The history of Homan Grown.

Ald. Michael Scott Jr. (24th) plants trees for the Oaks of North Lawndale initiative. Credit: Provided

NORTH LAWNDALE - Despite its green name, North Lawndale has some of the fewest trees of any area in Chicago, but hopefully not for long.

Community groups are aiming to transform the West Side neighborhood into one of the city’s greenest areas by planting and maintaining 7,000 trees in their neighborhood. Their efforts have not gone without notice, as leaders were recently recognized by the Chicago Region Trees Initiative with the Urban Forestry Award for their work on engaging the community to improve North Lawndale’s quality of life.

North Lawndale has less tree coverage than much of the city. According to an Urban Tree Canopy assessment, Lawndale has a tree canopy covering just 16.6 percent of the neighborhood, compared to about 38 percent in nearby suburban Oak Park.

Spurred by the simple desire to have more trees in the area, a partnership between the landscaping social enterprise Homan Grown, the School of the Art Institute and the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council’s greening committee was born in September 2017.

Together they launched the Oaks of North Lawndale, an ongoing project to plant and maintain 7,000 trees in the neighborhood. The project combines green landscaping with community events and public art to help improve the beauty, economic opportunity and public health in North Lawndale.

To date, neighbors have planted an estimated 250 trees toward their goal.

According to Annamaria Leon, one of the leaders of the project who received the forestry award, it is easy to forget how tremendously important it is for people to live in green areas surrounded by plants and trees. When people have access to green space, cardiovascular health improves because they are more likely to spend time being active outside, breathing fresh, oxygen-rich air.

“Our environment is conducive to community,” Leon said, adding that trees contribute to the walkability of a neighborhood, which can elevate the economic viability of Lawndale’s commercial corridors. They also provide local climate control, offering shade on a hot summer day and help to alleviate flooding.

One of the most important reasons Leon wants to work with other residents to transform Lawndale into a lush, green urban environment is the mental relief and therapeutic benefit of being surrounded by beautiful landscaping, gardens, trees and plants.

“What if on every block in North Lawndale you had affordable and mixed-income housing, and you had an area where you could go experience that connection with nature?” Leon asked. “I think it would be extraordinary, and it would have North Lawndale really stand out from other communities in Chicago, that we put the mental health of our residents at issue.”

Lawndale is already blessed with Douglas Park and the Boulevard System, Leon said. But the project aims to spread some of that greenery into every corner of the area so more residents benefit.

One branch of the project was Permapark, a food forest full of fruit trees and shrubs planted at 1330 S. Pulaski Road in partnership with the Community Christian Alternative Academy.

The project also aligned with art events, like the community tree planting in June at Unity Park, 1900 S. Kostner Ave., which was planned by Taykhoom Biviji from SAIC, who also won the Urban Forestry Award for the project. To make it happen, local park leaders brought in more than 200 residents to help with the planting. The event also featured a performance by famed cellist Yo Yo Ma and neighborhood children participating in the Ravinia Lawndale Family Music School.

Some of Lawndale’s ubiquitous vacant lots on Ogden Avenue and 16th Street were also transformed into community gardens to soak up storm water in areas prone to flooding under the program.

The project is ongoing, and there are many more trees left to plant before they reach their goal of 7,000. But already the project is making Lawndale a healthier, more beautiful place to live.

“When we focus on the monetary part of Lawndale, we aren’t that wealthy. But when we focus on the natural beauty of North Lawndale, the rich history, the open land we have here, we are wealthy beyond measure,” Leon said.

Pascal Sabino is a Report for America corps member covering Austin, North Lawndale and Garfield Park for Block Club Chicago.

A postcard depicting the old Sears complex shows the Sunken Garden in the lower right corner. Credit: BlueprintChicago.org

NORTH LAWNDALE - A historical garden on the West Side is getting a makeover, and organizers want residents of the surrounding area to decide the look and feel of the upgrade.

The redesign of the Sears Sunken Garden is led by the GROWWS Committee, a neighborhood group dedicated to urban agriculture and beautification that’s affiliated with the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council. The group plans to revamp the garden as a way to showcase the neighborhood’s history and attract visitors.

Community meetings will give residents a chance to hear about the history behind the Sears Sunken Garden, learn about landscape design practices and share their opinions what they want from the redesigned garden.

The virtual meetings are scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and Jan. 27.

