Sunken Gardens, Depression Work, and a Former Dump

Adjacent to Antelope Park, at Twenty-Seventh and Capital Parkway, there is a one-and-a-half-acre formal garden that sits below street level. In winter it is empty and geometric. In summer it carries thousands of annuals arranged in a new pattern designed by city staff each year. It is called Sunken Gardens, and it was built on a garbage dump.

The site had been a neighborhood dumpsite before it was donated to the city of Lincoln in the early nineteen twenties. Long-time Lincoln families, including the Seacrests, the Faulkners, and the Freys, conveyed the land. The city parks department eventually began planning what to do with it.

The project took shape in the winter of nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-one, at the beginning of the Great Depression. Park superintendent Ernest Bair hired unemployed family men to work on park projects through the winter. The gardens were their work. The rocks for the retaining walls and waterfalls were placed by hand. The terraces were graded out of what had been waste ground. The city called it the Rock Garden originally, which was accurate but less evocative than what it became.

By the summer of nineteen thirty-one, the Rock Garden was in bloom, with four hundred sixteen trees and shrubs establishing themselves in the new beds. The name Sunken Gardens came later, matching the way the space sits below the surrounding grade.

National Geographic's guide to public gardens in the United States and Canada eventually listed it among the three hundred best gardens to visit in the country. Nebraska contributed exactly one garden to that list. It is this one, on a former dump, built by unemployed men during the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century.