Garden Fairs and Garden Clubs
Next weekend is the Annual Hyde Park Garden Fair, Friday 9-6, Saturday 9-3, at the Kimbark Shopping Center, 53rd Street between Woodlawn and Kimbark. Friday morning is the best selection. My list of plants for the Native Plant department will get posted soon.
One of the very first bits of Hyde Park research I did was about the Hyde Park Garden Fair for the 50th Anniversary celebration. It grew out of Urban Renewal and the block club movement organized by the Hyde Park/Kenwood Community Conference, the grassroots organization dedicated to bringing about an integrated thriving community.
There were no garden centers in the mix of businesses authorized by the Land Clearance Commission, so a group of volunteers created a committee in HPKCC to provide the material for neighbors to fix up their parkways and yards. They wanted real gardens to sprout all over Hyde Park. They wanted color. The very beginnings seem to have been a plant exchange, but that wasn’t good enough.
In 1961, the committee, led by Sophie Rudin, Lee Botts, Helga Sinaiko, and Mollie Salmon, organized the first formal sale in the brand-new Hyde Park Shopping Center, designed by modernists Keck and Keck. Lee Botts wrote a gardening column in the Hyde Park Herald, telling people how to get started. The first fair was sponsored by the merchants of the shopping center, many of whom had deep roots in the community, especially the Hyde Park Co-op. The 1961 fair started the tradition of having the sale on Friday and Saturday so people could plant on Sunday.
It started small as this photo shows.
I guess word got out that Hyde Park wanted plants. One of the early members of HPKCC, Barbara O’Connor, told me that one day a guy drove up to the HPKCC office and offered to sell a truckload of ornamental crabapples for cheap. They pounced on the offer and offered them to the block clubs to plant on their parkways and in the brand new pocket parks created where buildings had been torn down. For decades Hyde Park was bursting with the crab apple flowers every spring, all along streets, and the triangles of grass by University Apartments that no one was quite sure who owned them.
During the 1970s, the fair expanded. People got into raising organic vegetables and herbs and people without a yard wanted to fill their back porches with plants in containers and hanging baskets. People embraced the idea of Native Plants to feed the butterflies and birds, who are our neighbors too! The Fair is a great place for heirloom vegetables, unusual flowers, and a wide range of native plants.
The Garden Fair however is not a Garden Club. We don’t have monthly meetings and hold teas in each other’s gazebos. Quite a few of us are guerilla gardeners.
Historically, there was a formal garden club in Kenwood. It made sense that the area where people had large yards and a lot of time and money embraced the world of ladies with big hats and formal teas. It was an affiliate of the Illinois Association of Garden Clubs, with its 150 affiliate clubs and 10,000 members. The Kenwood ladies would enter exhibits in the annual Illinois flower show. In 1947, it was in Marshall Field’s. Kenwood won three ribbons: a purple (better than blue) for a formal table arrangement, a purple for an arrangement in a copper container (that was the category), and a red ribbon for a still life inspired by a still life painting. The Kenwood Garden Club met monthly, had visiting lecturers, and had an annual fund raiser for the Kenwood Community Church. Not just anyone could join. Members had to cultivate the spirit of beauty in home and garden, promote civic beautification, and promote conservation of wildflowers and bird life. The Kenwood Garden Club was active at least until 1976.
There was a second garden club that was briefly one of the affiliate clubs of the Illinois Association of Garden Clubs. In 1934, eight young women formed the Thimbles and Thumbs Garden Club. The thimble was the smallest thing that they could use to grow a plant, though I’m not sure they tried. The women had been classmates at the Faulkner School for Girls. They also entered three exhibits in the 1934 garden show on what was then called “Municipal Pier.” In addition to flower arranging, they worked on landscaping property that belonged to Charles R. Walgreen, whose daughter and daughter-in-law were founding members. It doesn’t seem to have lasted long.
Searching for Hyde Park/Kenwood garden clubs led me to discover the Widows & Widowers Rose Garden Club, which seems to have been founded in 1919 by a Mrs. Sam Blair of Hyde Park. They met every Sunday afternoon at 5538 S. Indiana Avenue at the Silent Athletic Club. I thought how nice! A shared interest. And then, after the meeting, they danced. She protested that it wasn’t a matrimonial agency. At one time, they had 1,000 members. It turned out that the widows and widowers (and divorcees) weren’t interested in plant life at all. Mrs. Blair had gotten the idea while walking in Washington Park’s spectacular Rose Garden, near the gorgeous Conservatory.
Hyde Park had the Garden Fair Committee—focused on raising the look of the neighborhood and raising funds for HPKCC. It also had guerilla gardens for all the people who lived in apartments. They were sometimes elaborate but always lived on borrowed time. One example is the guerilla garden at the southwest corner of 57th Street and Stony Island Avenue, where a friend of mine had a plot.
Once upon a time, the 1893 World’s Fair concession stands that had become eclectic shops associated with the Artist Colony were there.
The Department of Urban Renewal designated them for demolition in the 1960s. The DUR bought the property through eminent domain, demolished the structures, and then put it up for sale. Debate raged over what should go there. It was zoned institutional by the urban planners. Real estate firm Kennedy Ryan wanted to build a gas station there in 1967. The DUR through the Community Conservation Commission nixed the idea. The Unitarian-Universalist churches proposed a 15-story affordable housing for seniors, trying to address the fact that urban renewal had wiped out the residential hotels where retirees were living. The lot however wasn’t zoned residential. Harvard St. George School and the American School of Correspondence both expressed interest, noting it was for institutions, but the DUR put a high price on it.
As the proposals and plans dragged on, the lot sat empty and filled with trash. Neighbors called themselves a garden club and decided to take it over. They pulled out the concrete blocks, thousands of bricks, rusted radiators, and pipes. They brought in truckloads of Sanitary District sludge to add nutrients to the sandy damaged soil. They paid to install a fence and divided it up into 36 garden plots plus a perennial flower rock garden. But it was still DUR land for sale. It was rezoned residential, and in 1987, the University of Chicago bought it to build the 5-story apartment building that’s there now. The guerilla garden was no more.
Fascinating story. How very Hyde Park!!!
Thanks Trish!! Really fun! My mother had a guerilla garden for a few years in the '60s--somewhat North along the railroad tracks. Interestingly, during those-still-postwar years everyone referred to them as Victory Gardens. I always liked that.