The Women's Garden. Planted beds, low walls, a place laid out to be sat in rather than walked through. The Foundation describes it as a living memorial to the power of civic participation.
All of that is new. And there is something you should know about the ground it's on.
There was already a Women's Garden in Jackson Park. A formal one, laid out in nineteen thirty-seven by a landscape architect named May McAdams. She worked for the Chicago Park District at a time when almost no women held that job anywhere in America. She built it as a tribute to the suffrage movement. To the women who had won the vote seventeen years earlier — and who were, at that point, still alive to walk into a garden made for them.
McAdams did one more thing, and it's the part that matters. She worked salvaged foundation stones into her design, taken from the Woman's Building of the eighteen ninety-three World's Fair. That building had been designed by Sophia Hayden, the first woman to graduate from M-I-T's a
rchitecture program, and it was the only structure on those fairgrounds designed by a woman at all.
So McAdams built a garden honoring women, and set it physically on the last surviving pieces of the one building at the World's Fair that women had been allowed to design. It stood for more than eighty years.
When work started on this campus, it came out. All of it. Every plant lifted, every tree
