Hoerr Schaudt?s revamped entry to Graceland Cemetery helps visitors slow down.
By Zach Mortice
A truncated patch of asphalt and two small parking lots marked the original entrance. Photo courtesy Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects.
?If there?s a street named after someone in Chicago, they are likely buried at Graceland,? says Joshua Bauman, ASLA, a senior associate at Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects in Chicago. Founded in 1860 and the eternal home to many of the city?s greatest heroes, scoundrels, industrialists, and politicians, Graceland Cemetery also hosts national figures, such as the first Black champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, and a concentration of architects (Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) that makes it a pilgrimage for design mavens. Its 121 acres on the far north side of Chicago are ?the keeper of a tremendous historical record,? says Stephanie Sloane, the vice president of L. F. Sloane Consulting Group, which manages historic cemeteries, including Graceland. ?However, people haven?t always felt welcome to come in and explore that history.?
An example of the 19th-century rural cemetery movement that posited outdoor spaces for grieving in nature as a precursor to the contemporary conception of parks, Graceland is nearly as renowned for its landscape design by O. C. Simonds, a founding member of ASLA, as it is for its honorable interred. But the cemetery?s entry sequence wasn?t doing it any favors. Visitors would pull off the ro...