Spring 2001

by Julia Sniderman Bachrach

As Chicago underwent rapid development during the late nineteeth century, many people felt proud of the changes the city was experiencing. Tall buildings, the elevated railway system, improved roads, and a new drainage system all signified that Chicago was becoming one of the nation’s premier cities.

Within this context, however, a Danish immigrant, Jens Jensen (1860-1951), saw the quickly disappearing native landscape as a resource to be revered, idealized, and preserved. Jensen is now considered dean of the Prairie style of landscape architecture, leader of the Midwestern conservation movement, and is remembered as a significant Chicago social reformer. Today, the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Chicago Park District have formed the Jens Jensen Legacy Project to inspire current generations about this influential designer and conservationist.

From Laborer to Superintendent
Born into a prosperous family in Slesvig, Denmark, Jens Jensen emigrated to the United States in 1884 with his fiancee, Anne Marie Hansen. After brief periods in Florida and Iowa, the young couple settled in Chicago where Jensen found employment as a laborer for the West Park Commission.

Soon promoted to foreman, Jensen planted a formal garden of exotic flowers. When the garden did not thrive, he took a team and wagon into the countryside and gathered an array of wildflowers, many of which were then considered weeds. Jensen transplanted the wildflowers into a small corner of Union Park, creating the American Garden in 1888. Although few park visitors had ever seen a wildflower garden before, the American Garden became quite popular.

Working his way through the park system, Jensen was appointed superintendent of the 200-acre Humboldt Park in 1895. By the late 1890s, the West Park Commission was entrenched in corruption. After refusing to participate in political graft, Jensen was ousted by a dishonest park board in 1900.

Chiwaukee Prairie in southeastern Wisconsin, the kind of spectacular flower display Jensen feared would be lost if not protected for the future. Photo by Joe Kayne.

Special Park Commission
Despite personal financial struggles, the turn of the twentieth century proved to be an exciting time for Jensen. He was commissioned to design several estates on Chicago’s north shore and in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He also made many excursions into the unspoiled countryside where he studied and photographed natural scenes and flora.

During this period, Jensen became involved in several organizations devoted to improving the city and conserving natural areas. He was an active member of the Municipal Science Club, a group that in 1898 sponsored a presentation by Jacob Riis, an influential photojournalist and social reformer from New York. Riis’s speech inspired the Chicago City Council’s formation of a Special Park Commission the following year. This committee was composed of prominent businessmen, attorneys, design professionals, and social reformers appointed by the mayor as well as representatives of the South, West, and Lincoln Park Commissions. Jensen was appointed to the Special Park Commission in 1903 or 1904.

Birth of the Forest Preserve District
The Special Park Commission sought to study Chicago’s existing open spaces, create playgrounds in the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods, and develop a systematic plan for parks and recreational areas throughout the metropolitan area. Over a one-year period, Jensen and his friend and colleague, the Prairie School architect Dwight Perkins, conducted an exhaustive study. Their influential report not only recommended a whole series of new parks and playgrounds in the inner city, but also the protection of thousands of acres of land.

In 1903, Jensen created a map entitled "Proposed System of Forest Parks and Country Pleasure Roads." He incorporated this concept into the Special Park Commission’s report, published the following year. The report identified significant natural areas in the Des Plaines River Valley, along the banks of the Little Calumet River, and within the Skokie Marsh region along the north shore of Lake Michigan. Jensen and Perkins recommended the creation of a belt of natural lands at the perimeter of Chicago. They suggested a new system of boulevards that would link the nature reserves with the city’s existing park and boulevard system.

Henry G. Foreman, president of the Cook County Board, wanted to quickly move forward to begin acquiring nature preserve lands. He formed an Outer Belt Park Commission in 1903. Two years later, as costs of land were increasing, the Commission decided to immediately draft a bill to allow Cook County to begin buying property. Jensen and Perkins were disappointed that the new Outer Belt Park Commission was not working to achieve their broad vision for the forest preserves. They enlisted the support of Chicago’s renowned architect and planner, Daniel H. Burnham, who incorporated their ideas into his seminal 1909 Plan of Chicago. After several more years of political debate on this subject, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County was finally established in 1915. Within its first 10 years, the new agency had accumulated 24,000 acres of land.

Reform and Opportunity in the West Park System
While Jensen was advocating the creation of the forest preserves, a new era of reform had begun in the West Park System. In 1905, a new governor, Charles S. Deneen, dismissed the West Park Board of Commissioners and appointed a progressive and honest board. The newly appointed board president, Bernard A. Eckhart, selected Jensen as chief landscape architect and general superintendent of the entire West Park System.

When Jensen returned to the West Park Commission, he found the parks in terrible condition. Deteriorating areas and features in Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas Parks allowed him to experiment with his evolving naturalistic style. Jensen demolished the small Victorian conservatories in the three parks that had each existed for less than 20 years, but had all suffered terrible deterioration. He replaced them with a larger, centrally located Garfield Park Conservatory. Designed in conjunction with Hitchings & Co., a New York engineering company that specialized in greenhouses, the new Garfield Park Conservatory was considered revolutionary when it opened in 1908.

