Demetrius Barbee and her husband Douglas moved to North Lawndale nearly 30 years ago, beckoned there in part by the West Side neighborhood’s architecture.
But the public sunken garden on the north side of Arthington Street just east of Homan Avenue helped cinch the deal.
“It was breathtaking,” Demetrius Barbee said. “It felt like I could have been by Buckingham Fountain. It was serenity. It was peaceful.”
The garden was built in 1907 by Sears & Roebuck and was a centerpiece of the then-mighty retailer’s expansive campus headquarters.
Sears famously abandoned the campus for the Sears Tower in the 1970s. But most of the original Sears buildings are still there, as is the pretty fancy, nearly block-long sunken garden the company created for its employees, complete with a Greek Revival pergola.
Though still handsome, the garden has seen better days after 116 years.
Fortunately, there’s a $5 million plan to revive the garden and turn it back into the showplace its original designers intended. And the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation is announcing this weekend that it’s contributing $1 million toward the effort.
Barbee, a member of the non-profit Friends of Sears Sunken Garden, said of plans to revive the historic North Lawndale feature: “I think it is one of most significant things to happen on the West Side in a long time.”
Revived garden to be ‘contemporary, naturalistic’
Chicago’s parks — the big, beautiful historic places like Grant Park, Lincoln Park, Douglass Park — are pretty well-documented.
But the city is dotted with some very fine smaller green spaces that were privately built in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, such as the South Side’s now-public Auburn Park from the 1880s and the Sears Sunken Garden.
A stereograph image showing the Sears garden shortly after its construction
Library of Congress
These parks and gardens were planned as pleasant little spots where residents — or workers, in the case of Sears — could step away from the bustle and enjoy a moment of quiet and beauty.
The Sears garden originally featured pools, fountains and colorful plantings. If that wasn’t enough, workers could go there and catch a performance from the 60-piece Sears, Roebuck & Company band.
The idea of renewing the garden was started two years ago by the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council’s Greening, Open Space, Water, Soil, and Sustainability committee.
“People would say, ‘Oh, I had my prom picture taken here,’” said committee member Annamaria Leon, an edible landscapes designer who lives in North Lawndale with her husband, garden designer Roy Diblik.
“You can see the former beauty of it,” she said.
Leon and Diblik invited noted Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf — one of the creators of Millennium Park’s Laurie Garden — to help remake the Sears spot.
Working with Chicago landscape architect Chris Gent, the redesign will include new plantings, accessible paths, a reflecting pool and the restoration of the garden’s signature piece: a 100-foot-long concrete and wood pergola flanked on each end by Doric columned porticos.
A reflecting pool is planned for the revamped garden.
Friends of Sears Sunken Garden
Oudolf said the revived garden would be “contemporary, naturalistic — less decorative than in the past.”
The redesign concepts were shaped by a series of design workshops during which North Lawndale voiced what they wanted for the new park.
“People were asked, ‘What would you like to see?’” Barbee said. “Nobody wants to be told what to do. You want to have a stake in it.”
“The most important part for me is that it’s [a project] outside of the central part of the city,” Oudolf said. “We do so many spaces in areas in the middle of the town, it’s exciting to see something happen in a neighborhood that needed it most. It’ll really be a community project.”
‘It’ll be beautiful’
The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation is announcing its $1 million grant Sunday at a fundraiser in Lake Forest for the sunken garden project.
The Driehaus funding will go to the restoration of the pergola and to develop working plans for the garden.
“We’ve done a number of legacy grants this year in honor of Richard,” the Chicago philanthropist and businessman who died in 2021, said Driehaus Foundation executive director Anne Lazar. “And this project — it just supports two of his priority passions: Chicago neighborhoods and historic preservation.”
And what a great call by the foundation — the kind of thing resource-starved North Lawndale and the West Side richly deserve.
“It’ll raise people’s curiosity [about the West Side],” Barbee said of the reimagined garden. “It’ll be beautiful.”
Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board. He is the author of “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side” and is working on a book about West Side architecture.
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