want.
What meme about famous Chicago Residents, you may ask? Why, I’ll show you!
Shoutout to vanechka for making the original post.
This is phenomenal. I love this meme. I’ve been thinking about it for days. It’s a wonderful parody of this infographic about certain famous Vienna residents in 1913, which has been made in many variants:
This isn’t even an exhaustive list of Vienna residents at the time; Tito, the future dictator of Yugoslavia, was also a regular patron of Café Central, the cafe highlighted in the middle. It does take Stalin’s single month of Vienna residency in January 1913 and imply a longer stay, but nonetheless.
The Chicago meme was so good I worry it is too good to be true. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about it for days. It agonizes me. It keeps me up at night. Vienna in 1913 makes more sense than the south side of Chicago in 2000, in terms of having this many notable residents, for a number of reasons:
Vienna was the capital and economic center of the Austrian empire. This is why Emperor Franz Joseph I lived there. Chicago may be the spiritual capital of the Midwest, but it’s not the actual, legal capital of anything except Cook County.
As Vienna was an economic gateway between eastern and western Europe, so too is Chicago the economic gateway to the Midwest - but not this part of Chicago. The Vienna map contains Vienna’s central business district, but the Chicago Loop is about 4 miles north of the area highlighted on the map.
With the exception of Hyde Park, we don’t get any of the ritzy neighborhoods (Lincoln Park, River North, Gold Coast) that might house scions of Chicago industry and politics. Ah, but we do get Hyde Park. Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago, will do a lot of work for us in these coming sections.
Could it be true? Could all of these people have been residents of Chicago’s south side in 2000? And what about those yellow arrows? Are they pointing to the right spots?
Let’s find out!
I recognize that most of my followers are not familiar with Chicago. Click here to view an interactive map with most of the exact locations in this article.
Barack Obama
Was he a Chicago south side resident in 2000-2001?
Yes. Famously so.
Obama was eight years into teaching constitutional law at UChicago and was also six years into his term as the Illinois state senator from Hyde Park. He would’ve been splitting time between Hyde Park and the state capital in Springfield. On top of that, in 2000, he also ran a failed campaign to unseat congressman Bobby Rush in Illinois’ 1st congressional district.
Given that he had a toddler and a pregnant Michelle at home in 2000 and 2001, I think it’s a positive thing that he lost his congressional campaign. Sure, it’s good to serve in public office, but you have to take care of your wife & kid, and you don’t want to jeopardize that law faculty position. No sense spending too much time on politics. Do you think you’re going to be president one day or something?
Does the arrow point to the right location?
It’s pretty far off.
From 1993 to 2005 the Obama family lived in East Hyde Park, both south and east of where the arrow is pointing. This makes sense for a young couple where one is a public interest lawyer and another is a law professor. That house is a relatively sizeable 4 bed 3 bath, but it’s pretty out of the way of everything and you'd presumably hear a ton of noise coming off of Lake Shore Drive.
Barack won election to the senate in 2004, and in 2005 the Obamas moved to a much larger house close to the corner of Hyde Park boulevard and Woodlawn. That house is apparently still in their possession and well known because the Secret Service blockades the adjacent street from civilian access. Their newer house is on the same latitude as the arrow, but the the longitude is off by about three blocks too far west.1
Pope Leo XIV
Was he a Chicago south side resident in 2000-2001?
Yes, but possibly not in this area of the south side.
Pope Leo, as you likely already know, is a south side native, born in a Bronzeville hospital and raised in an inner-ring suburb a few blocks from Chicago’s southern border. But! He left home at fourteen to attend a seminarian high school in Michigan and bounced around the world forever after, going more or less wherever the Order of St. Augustine needed him to go.
Fortunately for us, they needed him in Chicago in the years 2000 and 2001. The pope, then Fr. Robert Prevost, had been appointed Prior Provincial of the Augustinian Order’s Midwest province in 1998 and sent to the province’s headquarters in Chicago.
Does the arrow point to the right location?
The contact page on the Midwest Augustinians’ website says they’re headquartered in Beverly, a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood located way further south than the highlighted area in the meme.2
Orders of Catholic priests don’t always house priests right next to where they work. Maybe the arrow still has the right spot?
The arrow’s location seems to point to the now-defunct St. John Stone Friary, near Woodlawn and 55th in Hyde Park. Being a friary administered by the Augustinians, it would indeed house Augustinian friars such as Robert Prevost.
For a defunct friary, St. John Stone is very well-documented, because the friary happened to be near a school and a priest accused of molesting children lived there from 2000 to 2002. The accused priest (who would’ve needed Prevost’s sign-off to live there, although some reports say Prevost signed off under pressure from the Archdiocese of Chicago) says that he “never met” the future Pope. I find it highly unlikely that two men, living communally under oaths of poverty, would not have met each other if they lived in the same building at the same time.
