Landscape Information
In 1860 Thomas Barbour Bryan purchased 86 acres one mile west of Lake Michigan and two miles north of the city limits for a new cemetery, engaging landscape gardeners Swain Nelson and William Saunders to design fifty acres in the plot’s southwest section. H.W.S. Cleveland further developed the cemetery’s park-like setting in 1870 with a design featuring curvilinear paths along gently graded topography and expansive, grassy plots, uninterrupted by railings, that created a seamless sequence of green spaces.
In the late 1870s an additional 35 acres were acquired, and William Le Baron Jenney was engaged to drain the marshy eastern portion, lay out new drives and earthworks, and create Lake Willowmere, a Picturesque drainage reservoir with an island (where architect Daniel Burnham’s ashes are buried and recently rehabilitated by landscape architect Ted Wolff). In 1881 O.C. Simonds replaced Jenney and introduced plantings that focused views internally, creating a sense of immersion in an endlessly varied landscape. A wall and dense vegetation around the perimeter heightened this effect and screened the city beyond.
Monuments, whose designs typify the prevailing art and architectural styles of the time, are subordinated into the landscape and blended with naturalistic plantings to create a series of secluded outdoor rooms connected by grass paths. Architects Holabird & Roche (now Holabird & Root) designed several contributing structures, such as the cast iron gates for the main entrance at the intersection of Clark Street and Irving Park Road and the Administration Building (both late-nineteenth century). In 2023 Hoerr Schaudt landscape architects transformed the main entrance into a plaza that serves as a threshold and flexible gathering space; this included a new iron archway whose vegetal design pays homage to the original.
Graceland Cemetery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and added to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2021.
