The Secret Garden

After years of facing down gangs, lead contamination, apathy, and
even firebombs, Eden Place Nature Center keeps spreading good things
to Fuller Park. But this restored green space isn’t done growing yet.

by Katherine Millett

A surprising aroma of wildflowers rides a breeze through Fuller Park, the smallest neighborhood in Chicago. The spicy scent seems out of place as it hovers around barred and boarded windows, collapsed fences, and the rumble of freight trains and highway traffic that border this narrow strip of city on the South Side.

But if you follow the scent, you’ll come to an assembly of concrete blocks at 44th Street and Stewart Avenue, abandoned after construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway. Newly painted with butterflies, flowers, and rainbows, these stone sentinels lead to the gates of Eden Place Nature Center.

On a warm September morning, about 30 children try to suppress their wiggles as they walk through the gates, into the green oasis. They are clearly thrilled by the sudden softness of grass underfoot, the yellow leaves falling from a grove of cottonwood trees, the wetland pond that reflects their faces. Before Eden Place, nature was for other people, in other places.

Dressed in the navy-blue skirts and trousers of school uniforms, the children are kindergartners and pre-kindergartners from Hendricks Elementary Community Academy, a school around the corner. They hop and skip behind Amelia Howard, who is one of their teachers.

“These children are my heart,” says Amelia, her thoughtful face framed by a mane of salt-and-pepper hair. Amelia grew up in Fuller Park, moved away, but returned years later with her husband, Michael, to reclaim the family house, raise their five children, and rebuild the kind of community that had nurtured her as a child.

The Howards could have settled in a wealthier neighborhood. They met while working as portfolio analysts at a Loop brokerage firm. “Things started pulling us back,” Amelia explains. “We were looking for farmland out of the city when life redirected us back to the house I grew up in. When I was young, it was a tightly knit neighborhood. Everybody raised each other’s kids, corrected each other’s kids.”

“There were people who liked the status quo and did not like me bringing in new ideas and new people. One of my toughest problems was dealing with the naysayers. They kept saying, ‘They’re not going to let you have this.’ They meant the gangs.”

— Michael Howard

Times changed, however. Churches that Amelia and her friends had walked to as children closed their doors. Neighbors moved away, and crime rates rose. “Michael and I came back to a new situation,” she says. “There were gang problems, drug problems, a low-income atmosphere.”

At first, Michael was not welcomed. He brought from the outside a vision of community and a degree of optimism that threatened the assumptions of local residents who had become frightened and isolated. The Howards hoped to fix up their house, help neighbors buy and repair the houses they were renting, and then, as a neighborhood, turn a debris-ridden vacant lot into a nature center. It was an ambitious plan.

“There were people who liked the status quo and did not like me bringing in new ideas and new people,” Michael says. “One of my toughest problems was dealing with the naysayers. They kept saying, ‘They’re not going to let you have this.’ They meant the gangs.”

During the afternoon of June 22, 2000, Michael found a firebomb in his mailbox. It was badly made and did not explode. “I called the police,” he says, “and they threw it in the trash can. I guess they weren’t taking me seriously.

“But that night, at 2 a.m., gang members threw Molotov cocktails through the windows of my house. They threw another one on top, to burn the roof. Then they tried to kick in my door. But I’m a carpenter, and my door doesn’t kick in. I had two fire extinguishers. I was fighting the fire inside with those, and the fire department came right away to fight the fire outside. We saved the house.

“The police were wonderful after that. They gave me 24-hour protection for a month, and the station chief became a very good friend. The police caught the three young men who did it, and they’re in jail. We haven’t had problems since.”

Michael is, indeed, a carpenter. When the couple decided to leave the brokerage firm in 1982, Amelia became a teacher’s aide, and Michael began a successful construction company based in Beverly-Morgan Park. He rehabbed houses all over Chicago using both the skills and the entrepreneurial spirit he had cultivated as a teenager growing up in Bronzeville.

“As a high-school kid,” he says, “I’d go around to construction sites and offer to work for free if they’d train me. I was always a big kid, so they figured they could work me hard. What they didn’t know was that I was also a quick learner. I worked with these Old World craftsmen and soaked up what they taught me.” And so he became a practicing electrician, plumber, and drywaller, as well as a carpenter, who now teaches construction skills to young adults through his Southpoint Academy. (Along with volunteers from church groups and the neighborhood, Southpoint students have helped build Eden Place by hauling soil, designing and planting a savanna, wetland, and prairie, building a gazebo, and weaving a wigwam big enough to hold a large tribe of neighbors and schoolchildren.)

After fixing up their own house, the Howards turned their attention across the street. There lay a hopeless mess. The three-acre tract of land had been part of the Chicago stockyards, which closed in 1971. It saw continued abuse for the next 30 years, as midnight dumpers deposited truckloads of construction debris, much of it contaminated by lead paint and asbestos. In Fuller Park, according to a 1995 federal study, 20 percent of children under the age of six had elevated lead counts.

Undaunted, Michael and Amelia asked neighbors to help clean it up. They fired up a small barbecue to cook food and attract volunteers. The people came, and they worked hard to pile up bricks and trash along the edge of the property.

“The city saw us being so faithful they took pity on us,” Michael says. “We made neat piles, and they hauled them away.” Next, he borrowed a bulldozer for a week and “turned up the energy” to clear the rubble all the way down to ground level. When he found crumbling foundations under the cottonwoods, he borrowed a jackhammer to break up the concrete. It took five years, from 1996 to 2001, to remove 40 tons of concrete and debris from the site.