Jensen thought that most conservatories looked like palaces or chateaus and were too fanciful and pretentious. In contrast his new structure emulated the simple form of a haystack. Many other conservatories displayed plants in pots placed on pedestals or in large groupings in the center of a room. Within the Garfield Park Conserva-tory, however, Jensen designed interior rooms to look like outdoor landscapes. Jensen placed plants directly in the ground and framed views by keeping the center of each room open, with a fountain or a naturalistic pond as the centerpiece. He also hid exposed pipes and mechanical systems by tucking them behind beautiful walls of stratified stonework. Unlike the mounds of volcanic stone used in Victorian conservatories, Jensen’s horizontal stonework resembled the bluffs and outcroppings found along rivers in the Midwest.

Unfinished areas within all three parks also gave Jensen the opportunity to create impressive gardens and naturalistic landscapes. In Humboldt Park, he extended the existing lagoon into a long meandering waterway. Inspired by the natural scenery he saw during trips to wetland landscapes in Illinois and Wisconsin, Jensen designed hidden water sources that supplied two rocky brooks. He edged this "prairie river" with native grasses and established emergent plants in the water such as arrowroot, lotus, and cattails. Nearby, Jensen created a circular garden of roses, other perennials, trellis-like pergolas, sculptures, and ceramic urns. Between the rose garden and the prairie river, he created a naturalistic perennial garden with masses of native flowers.

City residents relaxing by Jensen's prairie river in Humboldt Park, circa 1910. Photo courtesy Chicago Park District, Special Collections.

"For Jensen, the only meaningful source of inspiration for landscape gardening was the native landscape," writes Robert E. Grese in his biography, Jens Jensen, Maker of Natural Parks & Gardens (1998). "Its vegetation, its wild life are due to natural selection for fitness for thousands of years. It is fitting and it belongs. To destroy it is to destroy the real America. To corrupt it is the work of stupidity — it is vandalism."

Progressive Programs and Plans
In addition to redesigning existing parks, Jensen also created new small parks to provide breathing spaces in densely populated immigrant neighborhoods. Although expansive elements such as broad meadows or meandering waterways could not be included in the compact sites, Jensen introduced his naturalistic philosophies in several ways. He used native plants in informal groupings and sun-openings as gathering and play spaces. Jensen incorporated his characteristic stonework into several of the small park designs, and also included Prairie-style architectural elements. In several of these small parks, Jensen introduced community gardens to bring urban dwellers closer to nature. Tended by neighborhood children, these gardens yielded produce for their families as well as for orphanages and other charities.

Jensen also embraced a connection between the performing arts and nature. In many of his small park designs, he included a "players’ green." This was a slightly elevated sun-opening, which served as the stage for outdoor theatrical performances. The audience would sit on the ground on an adjacent meadow area. Jensen was interested in using masques and other outdoor theatrical productions to educate people about nature and conservation. He also believed in celebrating nature, and he inspired events fitting this theme. In 1915, a Garfield Park festival featured 1,400 children who celebrated nature’s four seasons before an audience of 25,000.

Many of Jensen’s progressive ideas about nature in the city were articulated in an ambitious open space study he conducted in 1917. His report, "A Plan for a Greater West Park System," called for thousands of acres of new parks, boulevards, greenways, and community gardens. To Jensen’s great disappointment, the plan was not implemented. However, many of his ideas impressed a large number of friends and supporters.

Jensen argued for planning that aspires to "harmony with the laws of nature." As he noted, an "artificial" type of plan, while it permits a man to arrive at his business in so much shorter time and allows him to run from one thing to another with less expenditure of effort and money, [it] makes not provision for the cultivation of his soul. A little inconvenience for the sake of a better environment is well worth the cost. To shut out nature from man’s whole life is to shut out the inspiration of noble and humanitarian things. The artificial state has come to be the producer of insanity, crime, and immorality."

Organizations and Conservation Efforts
Jensen explored many of his ideas about bringing people closer to nature through his involvement with several clubs and organizations. In 1908, Jensen began a series of "Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips," along with other members of the Playground Association. These outings to natural areas outside of Chicago often attracted 100 to 200 walkers, and Jensen took turns leading the group. These walks became so popular that they inspired the formation of the "Prairie Club," a name suggested by Jensen.

The Prairie Club sponsored walking trips of natural areas that were threatened by development, such as the Indiana dunes. Jensen had studied the dunes landscape along with his friend and colleague, the eminent plant ecologist Henry C. Cowles. In 1908, more than 300 people participated in a Saturday Afternoon Walking Trip of the dunes. The Prairie Club built a permanent beach house on the dunes at Tremont, Indiana, in 1913. To celebrate the event, the club produced and performed a special masque entitled "The Spirit of the Dunes."