Opened in 1907, the Sunken Garden at 899 S. Homan Ave. was built by Sears, Roebuck and Co. as leisure space for employees who worked on the sprawling 40-acre complex when the company was headquartered in Lawndale.

But Sears began pulling out of the West Side in the ’70s, first by relocating its corporate headquarters to the Sears Tower Downtown, then by closing its warehouses and distribution centers at the Lawndale campus in the ’80s.

When Sears left North Lawndale, thousands were left unemployed. As the area struggled economically, the beauty of the Sunken Garden also began to fade, organizers said.

“Let’s bring it back to its beautiful state … so it can be a place in the community that is looked upon as a tourist attraction,” said Reshorna Fitzpatrick, pastor of the historic Stone Temple church and a member of the GROWWS Committee.

“We’re trying to reimagine the Sunken Garden, and we want to do it with the community.”

The garden is meant to be a place of refuge for residents, so it is essential for them to participate in its development, Fitzpatrick said.

“If you get community buy-in, then people become a part of it. They take care of it, they love it, they embrace it, they spend time there and they take ownership,” Fitzpatrick said.

Feedback from residents will be incorporated into the plans for the garden by landscape designers Roy Diblik and Piet Oudolf, who helped design the 2.5-acre Lurie Garden Downtown in Millennium Park. The GROWWS Committee will raise money to pay for the landscaping.

The designers will be “interpreting what people perceive they would like to feel within their community. So we’re actually interpreting emotions with plants,” Diblik said.

The project will honor the past, present and future of North Lawndale by recognizing the area’s industrial history while incorporating current residents’ efforts to build a prosperous, more beautiful community, said Annamaria Leon, a member of the GROWWS committee.

“It also gives us the opportunity to walk back in time,” Leon said. “North Lawndale was the center of innovation. That’s our past. We get to reclaim that. We also get to see, moving through time, how we’ve gone from bohemian to Jewish to African American, to where we are at now.

“We get to reevaluate who we are as a community though this project.”

The true value of the garden isn’t just the end result of physical beauty, Leon said, but rather the journey the community takes together to envision an urban environment “that works for everybody and everything.”

“We’re sending a big message with this garden. We’re innovators,” Leon said. “We can have a garden that is world class … because that’s what North Lawndale is: a world class community.”

Pascal Sabino is a Report for America corps member covering Austin, North Lawndale and Garfield Park for Block Club Chicago.

A rendering of Love Blooms Here Plaza. Credit: Provided

NORTH LAWNDALE - A formerly vacant lot will soon become a community plaza that will host events, a mini-museum, a flower shop and a café.

Love Blooms Here Plaza at Central Park Avenue and Douglas Boulevard is being developed as a low-cost but high-impact gathering place for Lawndale residents. Members of the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council are creating attractions at the plaza that will be housed in retrofitted 20-foot shipping containers.

Organizers are raising $25,000 with a GoFundMe to landscape the plaza and customize the shipping containers for the flower shop and café.

“So many people with their different ideas and their missions and the spirit of the community, we really have created love. So that’s kind of why we say love blooms here, right here, wherever we put our shovel,” said Annamaria Leon, co-chair of the GROWWS Committee that is a partner on the project.

The land is owned by Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church, which is across the street from the plaza at 3622 W. Douglas Blvd. The partnership with the church makes it easier to run several projects at a very low cost since visitors can access basic amenities like bathrooms at Stone Temple.

The Lawndale Pop-Up Spot, a community mini-museum formerly based at Spaulding Memorial Garden, is currently at the plaza. The museum was designed to be mobile so the exhibits housed in the shipping box could easily be moved to help activate new locations when needed.

Chelsea Ridley, Annamaria Leon, and Jonathan Kelley in front of the Lawndale Pop-Up Spot at Love Blooms Here Plaza.

“It was time for us to try to go and pop-up somewhere else,” said Chelsea Ridley, a cofounder of the Lawndale Pop-Up Spot and project director for Open Books. “So this is really exciting for us to really test on our model to see what we could do, where we can move.”

The mini-museum is reopening its “Lawndale: A Living History” exhibit at the new location April 10. The exhibit will be open Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays through May 10. It is a portrait series and storytelling project that honors the wisdom of elders who have lived in North Lawndale for decades.

A monthlong spring exhibit on mobility justice will explore how transportation and cycling intersects with racial equity, said co-founder Jonathan Kelley.

In the summer, the Lawndale Pop-Up Spot will host a wellness exhibition series of events focused on healthy living.

