As Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck and Co. started to grow more than a century ago, its farsighted leaders wanted a green space for their headquarters. They commissioned the Sears Sunken Garden, an unlikely oasis across the street from the retailer’s main administration building on the West Side’s Homan Avenue.
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The 1907 garden was “sunken” below street level to provide peace and quiet as horse-drawn wagons and early motor vehicles clattered by. Ornamental fountains, a reflecting pool, ponds stocked with goldfish and carefully designed plantings nestled just below the garden’s defining feature — a dramatic, 100-foot-long row of classical columns known as a pergola.
A slice of the Mediterranean had come to a busy city street.
Today, Sears is a memory, much of its Homan Square complex is boarded up and the once-marvelous garden is a wreck. April brought welcome news that this neglected landmark finally would be getting a face-lift, thanks largely to a $1 million pledge from the city’s Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
An ambitious timetable was set. Media reports trumpeted how the pergola would be brought back to its former glory as soon as mid-July.
Anyone familiar with the ups and downs of the North Lawndale neighborhood won’t be too surprised about what happened next. As of earlier this month, the garden remained in disrepair. The beat-up pergola was blocked off with an orange mesh safety fence. A tipped-over trash can spilled its garbage onto the unkempt lawn. The walkways were overgrown, the garden plots weedy.
Turns out, the pergola’s columns were in worse shape than expected. As work began, crews discovered the concrete had disintegrated and the structure needed to be replaced rather than repaired. The restoration halted until the Driehaus Foundation stepped up — again — with additional funding.
“We are now back on track,” declared Caroline O’Boyle, who serves on the nonprofit board supervising the renovation. A new timetable calls for the pergola restoration to be finished by mid-November and work on the garden itself to begin next year, she told us.
Start. Stop. Plead for more money. Start again, fingers crossed.
That pattern is familiar to anyone involved in rebuilding neighborhoods that have endured decades of disinvestment. North Lawndale certainly has: It lost major employers, population and investment over generations.
It also has an amazing history, and potential. When Sears made Homan Square the heart of its fast-growing retail empire, North Lawndale was among the hottest neighborhoods in the city.
By the 1960s, it had become a focus of the Civil Rights Movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously made North Lawndale a centerpiece of his fair-housing campaign, moving his family into a rundown apartment to protest slum conditions.
In the 1970s, Sears left for its downtown tower, marking a retreat of money and influence that devastated the neighborhood. As with the garden project, North Lawndale’s recovery efforts have proceeded in fits and starts.
The retailer’s Homan Square complex is an important Chicago landmark, and a couple of its prominent buildings have been impressively restored. The big red-brick office complex across from the Sears Sunken Garden, however, continues to rot. Timetables for shoring it up have kept slipping.
Given the monumental challenges, could fixing up a small-ish garden really do anything to turn things around? Yes.
A beautiful green space can indeed transform an urban neighborhood. Among the first to prove the point was the Liz Christy Garden, which became a catalyst for remaking Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1970s. Across the Chicago area, community gardens, green-thumb clubs and dedicated individuals make it their business to beautify their surroundings.
Those efforts inspire neighbors to take pride in their communities, which in turn inspires hope for a better future — a missing element in the most troubled parts of the city.
In Chicago these days, the word “hope” inevitably brings to mind favorite son Barack Obama, and the Obama Presidential Center, which took the South Side by storm this year. While the center’s Museum Tower gets the most attention, with its impressive exhibits about his presidency, the free, open-to-the-public gardens around it could turn out to be the most transformative part of the project.
It’s good to see the West Side getting a little love in the same vein. And we believe the late Richard Driehaus, a gregarious financier, would have loved the Sears Sunken Garden restoration. Hats off to his foundation for backing a project that fits with this one-of-a-kind local character’s legacy.
The foundation’s financial commitment to the garden stands at $1.5 million so far today, a spokeswoman told us. Even with that, the nonprofit Friends of Sears Sunken Garden has unmet fundraising goals to see the project through. Here’s hoping the rest of Chicago does what it takes to raise up the West Side’s sunken treasure.
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