Dark Chicago    The City    Neighborhoods    South Side      Kenwood

Kenwood don’t raise its voice—it raises eyebrows. Old money, old magic, and too many doors that only open for the right name.

Kenwood stretches along the lake just south of Hyde Park—a quiet pocket of contradiction. Stately mansions crumble beside subsidized flats. Gilded-age architecture hides ghosts, and boarding houses echo with music, arguments, and half-remembered dreams. Once an address for Chicago’s white elite, by 1953 Kenwood has become majority Black, shaped by migration, segregation, and silence. City officials tread lightly here. Spiritualists walk bold.
The Veil here is dense, but not noisy. It waits in drawing rooms, hums in bookshelves, and curls up on velvet chairs. Academics call it intellectual. Mystics call it prideful. Locals just know that you don’t touch what ain’t yours—and if a hallway goes longer than it should, you walk backward out the way you came.

Neighborhoods

The Promenade

Mansions line Drexel and the lakefront, mostly shuttered, sagging, or quietly humming with Veil residue. A few are kept pristine by professors or out-of-town patrons. Others are sealed from the inside. Shadows on the curtains don’t always match the figures inside.

The Flats

From 47th to 51st, this is where people hustle to stay upright. Cramped apartments, corner stores, kids running between laundry lines. The Lexington Building looms over all of it—proof the Veil doesn’t care how tight your wallet is.

Grove’s End

West of Cottage Grove, Grove’s End feels like unfinished business. Stores close without warning, squatters perform rituals, and revolutionaries recite poetry in wine-stained parlors. This place is alive—but not entirely from this side.

Notes

Arcane Division doesn’t patrol—just logs and leaves

The Promenade still gets cleaned before other streets, even though few still live there

Old Jewish and Italian families have quietly retreated, but left strange protections behind

Grove’s End might hold a micro-gate—localized Veil distortion is unusually stable

Most of the crime here is intellectual, symbolic, or deeply personal

Fat Paulie lost a man here last year. Won’t send another.

The White Page Society may have a working exit point—but no one talks about where it goes

CPD recently investigated a “misplaced building.” It turned out to be in two neighborhoods at once

Where books whisper and staircases breathe. Kenwood teaches you to listen—or disappear.

Wealth
Security & Safety
Criminal Influence
Occult Influence

African American	84%
White (mostly in The Promenade)	12%
Other	4%

South Side

Southwest Side

Kenwood

The Lexington Building – Five stories on paper. Four in view. Something else moves upstairs.
The Hollow House on 49th – Untouched by vandals. Unwelcoming to trespassers.
The White Page Society – A private club that acts like a Veil university.
Lakeview Wall – Stone barrier with shifting carvings that predict things too well.
Kendrick’s Attic – Bookstore full of the wrong books. Lodgers never sleep the same way twice.

The Promenade:
Crime & Underworld Locations:
The Blanche House – Now a private gambling parlor with strange clientele
Cliffside Gate – Where select Veil brokers exchange illegal charms for information
Drexel Furnace House – Allegedly an Outfit cache point—under arcane protection
Veil Locations:
Lakeview Wall – Crumbles nightly; carved messages reappear by dawn
The Hollow House – Mansion never vandalized. Feared by all
Whisper Court – Dead-end lane where mirrors show strangers behind you

Groves End:
Crime & Underworld Locations:
The Seven Steps Club – Meeting place for radicals and smugglers
The Bell House – Used by BCN to stage local operations in secret
Jenna’s Place – Tavern with a back room no cop dares enter
Veil Locations:
The White Page Society – Quiet power. Ancient texts. Dim lights.
Plum Tree Hollow – Sinkhole garden filled with crows that know names
Basement 4, Giles Flats – Space appears larger than its building footprint

The Flats

Crime & Underworld Locations:
Varnum’s Market – Stolen goods sold cheap; buyer beware
The Back Room Barbershop – Crown Sons handle numbers here
Lexington Service Door 3B – Site of unsanctioned ritual trades, marked in chalk
Veil Locations:
The Lexington Building – Five floors on record. Four in sight.
Kendrick’s Attic – Bookshop run by a woman who dreams other people’s futures
Shroud Alley – Short path between buildings where people disappear for minutes—or days