At the start of its 50th-anniversary year, the Chicago Botanic Garden will do something it never has before: Charge an admission fee.
Citing a need to increase revenues that predates the pandemic, the north suburban horticultural park says in January it will begin charging visitors on a sliding scale, from $10 up to $26 per visit.
Currently, the garden charges only for visitors to park their car, typically $20 or $30 per visit.
“Nature is in demand. The garden is in demand,” said Jean Franczyk, the garden’s president and CEO, citing the facility’s 43% increase in visitors over the past decade.
Setting aside the pandemic year, the botanic garden has been surpassing a million visitors annually.
“That’s a million pairs of feet crossing the threshold and traipsing through this extraordinary living museum,” Franczyk said. “One of the things that was really obvious to us is that we wanted to make sure we were maintaining this high quality experience. … We wanted to keep up with demand.”
So starting about three years ago, “we did a lot of modeling and anticipating and said, ‘OK, how are we going to maintain the quality of programs? How are we going to keep up with ongoing maintenance? How are we going to meet this audience demand?'” she said. “And we landed on: One of the things that we could do was revise our admissions policy.”
So although parking will go down to $8, people will now have to pay to be on the grounds, which include 27 gardens on 385 acres.
Free admission used to be common at Chicago cultural attractions but has slowly disappeared as institutions in recent decades worked to keep up with budget demands. The garden’s move will leave Lincoln Park Zoo and the National Museum of Mexican Art as the only major cultural institutions in the area that remain free daily. (Many have select free days.)
The garden’s variable pricing is designed to encourage booking ahead and attending at less popular times, Franczyk said in an interview.
For instance, a walk-up visitor on a warm spring weekend who does not live in Cook County could expect to pay the full fare of $25.95. Fares across the board are $2 cheaper for residents of the county; the garden sits on Cook County Forest Preserve District land at 1000 Lake Cook Road in Glencoe and is owned by the district and run by the Chicago Horticultural Society.
The dynamic pricing plan, known as “plan-ahead pricing,” means that nearly one-third of days will cost the $9.95 minimum. Ticket costs will break $20 “only on the highest demand days,” a spokeswoman said, a price expected to be reached on about 15 percent of days. And earlier booking and online booking will bring lower pricing.
“This is a living cultural institution,” said Mary Richardson-Lowry, a botanic garden trustee who sits on the board’s executive committee. “And if we want to retain it, we must invest in it. If we want to invest in it, we have to have resources to do that.”
The park, which opened in 1972, will add 52 free days per year, in keeping with other Chicago museums and nature facilities on public land. Fourteen of those days will come during the park’s peak season, April through October. The $8 parking fee will remain in effect.
As with other major area institutions, the botanic garden will offer free or reduced entry and parking opportunities to groups including active-duty military and veterans; Illinois teachers and self-guided school groups; holders of Illinois LINK cards; and people who get passes via Chicago and suburban libraries.
The new admission structure will be all-inclusive, covering attractions within the park that currently can cost extra: the butterfly building, the tram ride and the model railroad garden. Parking and admission will continue to be free for the 53,000 households that have memberships.
“When you look at all of that, together, we think that at the end of the day, we’re going to see about 15% to 20% of the entire visitorship that actually pays that admission charge,” Franczyk said. “And it’s not dissimilar to what we see today. Today, it’s about 20% that pay to park.”
While the change may seem radical, Franczyk says projections are that it will bring a modest but necessary increase in revenue, about $2 million annually.
That’s compared to expenses in calendar year 2020 that were $46.7 million, according to public documents, down slightly from the prepandemic costs of $48.9 million in 2019.
Where the money will really help, said Franczyk, is in capital expenditures, an area where the garden has not been spending on a par with peer institutions.
Board members and executives have been considering the change for three years and approached the move cautiously, said trustee Richardson-Lowry.
Among the steps taken were looking at what peer institutions worldwide were charging for admission. The announcement six months ahead of implementation and the sliding fee scale also are designed to soften any potential blows, said Richardson-Lowry.