In the following years, Eden Place would partner with organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, North Park Village Nature Center, Audubon, Brookfield Zoo, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, Openlands, and others. The groups contributed services and materials to install the site’s small ecosystems and develop the center’s educational workshops.

Yet a serious financial crisis threatened the property shortly before Christmas in 2002. Eden Place was ready for planting, but nine lots were about to be lost at a tax sale. Owners of those lots had donated them to the Fuller Park Community Development Corporation, the umbrella organization for Eden Place, but they had not paid back taxes. In a flurry of activity, Michael contacted his friends in the environmental community, many of whom he had met through Chicago Wilderness. He furiously faxed financials, and his efforts were rewarded when the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation made an unusual discretionary grant to pay the taxes.

Eden Place is truly a community effort, but it hinges on the energy, learning, and charisma of the Howards. “If it weren’t for Michael,” says Shelly Hope, a teacher who travels from Humboldt Park to organize pumpkin festivals and other events, “these kids wouldn’t know where vegetables come from.”

Facing the children on that September morning, Michael raises a bullhorn to his mouth. “Today we’re going to pick some of the tomatoes you planted last spring. What did we plant?” he calls out.

“Flowers!” The children answer.
“What else did we plant?” he asks again, laughing.
“Seeds!” they answer.
“What kind of seeds?”
“Tomato!”
“And what did we get?” he asks.
“Tomatoes!”
With a “Hut! Hut! Hut!” reminiscent of his three years in the Army, he leads the children to a fenced garden. Inside, each child picks a cherry tomato that grows among rows of pumpkins, eggplants, squash, and pole beans.

The Howards encourage the children and their parents to start gardens at home. By Michael’s estimate, they’ve helped establish about 15 gardens in the community, while the nature center garden supplements the diets of about 25 people. “Especially in this economy,” says Amelia, “there is so much economical value to growing your own vegetables. And they feel such pride when they plant a tomato in a pot, give it the love and nurturing it needs, and a tomato forms! It’s a beautiful thing to watch.”

Growing food is just one example of how use of the land has evolved with community participation. Early on, the Howards enlisted a group of neighbors to help design the landscape. Plans called for restoring native plants and the kind of terrain that existed for Native Americans.

But the group modified those plans on the advice of a neighbor. Walking down the alley one day, the woman asked what was going on. Mrs. Green, a member of the board of directors, told her about the prairie grasses and sedges. “Those are just weeds!” the woman said with disdain. “You need some pretty flowers for these city black people!” While the native habitats stayed, they were joined by a perennial bed and grand lawn.

Michael laughs and slaps his knee as he tells the story. It is one of many that illustrate cultural differences about environmental matters. “Changing attitudes is our biggest focus,” he says. “We’re here to be the doorway to nature for the South Side of Chicago.”

Eden Place was featured in a Public Broadcasting Service documentary and book called Edens Lost and Found in 2006. At the time, Michael Howard said, “People think the environment is a white people thing, but I tell them it’s a human being thing. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, and eat the same food.”

The nature center appears poised to begin a new chapter. With directors of the Fuller Park Community Development Corporation, the Howards are now raising money for a permanent structure to replace the construction trailer at the site. Designed by graduate students at the architecture school of the Illinois Institute of Technology, the project calls for two small buildings under a common roof. Michael proudly displays the students’ model on a long table in the trailer. The building signals permanence and solidity, not to mention a practical staging area, with bathrooms and other facilities, for visitors and incoming field trips.

Eden Place also finds itself near the center of a growing regional and national children’s education movement. Expanding on its successes with public schools and the local neighborhood, Eden Place has become a vital part of the Leave No Child Inside initiative, a cooperative effort launched by Chicago Wilderness in 2007 to reconnect children and nature. The Howards are key players in the campaign, planning programs for the summer.

Despite the steady use of Eden Place by school groups — and the popularity of occasional music festivals, where Michael may be heard singing ballads to his own guitar accompaniment — the Howards struggle to maintain adequate funding and a roster of reliable volunteers. Even their own children, who have helped out since the beginning, are moving on to college and the making of their own families. Their son, Troy, still helps, but as Michael fondly puts it, “We’re losing our base.”

He views it as a cultural disconnect. “A problem we have in this neighborhood,” he says, “is that donating money and working as a volunteer just aren’t the culture. People see me and they say, ‘Mr. Howard, you don’t need anything.’ But I tell them the chickens need to eat, and the grass needs to be cut.”

Stalwart supporters such as Hope feel confident that with more time and dedication, Eden Place will flourish. “Church groups help during the summer, and they work so hard he sometimes runs out of things for them to do, but we need volunteers from the neighborhood. Michael is the most hard-working man. He will never give up. ”

And why would he? Eden Place has transformed children, adults, and families by connecting them with the natural world. It is trying to restore the kind of community that shaped Amelia. Such transformations may seem subtle and fleeting, but they can be profound.

“We started a Family Fun Fest,” says Michael, “for people who had forgotten how to do something as simple as bring a picnic to the park, sit on the grass, and listen to music. We brought in kites to fly, and gunny sacks so they could have a sack race. I was making a little video of a man playing with his kids, and his wife was moved to tears. She said she’d never seen him play with his kids before.” As Amelia says, it’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Related Articles:

People: Nurture & Nature, CW Summer 2007

Into the Wild: Your Kids in Nature, CW Spring 2008