GrowUptown Garden
Opened in August 2018, GrowUptown has over 110 raised beds dedicated primarily to organic vegetable gardening. Community gardeners come from all around Uptown and Edgewater. The garden is managed by a board of garden volunteers who manage day-to-day operations of the garden and offer educational and community programming, including clean-up days twice monthly.
GrowUptown hosts a set of dedicated beds as part of a “Grow2Give” program, in which EZRA participants learn about gardening, help manage the plots, and access the resulting fresh produce through the EZRA food pantry. In addition to this official partnership, both Thresholds and Tapestry 360 have beds in GrowUptown that support their programming in the community.
While GrowUptown is full for the 2024 season, the Board encourages you to reach out to be added to the waitlist if you are interested in participating in 2025. The Board can be reached at growuptown@gmail.com.
Follow GrowUptown on Instagram: @growuptownchi
Remaining Clean-Up Days for 2024 (Volunteers welcome!):
- August - 14th (6-8pm) & 17th (9-11am)
- September - 11th & 21st (9-11am)
- October - 9th (6-8pm) & 19th (9-11am)
- November 9th (9-11am)
Winthrop Family Historical Garden
A vibrant community garden and gathering space celebrating the rich history of the families who lived along Winthrop Avenue.
The Winthrop Family Historical Garden was established by NeighborSpace in 2009 to celebrate the families who helped found Uptown’s rich cultural diversity, while also providing a greatly needed, open green space in one of Chicago’s most densely populated neighborhoods.
Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood is known for its rich, dynamic history and its mingling of cultures and customs. However, pre-World War II land covenants and legal segregation listed the 4600 block of North Winthrop Avenue as Uptown’s only block where African Americans could live. “Dis/Placements: A People’s’ History of Uptown” Project, co-founded by University of Illinois Chicago professors Gayatri Reddy and Anna Romina Guevarra, chronicles this history. As they note on their website, “Partly as a result of this racism and outright segregation, the families who lived on Winthrop Avenue developed a tight-knit bond. They referred to each other as the “Winthrop Avenue Family,” and grew up surrounded by love and care by the members of their family on “the Avenue.” Oral history narratives with contemporary members of the family, almost none of whom live on the Avenue anymore, reveal only the fondest memories of life on the block, their home.” Although only one resident from those decades remain, the result was a large extended family that still gathers and refers to themselves as the Winthrop Avenue Family. Learn more about the Dis/Placements Project and the history of Winthrop Avenue here.
In the mid-2000s, through community engagement efforts, the idea of transforming several vacant parcels of land into a community greenspace on the narrow 4600 block of Winthrop took shape and a new garden was dedicated in the fall of 2009 thanks to the leadership of Uptown United and several other local leaders and volunteers. 20 years after the garden dedication, Uptown United received a City of Chicago Public Outdoor Plaza (POP!) Grant in 2022 to fund a complete renovation of the garden.
Partnering with Uptown United, MKSK and Human Scale have collaborated to reimagine and renew the Winthrop Garden as a beloved community green space for growing food and gathering together as a community. The design will re-establish the garden as a vibrant outdoor open space for gardening demonstrations, markets, neighborhood events and more, all while telling the story of the rich history of the Winthrop Avenue families within the Uptown neighborhood. The new garden will reopen in the late summer of 2022 and Uptown United looks forward to utilizing the space for community programming this fall.