Troubled Hyde Park Co-op to vote on closing out a million in debt, closing its doors.

The end may be near for the Hyde Park Co-op, a linchpin of the South Side neighborhood and a link to an era of utopian dreams—including a conviction that a better society lay in a grocery whose owners would be customers.

The Co-op’s Depression-era founders wanted a business in which decisions were made not by distant executives, but by a show of hands.