South Chicago

If there’s a bleak, cursed core to the South Side’s urban blight, it’s got to be Englewood. Englewood is a tangle of overgrown lots, abandoned multi-family homes, open-air drug markets (marked by shoes dangling from power lines) and boarded-up garages. Plenty of good people live here, unable to escape the sucking gravity of poverty (and the blood-sucking monsters attracted to it). Englewood’s reputation is so bad, however, that it stains surrounding neighborhoods and attracts foul souls looking for a place to get away with evil.

If there is a homeland for the painfully brilliant, it is the University of Chicago. Its gray Gothic buildings seem to act like a siren song to intellectually brilliant and socially maladjusted students - and faculty. Without a doubt, there are topics about which one can know too much for one’s own good. Many who would study such dangerous topics attend the University of Chicago.