`When you’re educating kids, you want to place them in the middle of wonder,” says the Rev. Donald Rowe, president of St. Ignatius College Prep, the storied institution on the Near West Side whose campus he is trying to transform into a wonderland of gardens and architectural fragments.
The most important wonders, he concedes, are the ones found in science labs and history books, not the ones in perennial beds. But Rowe is sure that good education goes far beyond test scores. He uses terms like “humanizing the mind” and “elevating the sensitivities” when he explains why the school will spend at least half a million dollars to install lavish gardens, monuments and parkways around its buildings over the next six years.
It’s nothing short of a complete makeover for the school’s 19-acre campus. From a 2-acre park on what is now the oil-stained site of an old truck repair yard to the plant-filled atrium that a glassed-in hallway is supposed to become, all of the spaces where students spend unprogrammed time are going green.
A grungy courtyard between the school’s ornate main building and Holy Family Church is now being transformed into a lush shade garden. The soccer field will be ringed by fastidious hedges instead of chain link fence. A century-old building whose front was a cold wall of stone now sprouts a lacy iron porch that eventually will be covered with wisteria vines. The main quadrangle area will go from solid lawn to a tree-lined brick walk encircling a lawn capped at one end by a 28-foot triumphal arch.
And everywhere there will be architectural tidbits. Salvaged scraps from the cornice of Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange, huge limestone blocks that once were the foundation of a now-gone St. Ignatius building, and even a pair of 19th Century Belgian street lamps all have places set aside for them on the new campus that is taking root.
“What Father Rowe is doing looks really good so far. You’re on the West Side of Chicago, but there are flowers and trees everywhere,” says Eileen Schuetz, a 1994 graduate of St. Ignatius who dropped by the campus recently. “You feel like wandering around and relaxing. It’s like a museum.”
For now the campus is a jumble of plans, dust and waiting, with a few isolated spots that are settled and clean. The new gardens will come after a still-unfinished round of construction that has added two buildings to the campus and renovated others–not to mention after money comes for them.
The school is running a $30 million fundraising drive, with most of the proceeds earmarked for things other than gardens. Only the shade garden, a gift of the Daniel and Ada Rice Foundation to make use of a space that has been forlorn since the school’s Jesuit priests stopped raising their livestock there several decades ago, is in the making now.
Covering four-fifths of an acre and L-shaped, the shade garden, as designed by the Rice Foundation’s president, Arthur Nolan, will look a little like a courtyard at Yale or Oxford Universities. Although Nolan hasn’t yet revealed what plants he’ll use, his layout has a raised cloverleaf planter in the more public area where students are likely to hang out, and a gravel pathway into a quieter, more private area at the foot of the church’s steeple.
The brick walls surrounding the courtyard now are being sandblasted clean of 125 years of gunk, and a new porch and balconies on some walls are being built to complete the feeling that this isn’t a dead-end spot but a secret, tranquil reserve away from the noise of a campus filled with 1,200 adolescents.
Good neighbors
When completed next spring, this little garden will be to St. Ignatius what the school is to its neighborhood: an island of calm. Founded by the Rev. Arnold Damen 126 years ago, St. Ignatius has stayed put as its neighborhood declined and then collapsed altogether.
The view across Roosevelt Road from the school’s front steps is of ABLA Homes, a high-rise CHA development with its share of boarded-up or fire-scarred windows.
“If we are to elevate the sensitivities of our students, we need to make our campus a counterpoint to what’s across the street,” Rowe says. “I’m not saying we want to show up people with our prosperity. We want to show that something lush and welcoming can exist in the inner-city.”
St. Ignatius never turned tail and ran when all the life was being drained out of the West Side by racial strife and poverty. Now that the school–85 percent of whose students live in the city–is giving itself a garden, it’s planning to share with the neighborhood.
West of the school and church on Roosevelt Road, St. Ignatius recently purchased the oil-stained former site of a truck repair yard. That and a closed stretch of Ada Street separating the new property from the church will be redone as a park, with about 2 acres of lawn, rows of trees lining brick sidewalks, and hedges and iron gates completing what Rowe calls the “European-style composition.”
While clearly intended for use by the students, it will be open like any public park.
Obviously, some of the dressing-up of the campus is tied in with the school’s marketing of itself. Even though its location is pretty desolate, it still attracts serious, college-bound students. More than 96 percent of the school’s graduates move on to four-year colleges. Many attend on financial aid, but there are also those–some of them children and grandchildren of graduates–who could afford to go to a leafier campus in a safe suburb. To keep them coming, St. Ignatius has to look as much like those other schools as possible.
“We’re trying to create a whole atmosphere that is welcoming and comfortable,” Rowe says, “and to make this look like a larger campus than it is.”
Optical illusions
To that end, the garden plans involve playing some visual tricks. A sidewalk that leads from the main buildings toward very hip Taylor Street, for example, curves to make it feel longer. At the edge of campus, the walk will end at a high iron gate lined on the other side with tall evergreen trees. The visual impression will be that students are walking off to the wooded, undeveloped end of campus, not to a traffic-choked strip of Italian restaurants.
Along that walk, and everywhere else it’s possible, Rowe wants to drop some of the architectural fragments he has collected among the pachysandra, or grow vines over them, or–in the case of nine refrigerator-size capitals from the columns of an old bank at 69th and Woodlawn–turn them into enormous planters dripping with floral color. Every piece has a story, and in most cases plaques will tell it for interested students.
Rowe is using his garden’s hardscape elements as teaching tools as well as decorative flourishes–all part of his program to fine-tune the kids’ spirits as well as their souls.
James McLaughlin thinks the gardens and architectural pieces are a great idea. A member of the St. Ignatius Class of ’32 who grew up to become the president of United Parcel Service and a major donor to his alma mater, McLaughlin says, “A lot of these kids don’t see any of that kind of beauty where they live. Where do you find anything like what (Father Rowe) has in mind in that part of Chicago?
“Some of these kids don’t even see trees. But they’re going to go away with a different feeling about what makes a nice home, and that will last them a lifetime.”
