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Garden History:
The Conservatory’s Big Back Yard
The City Garden, the newest public garden in Chicago,
has a varied history. This large enclosed outdoor space just west of the
Desert House exit, has gone through many incarnations over the last 100
years. For example, it is here that city dwellers once played tennis on
one of eight courts and dipped their toes in a large shallow wading
pool. The space now reflects the needs of its contemporary metropolitan
dwellers by hosting outdoor events and exhibits and highlighting hardy
urban landscapes, green roof displays, creative reuse of materials, and
other urban greening endeavors.
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A
Special Place:
Potter and French’s Bulls
of 1893
If you’re hunting for a good story, look for a set of
bronze bulls to the north east side of the City Garden. You will see
that next to each bull stands a goddess, one who holds wheat sheaves and
represents the Old World Roman goddess of grain, and one who holds maize
and symbolizes the New World Native American goddess of corn. The
account below will shed some light on how these Bulls came to rest in
our City Garden.
In 1908, the West Park Commission worked with the Art Institute of
Chicago to hold an outdoor art exhibit in Humboldt Park. This outdoor
exhibit featured a pair of plaster bulls, cast that same year from
carefully salvaged study models of sculptures that adorned the grounds
of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The original sculptures, the
products of two collaborating sculptors of the time, Edward C. Potter
and Daniel Chester French, were displayed in greatly enlarged, heroic
form at the main entrance of the fair’s Agricultural Building. The
smaller re-cast versions were contributions to the 1908 outdoor exhibit
from the Art Institute’s collection, as at that time, there was very
little money available for newly commissioned work. In 1909, an outdoor
exhibit was held again, this time in Garfield Park, and different study
models were recast in plaster, this time of Edward Kemey’s famous
Columbian Exposition bison. Around 1912, both sets of plaster
sculptures were recast in bronze and then switched to opposite parks (ie
the bulls at Humboldt came to Garfield, and the Garfield bison went to
Humboldt). The reason for this exchange is unknown; one possibility is
that each of the parks’ formal gardens was better suited in scale to the
replacement sculptures.
The bulls flanked the Garfield Park’s formal gardens until the mid
1980’s, when vandals unfortunately stole one of the bull sculptures and
damaged the other. In 2003, conservator Andrzej Dajnowski recreated the
missing sculpture and repaired the damaged one, and installed them in
the new City Garden behind the Conservatory. Kemey’s pair of bison still
stands watch over Humboldt Park’s formal gardens.
(Source for this section: Inspired By Nature, pages 22 and 23.)
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A
Special Place:
The Historic Hawthorn
Grove
The shady area under the group of hawthorn trees in
the southwest corner of the City Garden has hosted many a picnic over
the last 100 years. In fact, it is believed these trees were planted by
Jens Jensen himself before the conservatory was built in 1907. Hawthorn
trees, a trade-mark planting of Jensen’s, imitate the lines of an
idealized prairie, with horizontal branches growing parallel to the
ground. Jensen also felt that the branching habits of these native trees
softened the landscape and let it breathe.
This grove of magnificent historic trees has cast its soft gaze on our
conservatory for a very long time. Keep an eye out for other historic
hawthorn plantings around the grounds of the conservatory and Garfield
Park. A single hawthorn, just outside and to the right of the Desert
House doors, is also a product of the landscape style of Jensen et. al,
paying homage to the many Hawthorns planted throughout Chicago at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
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