BY CAROL BECKER

Hoerr Schaudt’s Michigan Avenue plantings in Chicago return the investment near and far.

From the September 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

You might be in Xanadu, having lunch in an outdoor café on Michigan Avenue. You are steps from noisy traffic, but flower baskets surround every café, parkways are lush with flower beds, and every available space along the sidewalk, both public and private, is given over to gardens, urns full of flowers, statuary, and well-kept trees. A garden grows in the middle of the six-lane avenue. Twenty-five years ago, Chicago’s main downtown thoroughfare was little different from many others—you shopped or ate or saw sites or worked and lived along city streets with young trees under tree grates, with not much else that was living to separate people from constant high-speed traffic and the railroad yards.

Today it’s all different, owing to the Michigan Avenue Streetscape project, recipient of the 2016 ASLA Landmark Award, given to works of landscape architecture between 15 and 50 years old that have kept their design integrity and contribute to the public realm. The project has proved its worth for tourism, real estate, retail shopping, dining, and quality of life for the millions of people who find themselves on the avenue every year. Michigan Avenue has become a destination in itself. The Streetscape (which includes only the median plantings and not the many other streetside plantings that have followed) guides people through the city from north (Oak Street) to south (Roosevelt Road), a stretch of two and a half miles in all, and also brings them to world-famous landscape architecture: Millennium Park, the Lurie Garden, Maggie Daley Park, and now the century-old, all-new Navy Pier.

It started in 1991 as an experiment. Doug Hoerr, FASLA, now principal in Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects (formed in 2008 by Hoerr with Peter Schaudt, who died last year), was then a young landscape architect who had just returned from two years of gardening (his word) with Beth Chatto and others in England. He saw with new eyes the barrenness of Michigan Avenue, compared to just about any street anywhere in the United Kingdom. After a short assignment designing outdoor lighting for the flagship Crate and Barrel store on North Michigan Avenue, Hoerr suggested to the company’s founder Gordon Segal that he create gardens in the store’s three streetside parkways. Segal was at first skeptical of the return on a big investment. Shoppers noticed. They began gathering outside Crate and Barrel before stores on the avenue opened each day. A young Mayor Richard M. Daley, Honorary ASLA, also noticed and challenged Segal to bring the same quality of horticultural design to the middle of Michigan Avenue. Daley offered $360,000 in earmarked funds left over from Michigan Avenue upgrades to design and build the planters, if the merchants would pledge $200,000 annually for 20 years to fund maintenance. Segal agreed, on the condition that Hoerr be engaged as principal landscape architect. Thus was born a public–private partnership that funded the project north of the Chicago River to Oak Street, known as the Magnificent Mile.

The partnership did not extend to Michigan Avenue below the river, which was less a shopping mecca than an undeveloped mixed-use area, dominated by the old railroad yards despite the Art Institute of Chicago and the Symphony Center opposite each other at its center and the Museum Campus just south of Roosevelt Avenue. That section, recently dubbed the Cultural Mile, was built and maintained by city funds. Today, the railroad yard is gone, replaced by Millennium Park, the Lurie Garden, and Maggie Daley Park. Originally 30 planters were built, 19 north of the Chicago River and 11 to the south. In the late 1990s, the median planters on the south section were significantly enlarged. Today they vary in length from six feet up to 190 feet and in width from nine to 25 feet. The largest of these include trees: Crataegus, Syringa, Malus, Prunus, and the multistem Ginkgo biloba, which were 18 feet high at installation and now rise more than 30 feet above the highway in front of the Art Institute. Hoerr argued from the beginning against ornate planter designs that would detract from the plants. The Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin noted at the time their lack of “architectural elegance” but predicted that “the best part of the project figures to be Hoerr’s plantings.” Hoerr would prove Kamin right.

Hoerr was about creating “horticultural theater,” he says, creating something instantly beautiful but also enduring. “It had to be perfect when it was done, and still looking good for a season.” Now new planting designs are installed three times each year. In the spring come tulips, different varietals in different patterns each year. Later in the season, texture and mass explode with plants like Cordyline, Pennisetum, Canna, Alocasia, and Cynara cardunculus, commonly known as the artichoke thistle. Color (including leaf color) is the byword for the middle level, where the plants form large masses. Hoerr has planted Asclepias, Perilla, Strobilanthes, Salvia, and the hardy sunflower Heliopsis helianthoides ‘Summer Sun.’ Petunia and Ipomoea are always among the trailing plants, and others often include Angelonia, Begonia, Vinca, Verbena, Plectranthus, Lantana, and many, many more.

Original Michigan Avenue planter designs.