That said, per a separate Augustinian website, there is another friary in East Hyde Park.
Maybe Prevost lived there. Who knows. I think there’s enough here to say that the future pope was hanging around Hyde Park in these years, even if he didn’t live there.
Milton Friedman
Was he a Chicago south side resident in 2000-2001?
No, he was not.
He may be one of UChicago’s most notable alumni! He is still the face of the Chicago school of economics, and of conservative economic theory in general! He may have taught at UChicago for thirty years - but those thirty years were from 1946 to 1977, after which he moved to San Francisco, where he would live for the rest of his life. I don’t think he even visited Chicago in this timeframe. He was old, man! He was pushing 90 in 2000!
Oh, how it kills me to say this, because Friedman really ties the meme together. He’s the Freud of the Chicago version. He’s the one where you say “wait, really? Him?” Unfortunately, no, not really, he was long gone by the time the Pope and the President overlapped.
Does the arrow point to the right location?
I’m fairly certain that arrow is supposed to be pointing to the University of Chicago Department of Economics. That might be Friedman’s spiritual home, but even when he taught there, it’s not like he lived there.
Jesse Jackson
Was he a Chicago south side resident in 2000-2001?
Now we’re back on track. Yes, Jesse Jackson absolutely lived in the south side of Chicago those years.
The late Rev. Jackson, who passed in February of this year, first came to Chicago to attend the Chicago Theological Seminary3 and basically never left. He got involved in the Civil Rights movement in Chicago, he founded Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, when he ran for president his home base was in Chicago, when he died, he died in Chicago. The sole exception seems to be his stint as Shadow Senator from DC, when he lived in DC, but then he moved back to Chicago.
Does the arrow point to the right location?
Almost.
The arrow points to the 6800 block of Jeffrey boulevard. Here’s a New York Times article about the Jackson’s relatives grieving at the family home in Chicago, with photos that match this Flickr post saying that the Jackson estate is on the 6800 block of South Constance Avenue. The arrow is off by about three blocks to the east.
Kanye West
Was he a Chicago south side resident in 2000-2001?
He just barely squeaks in.
West famously kickstarted his rap career sometime in the early 2000s when he, as detailed in his song “Last Call,” moved to Newark, NJ after getting evicted from his Chicago apartment. But when did he move to Newark?
This TIME Magazine article says he made the move in the year 2000. If you had to choose, you’d choose to move out of a Chicago apartment in the summer and thus give us a few months of overlap, but West was evicted. That said, even if he was evicted in January, he likely would’ve spent some time back in his childhood home before making the move to New Jersey. He did say in “Last Call” that his mother helped him with the drive.
It’s tenuous, but I think it’s more likely than not that he lived on the south side of Chicago for at least a month in the year 2000.
Does the arrow point to the right location?
I have no idea. I can’t find any information on where Kanye’s Chicago apartment was, and the place the arrow points to is as plausible as any.
We could play it safe and point it to his childhood home on S. South Shore Drive in the very far lower right corner of the image, but that feels somewhat disingenuous if he only spent a little time there in the year we’re examining.
That’s 4/5 people plausibly, for real, living on the south side in the given time frame. Remarkable! Ah, but we are missing Milton Friedman, and his presence really did add something. Can we find a suitable replacement?
We can certainly try!
Louis Farrakhan
Yes, that Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam (not to be confused with regular Islam) since 1981. There isn’t any other.
Did you know the NOI has its headquarters in Chicago? I did, because of the very conspicuous Mosque Maryam on Stoney Island Ave that they purchased with the help of a very generous sponsor named Muammar Gaddafi. You drive by it, you can’t miss it.
Is the NOI’s head quartered near the NOI’s headquarters? Yes, he is. Farrakhan lives in Elijah Muhammad’s former residence on Woodlawn, which per the New Yorker, Farrakhan bought in 1985. This means Louis Farrakhan lives the furthest north of anyone we can definitively place on the south side in 2000.
Nate Silver
Nate Silver, the man who popularized data journalism and probabilistic election predictions, founder of FiveThirtyEight and of Substack’s own Silver Bulletin, received his bachelor’s from UChicago in the spring of 2000. He almost certainly lived in Hyde Park during his studies, as most U of C undergrads do. I suspect when he started at KPMG that fall, he made the move to a north side neighborhood with an easier commute to the loop.
He’s famous, right? People recognize the name Nate Silver like they recognize these other names? Please tell me it was normal for a middle schooler to know who Nate Silver was in the early 2010s.
Martha Nussbaum
You may know Martha Nussbaum, who has lived in Hyde Park since she joined UChicago Law’s faculty in 1995, as the moral philosopher (along with Amartya Sen) behind the Capabilities Approach, which is indirectly responsible for the Human Development Index and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
You may know Martha Nussbaum. You may also be hearing about Nussbaum for the first time, just now, even if you already knew about HDI and the SDGs. Your reaction to her inclusion on this list will correlate directly to how interested you are in philosophy and international relations. Nussbaum is a highly influential figure, but she’s not a celebrity, she doesn’t have the same name recognition as a pope or a president.
