Coclanis and Vogel: "Hortus in Urbe"
In the 19th and 20th centuries, few cities highlighted the interconnections between the rural and the urban more than Chicago, a city of awe-inspiring factories fed by the wheat, cattle, hogs, and lumber extracted from the farmlands of the Midwest. Today, few visitors to Chicago would associate the post-industrial city on the shore of Lake Michigan with those agricultural roots. Yet in one corner of the Windy City, as Peter Coclanis and Jeanette Vogel explore, a high school for agricultural sciences seeks to develop leaders for the future bio-economy by building on, and wrestling with, the city’s complicated past.
Peter Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Jeanette Vogel is a retired Chicago English teacher and librarian, who worked for many years at Nicholas Senn High School in the Edgewater neighborhood (in Community Area 77) on the north side.
We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty (ampetty@wm.edu), Shane Hamilton (shane.hamilton@york.ac.uk) , or Cherisse Jones-Branch (crjones@astate.edu). This post should be cited as: Peter Coclanis and Jeanette Vogel, “Hortus in Urbe: Garden in a City,” The Short Rows, 25 April 2024. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/coclanis-and-vogel-hortus-in-urbe
Hortus in Urbe: Garden in a City
Peter A. Coclanis and Jeanette Vogel
Even though its official motto is Urbs in Horto—city in a garden, i.e., the rich and bounteous farmlands of the Midwest—not too many people associate Chicago with nature. We both grew up in the city and beg to differ. To be sure, growing up in the city during the 1950s and 1960s, when Chicago’s manufacturing era was still in full swing, the wildlife with which we were most familiar comprised rats, pigeons, stray dogs, feral cats, and cockroaches, and the flora, mostly crabgrass, dandelions, and thistle. But that said, there was always the awe-inspiring lake. For some, the Chicago and Calumet rivers, and, for others, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. There were a number of impressive parks scattered around the city, playgrounds everywhere, and forest preserves on its outskirts. In our Chicago, “nature” was found in more quotidian, often intimate settings as well—including in alleys and gangways—settings which captured the attention of a number of exceptionally talented writers, among them the urban naturalist Leonard Dubkin, the African American novelist/artist Ronald F. Fair, and, writing a bit later, Sandra Cisneros.[1]
In recent decades “nature” has expressed itself differently—and some would say more emphatically—in Chicago, large parts of which have been rewilded, often inadvertently, a development seen in a number of other Rustbelt cities as well. Rewilding is a complex phenomenon, with many causes and expressions, but clearly, with much of the city’s manufacturing footprint gone, Chicago has become more hospitable to all kinds of wildlife. Deer, beavers, raccoons, possums, otters, minks, coyotes, foxes, herons, owls, and bald eagles now are found in various parts of the city and its environs.[2] Similarly, the city is now far greener and richer in flora of all kinds than it has been in a long, long time, with wetland marshes restoring themselves or being restored and even “pocket prairies”—some planned and some unplanned—re-emerging here and there.[3]
The rewilding of Chicago came at a cost, and one must never forget its frequent flip side (indeed, in many areas, its precondition)—deindustrialization, disinvestment, class inequality, and environmental racism—which left large swaths of Chicago entrenched in poverty, and pockmarked by the carcasses of abandoned factories, toxic waste sites, fetid waterways, empty lots, and emptying neighborhoods. Not so good for humans, but often providing other animals and plants with new sites and new niches to fill, and new opportunities for the conservation-minded to facilitate the niche-filling process through various and sundry brownfield remediation projects (some of which, ironically, have led to gentrification). For better or worse, though, one cannot gainsay the fact that large parts of Chicago have been rewilded—one reason for the title of our piece, Hortus in Urbe, garden in a city.[4]
But only one. For another, more important and more unambiguously positive reason relates to the existence, however counterintuitively, of an unusual public secondary school situated on 72 acres of land on the far southwest side of the city: the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences (CHSAS), which we profile briefly here.[5] This school, located on West 111th Street just east of Pulaski in the Mount Greenwood community, was established in 1984 and first opened its doors in 1985, the second urban school of its kind, modeled after the W. B. Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences in Philadelphia, which traces its roots back to 1943 and has operated in a discrete physical setting in the upper Roxborough section of that city since 1951.[6] The CHSAS is one of the few of its kind in the Midwest—or in the rest of the country for that matter.[7]
View of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences and some of its grounds. Used with permission of Jeff Zoline.
