Austin Gardens has a noble history that perhaps many are not aware of. The property was owned by the Austins, a venerable family who supported the commercial and social development of Oak Park, and neighboring Austin, at the turn of the 20th century.
The Austin home originally faced Lake Street, and the grounds stretched north to Ontario Street along Forest Avenue. A large garden, meadow, encircling footpath, tea house, and dance hall were arranged on the site, with a wooded natural area along Ontario, all of which the Austins generously shared with the community for sporting events, art clubs, and parties.
Henry Austin, a champion of the native landscape, was an avid member of Jens Jensen’s Friends of Our Native Landscape advocacy group, along with some other notable Oak Park residents. He even asked Jensen to design a small garden area, featuring the “tea house” and a “bird garden.”
Based on historical maps and photographs, I believe that the north side of the Gardens, the location of the wildflower garden, has never been built on — a very rare condition in our urban region. By 1935, as the commercial area began to expand on Lake Street, the Austins’ Arts & Crafts-style house was moved to what is now the meadow area of Austin Gardens. The park was bequeathed to the Park District of Oak Park in Austin’s will in 1947, along with an endowment to be used for “enhanced maintenance” of the park, a unique charitable gift to our community and one that demonstrated his faith in this public trust.
We are now presented with a challenge to this public trust in the guise of a building that would permanently shade portions of the park to an unprecedented degree. Graphics of the shade patterns on the park have been circulated. The shadows that are thrown onto the park are not just momentary snapshots on one date during the year. The shadows will linger for weeks before and after the dates in the sample graphics.
People and plantings in the park will be affected, greeted by longer periods of darkness in the winter and into the spring, reducing the temperatures in the shadow areas and greatly reducing the pleasing warmth of the sun on a winter day in much of the park. It means that a much larger swath of the park will stay colder, slowing the thaw in the spring and the awakening of the spring flowers and other plants.
The impact of the shade cannot be measured with certainty. The trees, shrubs and flowers within the park will adapt and fail at differing rates, and the impact will be felt over many years. The effect will be gradual. Along with shadows, wind patterns have noticeably changed in the park. In the 18-month period during the construction of the current high-rise (Vantage Oak Park, across the street), five canopy shade trees have been lost to wind storms in the 50-foot area along the south perimeter of the park. While this is anecdotal evidence of a change in wind patterns, it is certainly rare to lose so many trees in such a small geographic area.
Austin Gardens, a natural area dedicated to passive use, has a great diversity of trees and plant materials, unique in Oak Park. This diversity is enabled by a natural phenomenon of sandy sub-soil conditions, found only in a swath of Oak Park west of the “continental divide.”
As a landscape architect, I have always appreciated the green spaces and natural areas that make up our public park system in Oak Park. On behalf of the park district, my firm prepared the Master Plan for Austin Gardens as part of the improvements and enhancements after the referendum in the early 2000s. The Master Plan was completed in spring of 2005 and updated in January of 2016, and both phases benefitted from public input and community meetings. The new Environmental Education Center and the Learning Garden, with their commitment to educational outreach, fulfilled the goals of the master planning process, are consistent with the natural character of the park, and creates continuity with Austin’s original endowment.
For several generations, Austin Gardens has served as a refuge, natural area, and green respite in our increasingly urban world. It is a critical green space located within single-family and multifamily housing districts, the primary commercial district of Downtown Oak Park and within the nationally recognized Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, which draws thousands of visitors to our village every year. It is imperative that we measure the value of this green space within our urban fabric and assure that this special asset is not diminished for future generations.
Carol Yetken is a landscape architect and an Oak Park resident. Historic photographs provided by the Historical Society of Oak Park-River Forest.