Gertrude Deimel Kuh, ca. 1950, Photo courtesy of Thomas Deimel.
In honor of International Women’s Day, the Farnsworth House, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Landmarks Illinois will host a virtual symposium entitled “Chicago Women in Midcentury Design” on March 7, 2021, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. The event will focus on 1940 to 1970, a period when American women who wanted to pursue careers in architecture and related fields faced many challenges. Please register if you can attend. I will be the panelist covering the contributions of significant female landscape architects of that era, including one with whom I’m especially intrigued—Gertrude Deimel Kuh.
Specializing in residential landscapes, Kuh often designed the grounds for large, stately homes. She created this lovely “outdoor room” for the Richard Loewenthal House at 1418 Waverly Road. Photo by Julia Bachrach, 1988.
I first learned about Gertrude Deimel Kuh in the mid-1980s when I was preservation coordinator for the City of Highland Park. Though largely forgotten today, she designed hundreds of residential landscapes, mostly on Chicago’s North Shore. While conducting a historic landscape survey in Highland Park, I spoke with several homeowners who proudly reported that they had a Kuh landscape. She respected the natural conditions of a site and created elegant designs that featured clean lines; plants in gentle shades of greens, grays, and browns; and simple terraces, walls, and other built-features that related well to their architectural contexts. She worked with a number of important Midcentury Chicago architects and her landscapes often provided the settings for beautiful Modern houses.
Kuh’s landscapes for Modern residences included the stunning 1950s Milton Arenberg House, the work of architect Edward Dart. (Unfortunately, this Highland Park house was recently demolished.) Photo courtesy of Matthew Seymour.
Gertrude and her mother, Fannie Eisendrath, ca. 1895. Courtesy of Thomas Deimel.
Born in Racine, Wisconsin, Gertrude Eisendrath Deimel Kuh (1893-1977) was the youngest in a family of six children. Her father, Benjamin David Eisendrath, a German Jewish immigrant, first arrived in Chicago as a teenager. The Eisendraths had been tanners in Germany, and Benjamin opened a tannery in Chicago in the late 1860s. He married Fannie Haas in 1883. A few years later, Eisendrath relocated his manufacturing facilities and his young family to Racine, Wisconsin.
Over the next several years, the Eisendrath family grew. Gertrude was sixth and youngest child. Around 1900, Benjamin Eisendrath decided that the family should return to Chicago, which he believed was a better environment for raising children. They settled on Grand Boulevard (now Martin Luther King Drive), an area of the South Side where many wealthy German Jewish families lived. As the B.D. Eisendrath Tanning Company became increasingly successful, the family’s social status also rose. Gertrude graduated from University High School (precursor to the University of Chicago Laboratory School). In 1912, she began attending Sweet Briar College in Virginia. A year later, she transferred to the Lowthorpe School in Groton, Massachusetts. This was a college for women who wanted to practice landscape architecture, gardening, and horticulture. While there, Gertrude studied under, and perhaps apprenticed with, Ellen Biddle Shipman (one of the most well-known and prolific early 20th century women landscape architects). Gertrude graduated in a class of seven women in 1917. She then worked for landscape architect Francis Robinson in De Moines, Iowa.
“Training Women as Gardeners,” Boston Globe, October 26, 1913.
Gertrude Eisendrath lived with her parents, her sister Elsa, and a servant in the luxurious Jackson Shore Apartments at 5490 South Shore Drive from 1920 until her marriage to Jerome Deimel in 1925. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.
In 1920, Gertrude was back in Chicago living with her parents in their spacious apartment in the city’s East Hyde Park neighborhood. The following year, she began her professional practice. She was soon part of a distinguished group of visiting speakers who gave presentations to the students of the University of Illinois’ landscape architecture program. In 1925, Gertrude married Jerome L. Deimel, a mortgage banker who was also from a well-to-do German Jewish family. The following year, she gave birth to a son, John E. Deimel. Jerome Diemel died in November of 1927, and Gertrude was left to raise her young son alone. Her mother and a sister helped with childcare so that she could go back to her profession. Little is known about the earliest years of her practice. (According to Annemarie van Roessel, curator of a 1997 Art Institute exhibition that featured Kuh’s work, during an office purge Gertrude destroyed most of her plans and records that dated to the pre-WWII period.)
This Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1929 indicates that along with Gertrude Deimel, active members of the North Shore Garden Club included the Rosenwalds’ daughter, Mrs. Edith Stern; Mrs. Clair Florsheim, wife of shoe company president Harold M. Florsheim; and Gertrude’s aunt, Mrs. Marjorie Eisendrath.