Mount Greenwood, where CHSAS is sited, is one of Chicago’s more interesting neighborhoods with a retro look and feel. There are seventy-seven official “community areas” in Chicago, some of them somewhat isolated even today, Mount Greenwood among them.[8] This area is overwhelmingly white, largely Irish, with many of the community’s residents city workers—fire fighters, cops, and the like. Homeownership rates and median household income in the community are far higher than rates in the city as a whole, and the area’s spotless streets are replete with small, but well-maintained bungalows and story-and-a-halfs with small, neat lawns fronting them. Many of the houses display American flags and sport signs worded “union home” or “proud union home.”[9] The area, which voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, has experienced racial conflicts off and on over the years.[10] Few of the racial incidents have been violent, but one—the fatal shooting of a black man in the Mount Greenwood community by two white police officers in November 2016—generated a lot of controversy, including sizable protests.[11] For the most part, though, it is not racial conflict, but Mount Greenwood’s white character and isolation that stand out. In 1992 Isabel Wilkerson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), characterized Mount Greenwood as “an insular, Leave It to Beaver world where white people can live out their entire lives without ever getting to know a black person, where people rarely venture beyond understood borders.”[12] Wilkerson’s characterization was a bit exaggerated, but it still captures much about the community even in 2024.
Although Mount Greenwood is overwhelmingly white, the CHSAS—located in the heart of Mount Greenwood—is decidedly not. Indeed, white students comprise less than a quarter of the student body. Equally intriguing and maybe even inspiring is the fact that a school focused on agriculture is located in Carl Sandburg’s “City of Big Shoulders,” erstwhile manufacturing center of the United States. The city’s origins were rooted in agriculture, of course—Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, and all that—and the creation of the CHSAS in the mid-1980s in the wake of the city’s deindustrialization was a sign perhaps that Chicago’s leaders were trying to imagine a future wherein the city was again connected closely to agriculture and food. Or so one hopes. [13]
Prior to the establishment of the CHSAS, the site in Mount Greenwood was home to the last working farm in Chicago, managed for many years by a couple who rented the land from the Chicago Board of Education. Readers interested in agriculture in Chicagoland—or in literature—should note that the CHSAS is about twelve miles distant from heroine Selina Peake DeJong’s truck farm in Edna Ferber’s 1924 novel So Big, set in the Dutch farming community of “High Prairie” (i.e., suburban South Holland), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925.
As suggested earlier, the CHSAS, with an enrollment of around 760 students, is quite diverse racially—with sizable numbers of Black and Hispanic students in addition to whites. The school is classified by Chicago Public Schools as a magnet school, which allows students to apply for admission from all over the city. At present, about half of the students at CHSAS live in what is referred to as the school’s proximity, an area within about three to five miles of the school. The other fifty percent comes from other parts of the city, but primarily from south-side and southwest-side neighborhoods, with limited numbers over the years coming from the north side.[14]
According to the most recent racial breakdown of the school’s population (2022-2023), 51 percent of the students were Black; 24 percent white, 23 percent Hispanic, with the remainder Asian or other. A little over half of the students are female (53 percent), and about 48 percent of the students at the school are classified as “low-income.”[15] When one of us (Coclanis) visited the school, one of the student hosts was an impressive African American female and another was an equally impressive Hispanic female. Both spoke highly of the school’s culture and curriculum, its diversity, and the student body’s esprit de corps. Formal meetings and informal interactions with other students during the visit largely confirmed the views articulated by the student hosts.[16]
In addition to its academic building, the CHSAS campus includes a 40-acre working farm, on which the students and staff grow a variety of crops and raise livestock. The school also maintains, operates, and staffs food labs, and a greenhouse, as well as stables and horses for its therapeutic riding facility. All of the students at the school are automatically enrolled in FFA (formerly known as Future Farmers of America), fulfill general education requirements, and are exposed in a hands-on way to the broad world of agriculture, while pursuing one of seven curricular “pathways”: Agricultural Finance and Economics; Agricultural Mechanics; Animal Science; Food Science; Horticulture; Natural Resources and Environmental Management; and Urban Agricultural Education and Communication. The school also supports a full range of sports teams and a variety of clubs and groups for students interested in activities running from art to debate, and from anime to video gaming. These activities are funded in part by proceeds from foods and other agricultural products sold at the school’s farm stand, operated by CHSAS students and staff.[17]
The CHSAS ranks in the top category of schools in the Chicago Public School system and has a “commendable” rating from the state of Illinois. The school has a low drop-out rate and a majority of students pursue post-secondary education either at a two-year or four-year institution, often following a course of study related to food or agriculture.[18] The school is not without its challenges—as is the case in many public secondary schools in other parts of urban America, students do not always meet national subject-area “proficiency” norms—but the better students perform well, many take AP classes, and the majority show solid improvement over the course of their careers at CHSAS.[19] One other matter worth noting: The animating idea behind the CHSAS isn’t necessarily to produce a large contingent of farmers to reenergize the rural Midwest, but to equip urban students with the skills needed to succeed in agribusiness, plant/animal science, and biotech, reasonable goals considering that Chicago is at the center of industries in these realms.