“We’ll have different wellness type events where we’ll have social workers, mental health professionals come and talk. We’ll have trauma therapists, we’ll have yoga, we’ll have nutrition workshops,” Ridley said.

Another shipping box will be a flower shop selling fresh-cut bouquets run by Leon’s social enterprise, Homan Grown. Flowers will be grown at a flower farm next to the plaza, and at Homan Grown’s nursery at 3844 W. 16th St.

A third shipping box will be customized into a small coffee shop with an outdoor seating area on the plaza.

“There’s something about having something warm in your hand, walking down the street. It has you feel like part of something. Like you’re cared for,” Leon said.

The plaza is along the Douglas Boulevard greenway at a walkable location just blocks from several schools, including Herzl School of Excellence and Lawndale Community Academy, and prominent churches like St. Agatha’s Parish and Stone Temple. The outdoor café will give students, parishioners and local families an easily walkable “place to be, a reason to stay, a reason to patronize and hang out,” Ridley said.

The group is actively seeking a local entrepreneur or a coffee roaster of color to join the plaza as a partner to run the café.

Organizers expect for the plaza to be completed by summer.

“Part of what Love Blooms Here is, is that our community is cared for. They feel like they matter. It matters that we have a museum that talks about them. It matters that we can grow flowers by the community for the community. It matters that they can come and get their own cup of coffee in their own neighborhood.”

Pascal Sabino is a Report for America corps member covering Austin, North Lawndale and Garfield Park for Block Club Chicago.

The Sears, Roebuck and Co. sunken gardens in the North Lawndale neighborhood on March 10, 2021. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago

NORTH LAWNDALE - A century-old garden on the West Side that deteriorated over the years is being restored to its historic grandeur thanks to a community-led initiative.

In the early 1900s, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. campus was the crown jewel of North Lawndale. Hidden within the stern Classical Revival-style buildings sprawled across the 40-acre headquarters was a pocket of lush greenery: the Sears Sunken Garden.

The Foundation for Homan Square, which took over many of the Sears buildings, preserved the 2-acre park but has lacked the funding to continue the extravagant annual flower shows and water features it had at its prime, executive director Kevin Sutton said.

Now, the foundation and several other groups are using a $150,000 grant to launch what could be a multimillion dollar overhaul to revive the space.

“I’m certainly hopeful this will be an opportunity to cast a fresh light on the cultural, historical and in this case horticultural significance of this area,” Sutton said.

A postcard depicting the old Sears complex shows the Sunken Garden in the lower right corner. Credit: BlueprintChicago.org

The 2-acre park was an urban oasis that stood out against the red brick buildings and steel railroad tracks that surrounded it. The Sears Sunken Garden had fountains, reflecting pools, a greenhouse and flower beds unmatched by other parks of the time.

“It was a place for Sears staffers, many of which lived in the community, to have a respite, a place of peace and relaxation and enjoyment,” Sutton said.

When Sears began relocating its headquarters downtown in the 1970s, the local economy waned as residents were laid off from the warehouses and distribution facilities were being shut down. Many of the buildings were demolished, though some were preserved and turned over to the Foundation for Homan Square to be restored into schools, housing and office buildings for local nonprofits.

The foundation preserved the Sunken Garden, which has been a National Historic Landmark for a century, Sutton said.

“That garden used to have seasonal plantings three or for times a year. But over time the garden began to fall into a state of disrepair after Sears’s departure,” Sutton said. “Having this beautiful garden return to some sense of grandeur and to be a further asset to the community will be great.”

Restoring the Sears Sunken Garden into a gathering place and a major cultural attraction was one of the priorities in the 2018 North Lawndale Quality-of-Life Plan, a community-driven blueprint for improving conditions in the neighborhood like public safety, education, greenery and public health.

Plans to redesign the garden are being spearheaded by Friends of Sears Sunken Garden, a nonprofit founded by a collaborative of neighborhood groups that had been organizing projects to improve the garden for several years. Partners include the Foundation for Homan Square, the Trust for Public Land, and the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council’s GROWSS committee, a group focused on greening and open space.

The Trust for Public Land awarded the project a $150,000 Equitable Communities Fund grant to “to jumpstart the process of raising the money and getting designers and ultimately being able to restore the garden,” said Illinois State Director of the Trust for Public Land, Caroline O’Boyle.

The Equitable Communities Fund is designed to “support community-led organizations and help them to position themselves to be ready for larger pools of funding when it became available,” O’Boyle said.