Jensen inspired the formation of another organization — Friends of Our Native Landscape — in 1913. The Friends and Prairie Club together fought to save the Indiana dunes. Jensen had asked his wealthy client Henry Ford to purchase thousands of acres of dune property to create a public arboretum there. However, when land speculators heard that Ford was interested, prices began escalating and he soon backed away. When Stephen Mather, a member of Friends of Our Native Landscape, was appointed as the first director of the National Park Service, the dunes effort became more promising. Mather held a public hearing to discuss the Indiana dunes in 1916. Jensen and other members of the Friends and Prairie Club provided testimony. However, there were Indiana politicians who wanted industrial development and objected to the idea of a park that would be heavily used by Chicagoans.

The Prairie Club continued its fight to protect the dunes. In 1917, they staged a huge dunes pageant with hundreds of cast members. More than 50,000 people attended two performances of the pageant. Despite the success of the event, Congress did not move forward on the idea of creating a Dunes National Park. The Prairie club shifted its focus to state government, and finally in 1926, 2,250 acres were designated as the Indiana Dunes State Park.

Columbus Park: The Prairie Idealized
During the years in which Jensen served as a director of the Prairie Club, between 1911 and 1914, he realized that he would have his first and only opportunity to create a whole new large park in Chicago. In 1912, the West Park Commissioners acquired a 144-acre site on Chicago’s west side called Warren Woods or the Austin Site. This property, which was later renamed Columbus Park, boasted fields, wooded areas, and traces of sand dune. In 1915, even before Jensen completed the design for the park, the commissioners opened a temporary nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and football fields there. Political winds began shifting once again, and in 1920, Jensen severed his relationship with the West Park Commission for the last time. Though he did not oversee the site’s completion, Jensen considered Columbus Park his masterpiece.

Jensen’s vision for Columbus Park was inspired by the site’s natural history and topography. In surveying the unimproved site, Jensen found traces of sand dune, and determined these were an ancient beach. Following that theme, he designed a series of berms, reminiscent of glacial ridges, encircling the flat interior portion of the park. Along the remaining traces of the lake beach, he created a meandering lagoon to emulate a natural prairie river and two waterfalls of stratified stonework to represent the source of the waterway.

Near the juncture of the two brooks, Jensen designed a "players green," with a lawn for the audience across the stream. The edges of the stage were thickly planted with elms, ash, maples, hawthorns, crabapples, sumac, hazel, and wildflowers, leaving two sun-openings as "back stage" changing-areas for the performers.

Jensen also created a clearing in the children’s playground area to promote free play. At the edge he placed one of his favorite design elements, a circular stone bench known as a council ring. Stratified stonework was also used to edge the park’s original swimming pool. Designed to emulate a country swimming hole, the pool was large enough to accommodate as many as 7,000 swimmers per day. (The original pool was replaced by a more modern facility in the 1950s.)

The golf course was also very symbolic for Jensen. He viewed the flat horizontal golf meadow as a metaphor for the prairie. He provided shade for the golfers with small groves of trees and shrubs and oriented the golf course towards the setting sun.

Jensen’s Legacy
In 1920, when Governor Frank Lowden removed all seven West Park Commissioners from office, Jensen lost political support once more and this ended his involvement in Chicago’s parks. However, Jensen’s private practice continued to thrive. Between the early part of the century and the 1930s, Jensen had designed hundreds of parks, golf courses, and the grounds for schools, hospitals, hotels, resorts, and private residences throughout and beyond the Midwest. He had collaborated with some of the nation’s most renowned architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, and his client list included notable businessmen such as Henry and Edsel Ford, Harold Florshiem, and Ogden Armour.

In the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, Jensen’s private practice had slowed. Jensen’s wife, Anne Marie, passed away in 1934, and he decided to move to the family’s summer property in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin. Jensen decided that he would open a school there entitled "The Clearing," focusing on hands-on work and environmentalism (see www.theclearing.org). This school, and his last major work, Lincoln Memorial Garden, in Springfield, Illinois, were the focus of the end of his life. However, Jensen’s legacy has continued far beyond his death in 1951.

Jensen’s contributions to landscape design, conservation, and social reform have steadily attracted attention over the years, and a recent initiative has generated renewed attention to his importance. Last year, a letter from a Jensen great granddaughter, Marnie Wirtz, to Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Lois Weisberg inspired the Jens Jensen Legacy Project. This committee, formed by the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Chicago Park District, is devoted to celebrating and preserving Jensen’s work, and inspiring new design and conservation efforts by educating the public about Jensen’s contributions. A major Jensen exhibition is planned at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2002, and a number of other educational efforts are underway. To learn more about the Jens Jensen Legacy Project, see www.jensjensen.org. To receive newsletters about the project, call (312) 742-1771 or e-mail Jensen@winstarmail.com.

Julia Sniderman Bachrach is the Chicago Park District historian.

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