Over the years, numerous CHSAS students have in fact achieved considerable career success in the food/agriculture space. For example, in 1994 CHSAS alum Corey Flournoy became the first African American President of the National FFA. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s degree in agricultural education and extension from Michigan State, Flournoy has gone on to a distinguished career in agricultural education and business.[20]There are numerous other examples of career successes as well—some in higher education, the food industry, landscape design, etc., and even at the USDA.[21] In this regard, it should also be noted that many successful CHSAS alums have come back to the school to mentor current students, help with internships, etc., paying it forward, as it were, to coming generations.
All in all, this unusual school is a real success story, for which its dedicated administration and staff, led by long-time principal, William E. Hook, merit strong praise. The school’s story is compelling and deserves to be more widely known, not only to communities (such as members of the AHS) interested in agriculture and its history but also to communities interested in the possibilities of public education in the United State in the parlous times in which we live today. Hortus in Urbe indeed.
The authors would like to thank William E. Hook, principal of the CHSAS, and Sheila Fowler, former Assistant Principal at the CHSAS, for their help on the piece and for their gracious hospitality during visits to the CHSAS. We would also like to thank the CHSAS students we met during our visits.
[1] See, for example, Leonard Dubkin, Enchanted Streets: The Unlikely Adventures of an Urban Nature Lover (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947); Dubkin, The Natural History of a Yard (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955); Ronald L. Fair, “Thank God It Snowed,” The American Scholar 39 (Winter 1969-1970): 105-108; Sandra Cisneros, “The Monkey Garden,” in The House on Mango Street (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 84-98. For an excellent collection of “urban naturalist” literature, see Terrell F. Dixon, ed., City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). Also see Naomi Racz’s interesting blog site, Small Rain, which is devoted to urban nature writing. See: https://urbannaturewriting.home.blog/.
On the ways in which Chicagoans of different classes and races experienced and perceived nature during the city’s manufacturing era, see Colin Fisher, Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Note that in Urban Green, Fisher offers a number of keen insights into Dubkin’s writings.
[2] The literature on urban rewilding is now extensive. For a good recent overview, see Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City (New York: Penguin Random House, 2023).
[3] See, for example: https://news.wttw.com/2023/10/23/12m-wetlands-restoration-project-city-s-southeast-side-aims-alleviate-flooding-restore. Note that the rewilding project discussed is located in the deindustrialized Calumet area of southeast Chicago/northwest Indiana. Hegewisch, located in this area, is very familiar to the authors, as it is the long-time home to numerous relatives. For excellent discussions of the environmental consequences of heavy industry in this area, and the area’s difficult post-industrial experience (which includes attempts to transform brownfield sites via park-building and rewilding projects, and to jumpstart the entire area through the building of gambling casinos), see Christine J. Walley, Exit 0: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 117-152 especially.
[4] The mixed effects of rewilding are exemplified in the case of the High Line public park in Manhattan, which many see as a resounding success, but others view more ambivalently because it sparked yet another wave of gentrification in adjacent neighborhoods, hurting many residents of the area. See Katie Jo Black and Mallory Richards, “Eco-Gentrification and Who Benefits from Urban Green Amenities: NYC’s High Line,” Landscape and Urban Planning 204 (December 2020): 103900 [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2020.103900]. For an in-depth analysis of the economic effects of deindustrialization on the Black and white populations living in the Calumet region of southeast Chicago/northwest Indiana, see Walley, Exit 0, passim. Note that at long last environmental racism is capturing the attention of governmental officials in Chicago. On this development, see, for example, Brett Chase, “Chicago Mayor Unveils Reforms to Fight Environmental Racism,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 19, 2023
[https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19092023/Chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-environmental-racism/].
[5] See Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences (CHSAS) website: https://www.chicagoagr.org/.
[6] “In Chicago, A Model Farm School,” New York Times, August 5, 1992, Section B, p. 9
[https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/05/education/in-chicago-a-model-farm-school.html]. Also see the “History” page on the Walter B. Saul High School website:
https://saul.philasd.org/saul-at-a-glance/.
[7] “Down on the Farm at Big-City Schools,” New York Times, January 8, 2005
[https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/your-money/down-on-the-farm-at-bigcity-schools.html].