Organizers anticipate the restoration of the Sears Sunken Garden will cost around $5 million to “do the repair work, installing the garden, and establishing a fund that will allow for the garden’s ongoing maintenance,” O’Boyle said.

The Trust for Public Land and other partners are helping Friends of Sears Sunken Garden with technical assistance and grant writing support to bring together additional funds typically out of reach for small neighborhood groups, like the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures Grant, which organizers are seeking to use to restore a pergola in the park.

The Sears, Roebuck and Co. sunken gardens in the North Lawndale neighborhood on March 10, 2021. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago

The restored garden will be designed by Piet Oudolf, a world-renowned landscape designer who planned the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park and the High Line in New York City.

Others on the design team include Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennial Farm, Lawndale resident Annamaria Leon from Homan Grown, landscape architect Camille Applewhite of BlackSpace Chicago, architect Odile Compagnon, and historic preservationist Lynette Stuhlmacher of Red Leaf Studio.

Friends of Sears Sunken Garden held community design meetings where residents contributed their ideas for how the park should be restored. The meetings were also educational sessions where residents could learn more about the history of the Sears Sunken Garden as well as current trends in landscape architecture.

The community meetings steered designers toward a color palette that suits the tastes of the community and helped them decide to use native perennials that would thrive in Chicago’s climate and be easy to maintain, organizers said.

“People are interested in awakening all the senses in the garden: what you see, what you smell. What’s the texture? What memory does it evoke? What feelings?” O’Boyle said.

By incorporating the ideas of people who live in the area, the restoration of the Sears Sunken Garden can be a reminder of the neighborhood’s history and the fond memories many people have, Sutton said.

“It’s really been amazing to have a community-led effort. Many people will tell you they have reunion pictures and wedding photos, all sorts of memories in the garden,” Sutton said.

Annamaria Leon is devoted to building community in her adopted neighborhood, despite being a relative newcomer.

Annamaria Leon was initially enchanted by the lush greenery of Douglass Park and the handsome greystone homes of North Lawndale, located on Chicago’s West Side. But it wasn’t until after she moved into the greystone she first rented and would eventually purchase that she realized what lay beneath the surface of the stunning architecture of the neighborhood and its showplace park: the ravages of decades of redlining, disinvestment and racial unrest.

“I got off the highway and I ended up in North Lawndale. I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world. Douglass Park, you know, and being a feng shui practitioner, you had the curved streets and the old houses with the big doors. I said, ‘oh my gosh, I want to live here,’” Leon said.

She also discovered that her new neighborhood had transformed from a predominantly Jewish enclave to an almost all Black area. This transformation is reflected in the naming of Douglass Park, visualized by architect William LeBaron Jenney and reimagined by world-renowned landscape architect Jens Jensen.

The park was originally Douglas Park, with one “s,” named for Stephen A. Douglas, who was instrumental in bringing the Illinois Central Railway to Chicago and famed for his debates with Abraham Lincoln. Due to his pro-slavery stance, the park was renamed in honor of abolitionists Anna and Frederick Douglass in 2020.

Leon, whose family origins are Filipino, dug in, and committed herself to applying her extensive knowledge in sustainable urban agriculture and permaculture to cultivating much-needed green spaces, enhancing resiliency against the effects of climate change, and improving the overall quality of life in the place she now considers her home.

Digging in

As the co-founder of both Permaculture Chicago Teaching Institute and Homan Grown, L3C, Leon applies her experience and expertise as a certified permaculture designer and dynamic educator. She also draws on years of experience with her former employer, Christy Webber Landscapes, where she developed a reputation for creating community gardens, including work on high profile commissions for garden installations in downtown Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Leon has forged a number of collaborative relationships and built a deep reservoir of trust, establishing herself as a resource for enacting social change. She is recognized as a leader, and respected for her willingness to engage with other community stakeholders.

Her determination to grow roots in North Lawndale is consistent with that overall world view.

“When I look at the condition of the groups in my community, if they’re in need, if they’re hurting, I need to do something about that. Because my life is the groups that make up my community. I’m a connector…If you don’t share your ideas with the people in your community, it doesn’t work; it’s only like you talking into the mirror. Those bonds of trust are what makes a community happen,” Leon said.

For Leon, environmental elements such as abundant green spaces are essential to the overall health of any community, including to provide a cooling effect as climate-fueled heat waves threaten urban areas. North Lawndale, she believes, is not and should not be an exception.