A charismatic and highly-respected professional, Gertrude Deimel played a prominent role in noteworthy clubs and professional organizations—activities that certainly bolstered her practice. By the late 1920s, she was president of the North Shore Garden Club. The club’s previous president, Augusta Rosenwald, and her husband, Sears Roebuck & Company magnate Julius Rosenwald, had a close relationship with renowned landscape architect and conservationist Jens Jensen. (Jensen had designed the grounds of their homes in Chicago and Highland Park.)
Soon after Mrs. Rosenwald died in 1929, the North Shore Garden Club commissioned Jensen to design a memorial in her honor that would be built in a small park near the Rosenwald estate in Highland Park. As head of the garden club, a friend of the Rosenwalds, and a fellow landscape professional who appreciated naturalistic designs, Gertrude Deimel would have worked closely with Jensen on this project.
Augusta Rosenwald Memorial, Jens Jensen Park, Highland Park. Photo by Bob Laemle.
This photograph of Gertrude Deimel was likely taken during one of her frequent trips abroad, ca. 1930. Courtesy of Thomas Deimel.
In 1930, the Jewish Sentinel reported that Mrs. Gertrude Deimel presented the memorial—a stone-edged reflecting pool with a distinctive large boulder in the center—to the community. Jensen retired a few years later, and Gertrude Deimel received several important commissions for new gardens or other alterations to suburban estates that Jensen had previously designed for the Rosenwald, Florsheim, and Goodman families.
In the summer of 1942, at the age of 48, Gertrude married George E. Kuh, a successful businessman who had also come from a South Side German Jewish family. (He was the former husband of Katharine Kuh, a prominent art dealer and curator.) Sadly, George Kuh died quite suddenly only two months after the marriage. Becoming a widow for a second time, Gertrude Kuh seems to have thrown herself into her work.
Mary Rogers Long produced this presentation drawing of Kuh’s plan for the Donald Lubin House in Highland Park, 1956. Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.
By the late 1940s, Gertrude Deimel Kuh’s practice was becoming extremely busy. To help manage the workload and because she didn’t possess good drafting skills, she hired talented women landscape architects including Mary Long Rogers, Edith Antogoli, and May Elizabeth “Betty” McAdams. According to Mary Elizabeth Fitzsimons, who wrote a 1994 master’s thesis on Kuh, “these highly skilled consultants were paid on an hourly basis for such services as drafting, detailed planting plans for specialty gardens, colored perspective renderings, and grading and drainage plans.” Mary Long Rogers became a frequent collaborator of Kuh. Although Mary Rogers moved to St. Louis in 1950, and later to California, she and Gertrude Kuh continued working together over the phone, through the mail, and by having frequent visits with one another every year.
Richard Loewenthal House Garage Court, Photo by Julia Bachrach, 1988.
During the 1950s, Gertrude Deimel Kuh was one of the most sought-after landscape architects on the North Shore. She designed grounds, terraces, gardens, and yards for older homes as well as for contemporary houses. She frequently worked with highly-respected architects, including Edward Dart, Ernest Grunsfeld, Jr. (Julius Rosenwald’s nephew), and his son, Ernest “Tony” Grunsfeld III.
Kuh likely updated the landscape of the Strauss House in Highland Park, adding modern pool, without destroying the stonework that edged the original Jensen-designed pool. Photos by Julia Bachrach, 1988.
According Tony Grunsfeld, the only landscape architects his father would work with were, first, Jens Jensen and, later, Gertrude Kuh. Ernest Grunsfeld, Jr.’s work included the Martin Strauss House in Highland Park, which had a mid-1920s landscape by Jensen that was likely later updated by Kuh. Tony Grunsfeld, too, worked exclusively with Gertrude. In an interview conducted by the Art Institute of Chicago, he said,“I think everyone knew if they came to me, they got Gertrude doing the landscaping, as a bonus, I always thought. Clearly, she’s responsible for the success … of these houses because they are in fact, about the outside and the land.”
Design for the Property of Mr. and Mrs. Allan Loeb, Gertrude Deimel Kuh, 1957. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago. This plan for the grounds of a home on a sloped ravine site shows how Gertrude Kuh was respectful to the natural setting while also accommodating the needs of a modern family and providing privacy.
Describing a house designed by Ernest “Tony” Grunsfeld, III, with a Gertrude Kuh-landscape, a Chicago Tribune article of May 1, 1967 suggests that this North Shore residence and its setting rival the California coastline.
It is doubtful that much of Gertrude Deimel Kuh’s work remains intact today. Her son, John Deimel, donated most of her surviving plans and documents to the Art Institute in 1991. It is wonderful that these records will help her work live on. I am so happy that I can help bring awareness to this talented and interesting woman and hope we can learn more through future scholarship.