[8] The “community area” concept emerged in the 1920s when University of Chicago researchers began to employ census data to divide up the city into discrete geographical areas whose populations shared certain demographic and economic characteristics. Because the geographical bounds of these areas were fixed, the city over the years found it useful to retain the concept in order to analyze long-term trends more consistently. Since the 1920s, only two changes have been made to official “community area” boundaries. Note, though, that many residents have always viewed Chicago differently and have often preferred to divide up the ever-changing city into smaller, unofficial neighborhoods, of which there are presently 178. See City of Chicago, Community Areas, Map [https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/doit/general/GIS/Chicago_Maps/Citywide_Maps/Community_Areas_W_Numbers.pdf]. Mount Greenwood is Community Area 74. Also see Kristen Thometz, “Where Do You Live? Neighborhoods and Community Areas Aren’t One and the Same,” WTTW News, January 27, 2022 [https://news.wttw.com/2022/01/27/where-do-you-live-chicago-neighborhoods-and-community-areas-aren-t-one-and-same].
[9] The details of this depiction of Mount Greenwood are based on visits to the community by the authors.
[10] Howard Ludwig, “Trump Fans in Mount Greenwood Showed Their Support at Ballot Box,” DNAinfo,November 18, 2016 [ https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20161117/mt-greenwood/election-2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-republican/]; Edward Robert McClelland, “The Five Most Conservative Wards in Chicago,” Chicago Magazine, September 6, 2023 [ https://www.chicagomag.com/news/the-five-most-conservative-wards-in-chicago/].
[11] Christine Schmidt, “Life, and a Death, in Mount Greenwood,” South Side Weekly, November 16, 2016 [https://southsideweekly.com/life-and-a-death-in-mount-greenwood/]; Jake Malooley, “Mount Greenwood is Chicago’s Upside Down,” Chicago Reader, December 21, 2017 [https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/mount-greenwood-is-chicagos-upside-down/]. Note that the two policemen involved were ultimately exonerated from criminal charges, although a civil suit was filed against them. See Sam Charles, “Chicago Cops Cleared in Racially Charged Shooting That Sparked Huge Protests in Mount Greenwood,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 18, 2019
[12] Isabel Wilkerson, “The Tallest Fence: Feelings on Race in a White Neighborhood,” New York Times, June 21, 1992, Section 1, p. 18 [ https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/21/us/the-tallest-fence-feelings-on-race-in-a-white-neighborhood.html].
[13] See Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” Poetry 3 (1914) [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/Chicago]. On Chicago’s close economic connections early on with agriculture and its rural hinterland, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991); Peter A. Coclanis, “Business of Chicago,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago History, eds. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 110-115. On the broader context and long-term economic implications of such connections, see Brian Page and Richard Walker, “From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-Industrial Revolution in the American Midwest,” Economic Geography 67 (October 1991): 281-315.
[14] The material in the text regarding the catchment basin of the CHSAS was obtained from William E. Hook [Principal, Chicago High School of Agricultural Sciences] in an email to Peter A. Coclanis, March 15, 2024.
[15] Most of the data in the text above is taken from the school profile page on the CHSAS website. See: https://www.cps.edu/schools/schoolprofiles/chicago-agriculture-hs. On the male-female ratio at the school, see US News Best Schools in America, 2023-2024
[16] Site visit, CHSAS, Peter A. Coclanis, June 13-14, 2019.
[17] See CHSAS website: https://www.chicagoagr.org/index.jsp. Also see Benjamin Wideman, “From Skyscrapers to Silos: Chicago Ag Sciences High School Offers Unique Leaning Environment,” The CountryToday, June 4, 2018 [ https://www.leadertelegram.com/country-today/front-page/from-skyscrapers-to-silos-chicago-ag-sciences-high-school-offers-unique-learning-environment/article_30e81afe-7112-52f6-ab89-dd5337089254.html]. ]. Note that the “pathways” offered have evolved over time, with the latest version reflected in the text above. Information about the current formulation was laid out by Sheila Fowler in an email on April 3, 2024 to one of the authors (Coclanis).
[18] See CHSAS website, Illinois Report Card page: https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/School.aspx?schoolId=150162990250772. Also see Wideman, “From Skyscrapers to Silos.” The information in the text was corroborated in an interview by Peter A. Coclanis with CHSAS Assistant Principal Sheila Fowler, June 13, 2019.
[19] US News Best Schools in America, 2023-2024 [https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/illinois/districts/chicago-public-schools/chicago-high-school-for-agricult-sciences-6621].
[20] See more information on Flournoy, see Wideman, “From Skyscrapers to Silos.”; National FFA Organization, “Corey Flournoy: Paving a Path Forward,” February 24, 2024
[https://www.ffa.org/the-feed/corey-flournoy-paving-path-forward/] ; Eric Greve, “Corey D. Flournoy (1974-),” BlackPast.org, April 12, 2012 [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/flournoy-corey-d-1974/]
[21] See https://www.linkedin.com/school/chicago-high-school-for-agricultural-sciences/people/. Other information on alums was drawn from discussions at the school during a site visit to the school by Peter A. Coclanis, June 13-14, 2019.