To be fair, she has plenty of name recognition within her field. Many of you guys are nerds who said “holy shit, Martha Nussbaum was also there in 2000!?!?” upon reading her name in this article. Yes, she was. I’m glad you enjoyed this section. I do it all for you.
Several Famous Rappers Who Were All Young Children At The Time
If we were to expand the left side of the original image ever so slightly, we could include Parkway Gardens, better known as O Block. This would allow us to include the progenitor of drill music, Chief Keef, who was 5 years old in the year 2000. We could also include King Von, then 6. Go a little further west from there to Englewood and you can find an 8-year-old Lil Durk.
Southwest of our bottom left corner lies the neighborhood of West Chatham, where we could find an 7-year-old Chance the Rapper. We can find Chance’s same-age future musical affiliate & eventual Substacker vic mensa living in Hyde Park, although now we’re dipping back into people who (sorry, Vic) aren’t that famous.
I do want to emphasize how young all of these rappers were at the time. Part of the thrill of the original Vienna image was how, hypothetically, all of these people could have met each other and recalled it later. Now we’re just naming people who lived in a major city in a specific year. I really don’t think there’s much of a chance that Chief Keef met Obama and the pope as a five year old.
Near Misses
I really wanted to add film critic Roger Ebert to the list. He did guest lecture at UChicago fairly regularly, but he lived on the north side, in Lincoln Park.
One person in the replies to the original note tried to add Nick Fuentes. Fuentes would have been 2 in 2000, but more importantly he’s from the west suburbs, not the south side. He still lives there, having resided in Berwyn, a predominantly Mexican inner-ring west suburb, for many years.4
On that note, Richard Spencer, who in his words is “not a white supremacist leader anymore,” got a master’s at UChicago, but he started in the fall of 2001, and I’m really treating the early months of 2000 as the primary overlap period.
We have a couple politicians with UChicago affiliations who we can’t add. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), currently co-leading the House’s Epstein investigation, graduated from UChicago in 1998 and immediately went to Yale for law school. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) graduated from UChicago in 2004, but transferred to UChicago in 2002.
I tried to work Agnes Callard into this list somehow, I really did. She did her undergrad at UChicago and teaches there now, but her CV indicates that in 2000, she was getting her PhD at Berkeley.
Common, the rapper, is from the south side (Calumet Gardens specifically), but he moved to New York in 1999. Twista (North Lawndale) and Lupe Fiasco (East Garfield Park) are both from the west side. Juice WRLD grew up in the south suburbs.
What have we learned?
We could be snarky and have our primary takeaways be “important people live in major cities,” or “having a prestigious university in a neighborhood means interesting people will live there,” or “Russell Sprout has too much time on his hands,” but I refuse to concede any of those ideas.
In Vienna, we (mostly) find eventual military leaders, practitioners of violence, men who would leave the tranquil Austrian capital behind and plunge the world into wars hot and cold. In Chicago, we (mostly) find practitioners of peace. Even those who come from dangerous upbringings seek renown so that they may leave a violent life behind, not so that they may plunge the rest of us into it. Musicians, philosophers, men of faith - some have cruel and unkind words, poison to the ears, but none have lead the world into a protracted global war.
May it always be so!
A previous version of this article & interactive map mistakenly claimed that the Obama’s house off of Hyde Park boulevard was their residence in 2000. As Fliz correctly notes, they did not move there until 2005, prior to which they lived in East Hyde Park. Sproutstack regrets the error.
If you’re from Beverly and asking yourself “which parish is this headquarters closest to?”, it’s right next to St. Barnabas.
Incidentally, the building that housed the Chicago Theological Seminary while Jesse Jackson attended now houses an economics institute named after Milton Friedman.
I do think you could make a similarly funny image for the west side & adjacent suburbs, with the year being 2017 or so. You at least have Fuentes, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (from Austin), and Hannibal Buress (from Austin and bought property there that year, although some sources say he lives in Wicker Park). Presumably there were two other notable people on the west side in that year.
Buddy Guy! 🎸
This was a lot of fun for this former Hyde Parker (1984–1997)! You can add to your list Cass Sunstein, the inventor of the “nudge” and the former partner of Martha Nussbaum. He lived just south of 57th street and a few blocks west of the IC train tracks. I used to take care of his wonderful dog when he was out of town. And Milton Friedman may not have lived on the South Side, but his son, David, did. I went to dinner at his Kenwood house in (I think) 1986.
What could be the cause of so much genius from such a small geographic area? Could it be Harold’s Chicken?