Project Description

That the Sears Sunken Garden, completed in 1907 as part of the 40-acre Sears, Roebuck, and Company campus that dominated Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood for decades, was originally shared by managers, executives, and warehouse stockers are something Reshorna Fitzpatrick, a pastor at North Lawndale’s Proceeding Word Church, hammers home when telling people about the garden.

“What the Sears owners did is show that there shouldn’t be green space [that’s] beneficial for one group; it should be beneficial for all,” she says. Sears closed its West Side operations in the 1980s, and the garden fell into disrepair. Today, no one remembers who the original landscape designer was. People likely won’t forget its next one. North Lawndale residents and nonprofits are currently working with the Trust for Public Land and the garden designer Piet Oudolf, along with the Urban Landscape Collaborative, to update and restore the two-acre neoclassical garden, adding new plantings, circulation patterns, and water features. The project will be Oudolf’s second in Chicago, following the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, which was designed in collaboration with GGN.