Hoerr’s vision, achieved year after year in the streetscape, was to show the richness of annual plantings that are rigorous about texture, plant variety, and color, within a larger design that has structural mass. His designs have specified 110,000 tulip bulbs each spring and 245,000 plants in 27,000 square feet of planting beds. Plants were contract grown for each design and monitored by Hoerr’s team and their supplier, Clarence Davids & Company. Installation took place at night, over a seven-night period, with 12 to 15 designers. “We made three passes with every installation,” Hoerr recalls, placing framework plants first, then filler plants, then smaller annuals. Maximum effort went into “making it look at once like a permanent planting, perfect in the moment.”

Michigan Avenue before the Streetscape project began.

But perfect in the moment cannot be sustained over 20 years or even one season without rigorous maintenance. And with that, the Landmark Award goes to the city as well as to the landscape architect. Initially, maintenance was split: Clarence Davids & Company handled north of the Chicago River, and south of the river went to the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Department of Engineering. Since the late 1990s, though, CDOT has managed it all. Biweekly inspection walks by CDOT and Hoerr Schaudt staff identified what was required to keep the medians at their peak at all times. Watering has been done by truck at night until recently, when some of the larger medians were irrigated. Today, much of the maintenance is contracted by the city to A Safe Haven, a nonprofit organization that offers job training and other services for homeless young people, veterans, and people recovering from substance abuse.

The Michigan Avenue Streetscape fundamentally changed the way Michigan Avenue is perceived and the way cities understand the role of horticulture for economic and civic growth. It’s easy to be awed by the sheer volume of the effort, but Hoerr’s genius lies in using form, structure, and color to create natural beauty and bring a horticultural experience to folks on the street. For many people, “it’s all they will get,” he says, and perhaps this is the secret of the design’s enduring success. Within 10 years, the Mag Mile had achieved its own status as a destination, Chicago’s O’Hare airport landscape was redesigned with lush garden beds and hanging planters to welcome arriving passengers, and City Hall was given a green roof, a project Hoerr helped complete. Today, a view of Chicago from the air reveals many green roofs, and on the ground, more than 100 miles of streetscape gardens in Chicago’s 77 communities. The real outcome: Michigan Avenue is now an important stop for at least 50 species of birds on a main migratory highway, known as the Mississippi Flyway. In one memorable year, monarch butterflies denuded the foliage on the median’s Asclepias.

Other cities have also taken note, attracted by the public–private partnership that Hoerr says “must start at the top” to be successful. In Des Moines, Iowa, Hoerr has worked for 13 years with the city and the local chapter of the Garden Clubs of America to develop streetscapes in high-visibility public areas, including a four-mile stretch from the airport to downtown. He has also brought horticulture to Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., and to Houston Street in New York City. It’s all about the tax base, he says. Des Moines, Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C., did not come calling because the planters were so beautiful or even because the people liked them. They called because the Michigan Avenue Streetscape proved its economic value over time. “Beauty is one thing,” Hoerr says, but at a cost of $20.50 per square foot per year to install and maintain, the bottom line is “what horticulture does to stimulate tourism and trade and a perception of pride in the community.”

Hoerr’s fall season designs combine native grasses, very large structural plants, and typical seasonal annuals. Credit: Steven Gierke.

Back home in Chicago, Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects finished its 20-year run on the avenue in 2013. CDOT has taken over the median plantings, blending horticulture with art in a project conceived by CDOT senior landscape architect Kris Sorich, Associate ASLA, and designed by the landscape architect Pamela Self, ASLA. Self used detailed analysis of the colors, shapes, texture, and layering in Chicago artist Phyllis Bramson’s work to design the 2016 median planters. The result is a design that mirrors Bramson’s artistic style and reflects bright color, layered textures, and a touch of the unexpected—elements first introduced into the planting designs by Doug Hoerr in 1993.

The Michigan Avenue Streetscape has, over the years, lived up to Hoerr’s vision and the demands of a high-density, busy central city environment. Plants here are surrounded by concrete, noise, and vehicles; they’re punished by hot sun in summer and heavily salted snow in winter. Before CDOT began using barricades to protect them in times of celebration, they were also trampled by fans welcoming home the Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks or partying with Oprah Winfrey. Facing all these challenges, the medians did so well they became famous. They please residents. They attract shoppers and visitors. They offer shelter and food for birds and butterflies. Even so, no matter how beautiful the planters, no matter how high the quality of the horticultural experience they provide, people didn’t and still don’t come to Michigan Avenue to see them. They come to shop, eat, visit the museums and parks, and to be entertained by concerts, street performers, and people watching. Still, anyone who doubts that Michigan Avenue is a destination because of what Hoerr created and the city has maintained should check the online reviews at TripAdvisor and read what people say.

Carol Becker is a landscape designer and writer based in Chicago.