There`s a din on this property that`s hard to identify, making it a prime contender for some audio version of the old What`s Wrong With This Picture game. On the one hand, there are bird calls galore, the sound of water trickling into a fish-stocked pond, the croaking of frogs and the buzzing of honey bees-everything you`d expect to hear on a bucolic country-time relaxation tape guaranteed to insinuate you into a pastoral setting.
On the other hand, there are the incessant honkings of cars from the Kennedy Expressway, the clatter of trains racing by and the banging of metal on metal from nearby auto-body shops. It all reminds you that you`re not really in some remote countryside but still in the city and in a particularly blighted industrial corner of it at that.
This is the story of how two artists virtually by themselves, turned four weedy city lots and a run-down rooming house into an Edenlike preserve with a renovated home and an enormous studio. Eight years ago, then-newlyweds Marcia Weese and Dan Yarbrough plunked down $22,000 for the parcel of land just east of the expressway and south of Fullerton Avenue, in an area that was so far from being a neighborhood it didn`t even have a name. Through sheer force of will and hard work that bordered on obsession, they created an urban refuge. Their achievement is testimony to what can be reclaimed from a city`s industrial leftovers and to the restorative power of art.
”This really began as an experiment for us,” says Yarbrough, the farm- raised son of a Missouri tree surgeon. ”We had the desire to prove that there`s real value in taking over abandoned or devastated urban sites and bringing them back to life. It`s something that`s at the heart of the artwork we both do, and we really saw this as an extension of our art.”
No swift miracle this. Their reclamation project led Weese and Yarbrough to levels of expertise they`d never dreamed of as they trekked through arboretums and historical societies, to apiaries and prairie habitats, to the Audubon Society for bird advice and around the Midwest for seeds and saplings. It forced them to become thoroughly familiar with the city`s hefty building-code book and led to Dan`s being licensed as a landscape architect just so he could have access to nursery associations and resources.
The whole project began with a disappointing non-event: The first flowers the couple planted back in 1985 just wouldn`t grow. ”Everything died, including the grass,” recalls Marcia, a part-time interior designer whose only previous gardening experience was limited to having once tended a small vegetable patch.
”It`s a syndrome I called `failure to thrive,` ” Dan adds, ”a term used by doctors and nurserymen alike, and it`s not a simple problem but something that begins at the microscopic level. The soil, which was full of cinders, was simply incapable of supporting life. It was our first real awakening to the whole order and procedure of reclaiming failed land.”
Facing a problem so profound it required nothing short of a total overhaul of micro-organisms might well have sent most people hunting up attractive For Sale signs. But Dan and Marcia took the challenge and began by identifying what could survive in the harsh surroundings. Bicycle trips through the area to search for plants growing in asphalt cracks, along freeway embankments and in vacant lots resulted in a trove of hardy seeds and sprouts that were planted around the grounds and along the adjoining Chicago & North Western railway embankment. From seasoned gardeners, they learned that plants with long tap roots, such as chicory and hollyhocks, could thrive in the harsh soil, so in they came, along with wild raspberries, sumac and mulberry.
”We removed a tremendous amount of cinders and brought in more than 200 yards of topsoil in the first few years,” Dan says. ”But we were also using chemical fertilizers and herbicides to get things moving along and to rid the property of certain insects. It turned out that all the bugs were being wiped out, even the `good` ones. So we brought in ladybugs and praying mantises and switched to non-toxic fertilizer,” namely, nine tons a year of real, old-fashioned horse manure from local stables.
At the same time they were improving the soil, Marcia and Dan were also busy renovating the ramshackle 100-year-old structure that was now their new home, essentially reclaiming it along with the land. ”It had been divided and subdivided into several smaller units and was really falling apart,” says Marcia, who added an upstairs bedroom and bath for their newborn son, Finn, plus new insulation and electric wiring, which all called for-and withstood-a four-hour inspection by the city.
Now the frame structure is a cozy and simple home that exudes a handcrafted feeling, a sort of contemporary Shaker farmhouse with such creative touches as Marcia`s handmade bathroom tiles and Dan`s tree-branch-supported bookshelves. The view from the aquamarine kitchen is of a lushly growing preserve.
”Suddenly, about 1987, everything just took a real turn for the better,” Dan muses. ”It was as though word got out in the (nature) community that this was a safe place. The birds began to arrive in droves, and we sighted 20 new species a year.” The ubiquitous sparrows and pigeons that were early visitors to the property were joined by 135 different bird species, including such rarely seen specimens as nesting brown thrashers, herons, northern orioles and the extraordinary Williamson`s Sapsucker, a creature so evasive its sighting by Dan warranted mention in the 1989 volume of ”Birds of Illinois.”
The next stage in the reclamation saga was the building of an art studio that could accommodate large-scale sculpture, with private workspace for each artist. In the summer of 1988 the couple obtained a 120-day construction loan and, with the help of a student, proceeded to raise the studio of their dreams.
From the outside, the enormous concrete edifice, known to confound drivers who catch sight of it from the Kennedy, looks as startling as its surroundings. It`s a mutant strain of building, a sort of a cross between rural barn and Byzantine church. With its doors thrown open to the garden and with birds flying through and sunlight pouring in through the lofty windows, its cavernous interior seems to cry out for both barnyard noises and a church choir.
”We conceived the structure together, with the idea that it appear formidable and benevolent,” says Marcia, who can often be found in her second-floor ”office” amid pieces from past art installations such as, gravestones etched with the names of vanishing prairie flowers and other reminders of environmental disequilibrium.
On the expansive ground floor, bracketed by a second-hand steel crane that Dan welded into place before the walls went up, there`s a scale model of his current undertaking, a 20-acre agricultural restoration project at Illinois` Lake Carroll, on land that has been devastated by overfarming.
That grandly scaled venture, coupled with a current exhibition of his sculpture at the Cultural Center in the Loop, has kept active Dan`s dedication to what he calls ”dissolving the boundaries between farming, sculpture, architecture and the landscape. Conservation and farming, seen as separate entities, have caused a lot of problems in the last 200 years,” he says.
It`s this holistic view that binds together every aspect of Weese and Yarbrough`s reclamation efforts, which would have been incomplete without the sound of burbling water nearby. So in 1989 Marcia and Dan added the final touch to their environmental creation. Seeking to duplicate the setting of small wetlands, they created a water garden that includes a pond, tropical lilies and Japanese iris. Almost overnight, there was life where before there had been none-dragonflies, oarsmen, damselflies, plus a turtle, a hundred fish, salamanders and a mess of frogs.
Eight years and a lot of calluses later, Marcia and Dan can now look at their handiwork without a ”next step” in mind. ”Everything was so puny and small when we first planted it,” Marcia says. ”We`d talk about every little twig as though it was part of our family, and I never thought I`d see the trees grow taller than I. Now the environment we`ve created reminds us-and our visitors-of life`s priorities.”
The success of their efforts is especially and keenly felt on any hot summer day. ”In our yard, it`s 75 degrees and sweet because now there`s a natural canopy that shuts out the city`s atmosphere,” Dan says. ”It took five years to get it that way, but we learned that it`s easy to switch from having a user-consumer-buyer mentality to being a caretaker and guardian. It boils down to something very simple: If you want to breathe, you have to plant.”
