A chilling warning came to the Chicago Park District with the record January cold snap: something must be done soon to rehabilitate Garfield Park Conservatory, or the city could lose the country’s largest indoor garden.
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On Friday, park officials indefinitely closed the Aroid House, one of eight halls in the the venerable 4 1/2-acre turn-of-the-century building at 300 N. Central Park Ave., because of severe cold damage.
“The conservatory is just old,” Robert Megquire, the park district’s director of landscape architecture and management, said of the building built in 1906. “The social question is whether or not there is value to society in keeping an old building like this.”
Officials worry whether they can find the millions needed to adequately restore it and protect its vast collection of plants, many from desert, sub-tropical and tropical climates.
Eighty percent of the Aroid House’s exotic tropical plants were killed or badly injured after steam pipes that heat the room burst Jan. 19, plunging temperatures in the room to 25 degrees. Among the plants in the Aroid House were philodendron vines, lilies, hoya, columnea, ivies and evergreens.
But it was in the conservatory’s prized exhibition hall, the Fern House, where efforts to protect a priceless collection of cycads turned dramatic.
Cycads are plants resembling palm trees with fern-like fronds. They dominated the plant world in the Mesozoic Era, a period lasting 180 million years when dinosaurs dominated the animal world.
“That collection out there (Garfield Park) is absolutely fascinating,” said Dr. Peter Crane, vice president for academic affairs at the Field Museum. Crane is a botanist whose specialty is the study of how flowering plants began to succeed cycads 125 million years ago as the world’s dominant plant life.
“Whenever I teach at the University of Chicago, the first field trip I take my students on is to Garfield Park to see living plants,” Crane said.
Individual cycad plants in the collection are easily the oldest in the conservatory, with archival material indicating some were 300 years old in 1937.
The lacy green fronds of the tallest cycads, rising 30 feet, dominate the 16,000-square-foot Fern House, crowning a living tableau of ferns and primeval tropical growth. It creates a scene that sculptor Laredo Taft, whose work also graces the conservatory, called “the most beautiful room in America.”
Over the years, however, that room has fallen into disrepair. As a result of age and neglect, strong winds have been able to rattle loose the window panes that form the soaring walls and ceilings in the conservatory.
During the cold snap, from Jan. 14 to 20 when temperatures fell 10 below zero and lower every day, frigid gusts poured through dozens of broken window panes.
Thus, when the arctic winds came roaring through broken ceiling panels in the Fern House during the cold snap, it was like an ice-age assault on the steamy era of the dinosaurs.
To protect them, workers individually wrapped each cycad plant in plastic sheeting.
They also borrowed barrel-like, kerosene-burning “torpedo” heaters from Soldier Field to ward off the chill.
The heaters are used before late-season Bears football games to blow hot air under tarpaulins to keep the turf from freezing, and during the game they blow on players’ feet to keep them from freezing.
“Normally it’s 65 to 70 degrees in the Fern House,” said Jagdish Nautiyal, Garfield Park’s chief horticulturist. “We believe the cycads can tolerate temperatures safely down to 50 degrees or so, but at times during the cold snap, it got down to 35 degrees.”
Though some ferns and groundcover in the Fern Room did not survive the cold, the cycads apparently fared well with the efforts to keep them warm, said Nautiyal.
A thorough restoration of the Garfield Park Conservatory would cost many of millions of dollars.
“Reglazing and rebuilding the Fern House alone is estimated at $1.2 million,” Megquire said. “We don’t have estimates back yet what it will cost to restore the heating system or the reglazing of other houses, but we know we’re in the multi-million dollars.”
Nevertheless, the district’s $315 million annual budget cannot begin to cover dozens of capital improvement projects piling up, he said.
The Fern House and the cycads probably exemplify better than anything else the importance of the conservatory’s historical and cultural legacy to the city.
Jens Jensen, Chicago’s legendary landscape architect, designed the conservatory. He paid particular attention to the Fern Room, which, in the 1930s, he designed to show what Illinois looked like in the time of dinosaurs.
Many cycad experts believe Garfield Park’s cycads came from Charles Joseph Chamberlain, a University of Chicago botanist from 1897 to 1929 and one of the world’s first cycad specialists. He collected the plants from all over the world, often as fully matured plants already a hundred or more years old.
“Cycads grow extremely slowly and can get to be hundreds of years old,” said Francis Ching, retired director of the Los Angeles County Arboretum at Arcadia who built up an extensive cycad collection there.
“Judging by the size of the cycads in Chicago, they could easily be 200 to 300 years old or more.”
On top of being living representatives of the dinosaur age, having plants so old normally should be a major draw into any conservatory.
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“When you have plants several human generations in age,” said Dr. John MacDougal, manager of the Missouri Conservatory in St. Louis, “it is a touching thing. There is something almost spiritual about looking upon the same living thing that your grandfather once examined and admired.
“If you lost those plants at Garfield Park, it would take at least a generation in human terms before people would see cycads even approaching the size there now,” MacDougal said.
As it is, not all that many people seem to know about the cycads or the conservatory.
History has taken some bad turns for the Garfield Park Conservatory. Though the 100-year-old Lincoln Park Conservatory across town is far smaller (about one-third the size), it outdraws Garfield Park’s annually, 650,000 to 150,000.
That is because the once elegant brownstone neighborhood surrounding Garfield Park long ago became one of the city’s worst and most dangerous slums.
Most weekdays, the conservatory is virtually empty. The only time crowds show up is during four annual flower shows held there: an Easter Show in March, a November Chrysanthemum Show, a December Christmas Show, and an Azalea Show held this year from Feb. 5 through 27.
Erma Tranter, executive director of Friends of the Parks, a civic watchdog organization, calls the drawing power of the Garfield Park Conservatory disgraceful.
“It’s a remarkable resource, and the park district should be marketing it so that busloads of school children and senior citizens would be pulling in there every day,” she said.
“They should have trained docents out there, giving lectures on what those plants represent to troops of families filing through there on weekends.”
For the short term, Megquire said the district is allocating money for the most essential repairs to keep the conservatory warm during the next couple of winter seasons.
“We’re going to have to go through next winter more dependably than we have this year,” he said.
For the longer term, he said the park district is exploring a drive for corporate sponsorship and foundation grants, already an important funding source for many zoos and museums.
“If you want to continue supporting a park system on the scale of Chicago’s with the aging infrastructure it has, you’re going to have to make some triage decisions so that some things will disappear so that others can survive. Those are decisions people will have to make about their city,” Megquire said.