Statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Washington Park, August 2022.
Statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Washington Park, August 2022.
South Parks Administration Building, pergolas, gardens, fountains, and topiary. Now the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, 740 E. 56th Pl. A section of the balustrade and the stairs down to the sunken garden are still there.
Gardener in the Rose Garden. The Lessing statue on its pale granite pedestal stands beneath the poplar tree to the right of the photo, 1940.
Visitors to the Washington Park Conservatory, 1902.
Statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Washington Park, August 2022.
Statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Washington Park, August 2022.
Near the corner of 55th Street and Cottage Grove Ave., a statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) gazes across an empty lawn. The turf was once a formal rose garden, part of a large botanical complex. A low wall around the perimeter defined the space. A thick stand of trees and flowering shrubs screened the garden from the Cottage Grove traffic. Paths led south through a formal hedge to the Washington Park Conservatory with its sunken flower garden where 32 formal flower beds formed a giant starburst.
In the 1880s, the north end of Washington Park had become famous for its elaborate planting—three-dimensional sphinxes, a floral sundial, a very large globe and a massive pyramid that alone contained 13,000 annuals in bloom. Washington Park had a small wood and glass greenhouse so people could enjoy fuchsias in the winter. A head gardener and five full-time assistants were kept very busy.
The Washington Park Conservatory, however, dwarfed the old greenhouse. It was built with a unique mission: to protect the vast array of rare plants left behind after the 1893 Columbian Exposition. According to the Chicago Tribune, Charles B. Atwood, famed-architect Daniel Burnham’s talented associate who designed more than 60 of the fair’s buildings, had a hand in designing the new conservatory before his death.
The conservatory was 400 feet long with a large central dome, flanked on both sides by halls that stretched 40 feet wide and 32 feet high. On each end, domes reached 38 feet high and 60 feet wide. The entrance was white stone with “Washington Park Conservatory” in ornate lettering. The iron framework and ribs of steel were painted olive green. Granite steps, which are still there, led down to the sunken lawn dotted with urns and century plants. A balustrade curved past elaborate pergolas to the south, where, according to the Tribune, “gigantic Maiden Blush rose trees” and mock oranges perfumed the air.
The south dome of the conservatory was kept at a constant 80 degrees Fahrenheit for plants like the 150 varieties of caladiums donated by Brazil. The central dome was for the giant palms and banana trees, which brushed the 48-foot-high ceiling. The north dome was a constant 70 degrees for plants like the Mexican agave and Australian tree ferns. The wings held smaller plants, like hundreds of orchids from all over the world and 400-year-old bonsai trees from Japan—“honoring” the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in Haiti. There was a 1,000-pound tank for the water plants and to echo the sound of water dripping from ferns.
Visitors to the Washington Park Conservatory, 1902.
Moving these plants from the Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park to Washington Park was a major project. The towering date palm alone weighed two tons.
Right after it opened in 1897, real estate ads promoted the glamor of living near the conservatory. The University of Chicago Botany Department documented the unique plants in the collection. In 1903, the Inter Ocean reported that “thousands daily are visiting the long glass houses given over to rare exotics and even rarer blooms.”
From the start, the conservatory held special shows that filled the space with thousands of flowers during the cold months of the year; a time when warmth and flowers are most needed. There were mums in the fall, poinsettias at Christmas and tulips in the spring. In 1927, the midwinter show featured 5,000 primroses and 7,000 cyclamens.
In 1915, the South Parks Commissioners built an elegant administration building, designed by Daniel Burnham, between the pergolas. In front, two large fountains over six feet tall played, surrounded by formal flower beds, sculptures and topiary. Most of that is gone but the administration building remains, now as the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, 740 E. 56th Pl. A fragment of the balustrade is still to its north.
South Parks Administration Building, pergolas, gardens, fountains, and topiary. Now the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, 740 E. 56th Pl. A section of the balustrade and the stairs down to the sunken garden are still there.
The statue of Lessing was added to the complex in 1930. Philanthropist Henry L. Frank (1839-1926) left money for the statue in his will. Frank immigrated from Wurttemberg, Germany, when he was 12-years-old. He opened a notions store, then a wholesale dry goods company, and finally invested in real estate. He made a fortune in the first half of his life, and in the second, he quietly gave the money away. When his uncle, Michael Reese, left money for a hospital in his will in 1877, Frank became a director, insisting that the hospital be open to all people, no matter their race or religion. Frank himself donated $600,000 (around $19 million in 2022 dollars).
The commission for the statue went to Albin Polasek, head of the sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute. Though the statue is a portrait of Lessing wielding a pen—his weapon of choice—it also embodies the idea of promoting tolerance. Lessing was a dramatist during the German Enlightenment whose most influential plays were pleas for religious tolerance and against anti-Semitism. He was a close friend and chess partner of Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher and grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn.
Lincoln Park seems a more likely home for a statue of Frank’s favorite German author. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller already stood there. Frank himself lived at 21 E. Belleview Place. But Frank wanted the statue on the South Side. The executors requested Jackson Park’s Wooded Island, amid the rose garden left from the Columbian Exposition, but the South Park Commissioners persuaded them to choose the rose garden in Washington Park instead.
One inspiration for the South Side location may have been an 1895 project promoted by Rabbi Emil Hirsch. He wanted to build a library, funded by Chicago’s Jewish community, at the new U. of C. As the Inter Ocean said , Rabbi Hirsch wanted to name it Lessing Library to remind everyone “that the old walls of prejudice should be thrown down.” A statue of Lessing was part of the rabbi’s project.
Another inspiration may have been the rising tide of hate on the South Side in the 1920s. In the aftermath of Chicago’s 1919 race riots, the Ku Klux Klan, promising law, order and profit, had enough members that Englewood, Woodlawn, Kenwood and Hyde Park each had their own “klavern” or section. In 1923, the office of a Klan newspaper, Dawn: A Journal of True American Patriots, was located in the neighborhood, with much of its advertising coming from Hyde Park businesses. Fortunately, as Kenneth T. Jackson writes in “The Ku Klux Klan in the City. 1915-1930 ,” Klan membership collapsed by 1930. The “invisible empire” melted away after members’ names were published and businesses were boycotted by Catholics, Jews and African Americans. Frank may have wanted to place Lessing where his message of tolerance was most needed.
Gardener in the Rose Garden. The Lessing statue on its pale granite pedestal stands beneath the poplar tree to the right of the photo, 1940.
At the dedication ceremony in 1930, Henry Horner, soon to be the first Jewish governor of Illinois, praised Henry Frank as a great philanthropist and lover of literature. One of the attendees, James O’Donnell Bennett, drama critic of the Tribune, praised the rose garden as “a new and ennobling place of pilgrimage.”
The pilgrimage didn’t last long. In 1935, the Chicago Park District announced suddenly that it was tearing down the conservatory. The South Parks Commission, with its separate taxing powers and powerful board members committed to investing in the South Side, had stepped aside so that the parks could reorganize as a citywide department, which qualified the city for federal money. A year later, the Park District declared that the city needed only two conservatories—Garfield Park and Lincoln Park. There were still 50,000 visitors a year in Washington Park, but that didn’t matter. A series of heartbroken letters in the Tribune were to no avail. By 1939, the conservatory was gone. In the 1950s, Lessing’s roses began to disappear..
Though the roses, conservatory, pergolas and poplars are gone, Lessing and his message of tolerance remain in Washington Park.
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