She is outspoken about calling out bad actors as opportunists seeking to exploit the community for their own political or financial gain or both.

“If I see that all you’re doing is using the community, and to use a phrase, being a ‘poverty pimp,’ no, I’m not going to be with you. I’m not going to help you. Because unless you alter and transform how you see my community, why would I engage with you?” Leon said.

At the same time, she also looks to allies to facilitate acceptance among community members who trust them, but who do not yet know her.

“Even though I’ve been there [for years], I haven’t been there [for] generations. And I’m also not African American. If I can’t be effective in [communication with stakeholders], I want somebody else who can be effective in that, and I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page. But I am also not going to dictate how they express that.

“I need to find somebody who can break down those barriers for me… My commitment is to have North Lawndale thrive, to have people find beauty wherever they are, and for them to be self-expressed. That’s what guides me in my work. If it’s about architecture, if it’s about biking, if it’s about healthcare, is that providing beauty? Is it having people be self-expressed in their life? Then I’m for that,” Leon said.

Frustration and municipal red tape

Like many Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, North Lawndale suffers from disinvestment, including a paucity of green spaces. But the community’s reception of Chicago Department of Planning and Development proposals was initially lukewarm, Leon said. Leon persuaded community members to attend subsequent meetings and take an active role in executing various green space initiatives.

“We had a lot of people come because they trusted me. Like, if Annamaria is asking us to do something, let’s go,” Leon said.

But Leon also expressed frustration with dealing with the territorialism that often occurs with municipal politics.

“If our federal government, our local government, our city government, our alderpeople, when they say ‘Hey, I’m going to assist you with this project’ and they actually assist you with the project, and [if] they created it in a way that it is planned to succeed versus planned to fail, then this becomes stronger and stronger and stronger,” Leon said. “But there’s so many agendas out there. We can’t work like that anymore.”

For instance, a number of proposed greening projects in North Lawndale have run into significant hurdles, some of which Leon suspects were integrated by design. She highlighted one instance where a contract for green space maintenance in various lots was given to an organization with no experience doing that work.

“Why does the city then put it on the community? And then the community fails. Then they say, see, ‘we tried and they couldn’t take care of it.’”

Another project, Leon says, was a plot that featured pollinator-friendly plants that instead have simply been mowed, defeating the purpose of the original design.

“I’m part of the tree equity collaborative. I’m part of the urban heat island watch. And trees are great. But if you look at the heat index, it’s still high. And so, you have to have deep roots in the soil to bring up that water up. And [the greenery] becomes like an air conditioner.”

Making an impact

Despite dealing with red tape and other hurdles, Leon and her allies have made significant headway with adding green spaces, both for recreation and as a vehicle for facilitating community and economic development in North Lawndale.

For example, the North Lawndale Greening Committee recently expanded their portfolio of edible community gardens from 14 to 20, utilizing a city program to develop vacant lots while providing paid employment to residents of the community, Leon said.

During a recent presentation at the Morton Arboretum, located in the Chicago suburb of Lisle, Leon also described several projects administered by Stone Temple Baptist Church, a former Jewish synagogue located in North Lawndale, including a vacant lot that has been converted to a community garden and performance space. The church has also created a free community store stocked with donated furniture, Leon said.

A new cafe and flower shop is also scheduled to open in the near future, operating on a donation basis to avoid paying hefty zoning fees, Leon explained during her presentation.

And while grants have been a significant source of funding for various green space projects in North Lawndale, Leon and her collaborators are working toward greater community autonomy in furthering their mission of improving the neighborhood and its green spaces.

“We’ve received almost $2 million in grants, but we’re weaning ourselves off of the grants. I don’t think we can fully, but you know grants are fickle and you have to fulfill what the grantor wants. Sometimes it takes people off of their mission.”

For Leon, good management of green spaces provides a potentially useful blueprint for improving the overall quality of life for North Lawndale, for the city and beyond.

“It’s land tenure. It’s the way you manage your resources. It’s also societal, how you create your society. Is it hierarchical? Is it linear? You could just look at the soil. What makes a soil fertile is there’s a lot of the little organic microorganisms in there,” Leon said. “But those microorganisms live because they have air and they have good shelter that’s not poison, which is the soil. And it has good maintenance, and they respect each other’s boundaries and they collaborate.

“So that’s what makes a good society as well.”

Audrey Henderson is a contributing reporter at Canary Media focused on environmental justice and equity. She lives in the greater Chicago area.