A Sunken Garden Resurfaces

It was an oasis on Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s sprawling Chicagoland campus during the company’s heyday—a sunken garden with geometric flower beds, a reflecting pool, and a pergola. The resplendent garden in the city’s North Lawndale neighborhood was one of several amenities—including tennis courts, a library, even separate clubhouses for men and women—for the company’s 9,000 workers.

“We believe these surroundings inspire our workers to better things and make for contentment and happiness,” the company declared in a 1920 promotional brochure, explaining a degree of corporate benevolence that seems almost quaint by today’s standards.

The fortunes of the North Lawndale neighborhood took a turn when the company relocated its headquarters in the early 1970s to the city’s downtown. Sears Tower, once the tallest building in the U.S., became the new corporate symbol, while the former 40-acre campus, including the 1.7-acre Sears Sunken Garden, began a slow decline.

Now, Trust for Public Land has joined a group of residents to revive the garden, whose deteriorating pergola and long-vanished flower beds are a stark reminder of what the community lost. Befitting the former home of a once-iconic American brand, the partners have engaged a star garden designer: Piet Oudolf of the Netherlands. Among his many projects, Oudolf transformed the High Line in New York City, and, closer to home, the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Oudolf pioneered the “New Perennials” movement, which emphasizes native plants that offer visual interest in every season. The $5 million renovation will include thousands of new trees, shrubs, and perennial flowers; restoration of the pergola structure; a reflecting pool; seating areas; an irrigation system; contemporary lighting, and new electrical wiring. The garden, which will be fully accessible for the first time, will also capture up to 100,000 gallons of stormwater during a rain event.

“We have been doing a lot of work with the community, so they know what they are getting with a Piet Oudolf garden,” said Caroline O’Boyle, Trust for Public Land’s Illinois state director. “It might not be what they remember from their youth, when the garden featured annual flower varieties that were pulled out every year. Piet uses a much more naturalistic approach, one that doesn’t have that super groomed look of a traditional garden. It will be different, but beautiful.”

The Sears Sunken Garden’s historic pergola—shown here (top) during the garden’s heyday and more recently—is riddled with cracks and erosion, but will be restored as part of the project.

The resurrected garden will be a shot in the arm for the North Lawndale community. Some 50 years after the company’s exodus, many of the old Sears buildings still stand vacant, while others have been torn down or repurposed. (In 1978, the Sears campus was declared a National Historic Landmark.) The community was left reeling by the company’s departure.

Reshorna Fitzpatrick, executive pastor at Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church in North Lawndale, said the Sears Sunken Garden retained some of its charm until as recently as 2006, when a local foundation still did maintenance there. That year, she and her husband, Derrick Fitzpatrick, posed in the garden for their wedding photos. Soon after, however, the garden began to wither.

“You saw the flowers weren’t blossoming, and there was no color,” she recalls. “The grass was being cut, but the pergola started to show cracks, and the lights weren’t always on. It just lost its vigor. People started to avoid it.”

In 2018, the North Lawndale community unveiled a quality-of-life plan that included parkland and open space. Trust for Public Land was invited to support the efforts to rejuvenate and expand parks and greenspaces in the neighborhood, including the Sears garden. Roy Diblik, a garden designer and plant nursery owner who lives in North Lawndale, convinced his longtime friend Oudolf to sign onto the project.

Today O’Boyle serves on the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council’s committee devoted to open space and sustainability. She’s also a member of a nonprofit group, Friends of Sears Sunken Garden, which formed in 2020. A $125,000 grant from Trust for Public Land’s Equitable Communities Fund enabled the nascent group to ramp up its operations with a new website and logo, as well as fundraising and community outreach.

Among the community events were a watercolor workshop, in which residents painted the garden en plein air; a planting activity with test plots in the garden; and a Q&A with Oudolf about his now completed master plan for the Sears garden.

“Nobody would find it if it was not on the map,” Oudolf said, only half in jest, of the Sears Sunken Garden. “I think it’s quite rare that a garden like we normally make in centers of cities—where millions of people come—can arise in a neighborhood. And [this] neighborhood deserves it, because they really fight to get something done and get the quality to a level that brings people here. That’s what we tried to do, and that’s why I’m energized to make this happen.”

Last year, Pastor Fitzpatrick screened a documentary at her church called “Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf.” “It’s captivating,” she said of the 2017 film. “Some people think a garden is done when the winter comes. But he points out the beautiful colors that some plants keep.”

Fitzpatrick believes Oudolf’s involvement in the Sears Sunken Garden will have positive repercussions for the community as a whole. “He’s the Stevie Wonder of gardens,” she said. “He’s the guy you go to when you want a garden done right. This is something that is really going to bring the community together.”

Oudolf is working with local landscape architects and engineers on the implementation of the master plan. In the meantime, TPL and our partners are busy raising money to ensure the vision for the Sears Sunken Garden is fully realized.

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