WHPK 88.5 FMWHPK 88.5 FM

WHPK went on air on 22 March 1968 at fifteen watts, funded by the estate of a campus secret society that had just disbanded — the Owl and Serpent left its money and its Reynolds Club room to a student radio group. The call letters stand for Woodlawn, Hyde Park and Kenwood, the neighbourhoods it was built to reach, and it has never stopped reaching them: roughly eighty volunteers run it, half of them University of Chicago students and half South Side residents with no tie to the school at all.

In 1983 Ken Wissoker and Patrick Moxey put Chicago's first all-hip-hop show on WHPK, and J.P. Chill's late-night show later gave the city's rising rappers early airtime. The library runs past 40,000 records across seven formats — jazz, rap, folk, rock, international, classical, electronic — each with its own elected chief, and live bands come in to play in the studio.