A Chicago garden calls a Black community pushed to the margins back together again.
By Zach Mortice
MKSK’s design for the community garden extends a Mauricio Ramirez mural onto the ground plane. Image courtesy MKSK.
Since 2009, a vacant lot turned community garden on the 4600 block of Winthrop Avenue in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood has commemorated the Winthrop Avenue Family, the descendants of a group of Black families who for much of the 20th century were confined to this one block of the predominantly white neighborhood. “Everybody who lived on the block [was] not necessarily blood-related, but we were so close we felt like we were, and still do,” says Emilie Lockridge, whose mother was born there in 1925.
When Sears closed its West Side campus in the 1980s, the garden received less maintenance and upkeep. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction Number ILL,16-CHIG,110-12.
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.
Landscape architects are ingrained systems thinkers and experts on how to balance infrastructure and the ecological imperatives of climate change, all while improving transit networks that bind people together. Significant portions of the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill that became law late last year will be filtering down to communities, and landscape architects bring experience and expertise to these types of projects, including the removal of highways,streetscapedesign,greenwayplanning, and especially those projects that seek to address incidences of transit infrastructure exacerbating existing economic and demographic inequalities.Continue reading Get Ready to Respond→
Gerstacker Grove is the only major piece of landscape connective tissue on the University of Michigan’s North Campus. Photo by Millicent Harvey.
The Eda U. Gerstacker Grove on the University of Michigan’s North Campus is the modern anti-quad. The North Campus is cloistered and suburban, separated from the main Central Campus by a mile-plus and the Huron River. Continue reading Northern Star→
Research by Samantha Solano, ASLA, and TJ Marston from the VELA Project.
Samantha Solano, ASLA, and TJ Marston have peeked under the hood of gender equity in landscape architecture once again. Continue reading Climbing the Ladder→
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