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. Today, no one remembers who the original landscape designer was. Sears closed its West Side operations in the 1980s, and the garden fell into disrepair. “What the Sears owners did is show that there shouldn’t be green space beneficial for one group it should be beneficial for all,” she says. 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 is something Reshorna Fitzpatrick, a pastor at North Lawndale’s Proceeding Word Church, hammers home when telling people about the garden. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction Number ILL,16-CHIG,110-12. By Zach Mortice When Sears closed its West Side campus in the 1980s, the garden received less maintenance and upkeep. Chicago’s historic Sears Sunken Garden is part of a strategy to revitalize a struggling West Side neighborhood.
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