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| For more than 20 years, community gardeners have been turning
the Lower East Side's vacant lots into lush, magical public spaces;
today, as the New York real estate values soar, those gardens
fear a land grab in the "garden district." Manhattan is defined by hard edges. Take it in at any scale--from an airplane window view to the patch of pavement beneath your feet--what you see are grids, squares, and right angles. The island's largest, most beloved park is a perfect green rectangle 51 short blocks long by three long blocks wide, bounded by low stone walls. But the implications of that boundary are great. In the park, what would be loitering on the street becomes recreation: outside, pedestrians dodge errant traffic; inside, traffic must dodge them. The most basic premise of the park depends on everyone's understanding of what is park and what is street, and how things change when they pass through those stone gates. It's no wonder, then, that even some seasoned New Yorkers find it hard to make sense of a walk through the Alphabet City section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Nearly every block features small, fenced-in patches of land planted with trees, bushes, and flower beds. Their entrances are usually open during the day, and some have signs welcoming visitors. The casual explorer might hesitate nonetheless: these gardens don't look like any other public spaces in New York. The plantings are diverse and often unruly. The furniture rarely matches. Archways, follies, even toys may be placed every which way along the paths, the odds and ends of a commune's backyard. Even someone who lives in the neighborhood may pass by many times and never rattle a gate or follow the hand-painted arrows inside--at least until springtime. By May or June, the gardens are hard to resist, climbing roses and clusters of shade trees being so rare in these parts. Still, one wonders what kind of amenity these spaces are. They're at once formal and informal, public but personal . . . even a little bit overbearing. Wisteria and honeysuckle spill over the fences in a kind of one-sided conversation with the street. It's during the height of that season that one is most likely to discover what some Lower East Siders have started to call the "garden district." Unlike the bargain district or the lighting district to the south, the garden district may never be identified on street signs, listed in the historic register, or officially promoted. It wasn't created by landscape professionals, its surrounding architecture is not stately, and most of its caretakers don't even own the land. Most important, perhaps, this is a domain of soft, blurred edges, and the city and its managers are ambivalent about that, to say the least. New York's community gardens grow largely on city-owned vacant lots claimed by self-organized neighborhood groups. The practice began in 1973, when several Lower East Siders calling themselves the Green Guerrillas cleared and planted a rubble-strewn lot at East Houston Street and the Bowery, now known as the Liz Christy Garden. Their actions inspired garden takeovers in other poor and underdeveloped areas. In 1978, the city responded by launching Operation Greenthumb, a program that leases the lots to gardeners for $1 a year. Some 750 leases were eventually granted--more than 50 of them in the Lower East Side. Others are concentrated in the South Bronx, East Harlem, and the East New York section of Brooklyn. In the past two years, New York's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) has made it clear that it wants the land back--in some cases, land that's been cultivated for a decade or more. After bulldozing several gardens that were not part of Greenthumb, the city is moving to terminate its year-to-year agreements with leaseholders. In May, HPD announced that it would be taking over administration of Greenthumb from the parks department, a move that gardeners and their advocates see as a step toward their eviction. As if to offer proof, HPD's statement to the press assumed a shrill tone. "Greenthumb Gardens are a creative but temporary use of vacant property," the agency insisted (emphasis theirs), and repeated, "[gardens are] an appropriate yet temporary use of City-owned vacant property." In the Lower East Side, a currently trendy neighborhood where rents rose 30 percent between 1993 and 1996, gardeners read grasping urgency between the lines. According to the Green Guerrillas, now a citywide garden advocacy group, communities on the Lower East Side have been gardening longer than those of any other New York neighborhood. In some ways, their work has been a response to a half-century of extraordinary physical and social upheaval: the neighborhood was transformed from a densely packed immigrant enclave to an abandoned ruin, then a speculative boom reversed the process. The Lower East Side began to decline in the 1920s and 1930s as second-generation European immigrants started leaving "the old neighborhood" for the outer boroughs and the suburbs; quotas restricted new immigration and New Deal slum clearance displaced hundreds of residents. After World War II, Puerto Ricans arrived and filled up the tenements, but with the city's manufacturing base on the wane, jobs were scarce and incomes low. The widespread landlord disinvestment and abandonment that followed peaked in the 1970s; photos from the period show block after block returning to something like a state of nature, with weeds and junk interrupted by crumbling masonry. The story of nearly every Lower East Side garden began with a burnt-out scene like this, on a lot that had devolved to city ownership and become a junk pile. The protagonists were typically a group of residents who got tired of watching the lot attract drug dealers and rats. Banding together, they cleared away the trash and applied for a Greenthumb lease. With plants and supplies from the city and technical assistance from the Green Guerrillas and others, they would build a typical community garden: a series of raised wooden boxes filled with soil and planted with flowers and vegetables. Each member received a small plot on which to plant whatever she chose. Over the next few years the barren, rock-strewn land greened; bushes and trees were planted among the boxes, and communal areas were added. Meanwhile, the garden group recruited new members from the immediate neighborhood. Many gardens emphasized cross-generational participation: they reserved children's areas for local elementary school classes and day-care centers, built raised-bed plots that seniors could tend more easily, and held performances and community events. On the low-numbered blocks around Avenues B and C, where vacant land was plentiful, gardens appeared in clusters, with names like Green Oasis, Interfaith Garden, Jardin de la Esperanza (Hope Garden), and Parque de Tranquilidad. Gardens were just one of many uses that people on the Lower East Side found for vacant land. Local artists claimed space for large installations, like the abandoned gas station turned art gallery on Avenue B and the open-air metal sculptures on Sixth Street. (Both were recently cleared for housing construction.) Some street-level art was associated with the buildings occupied by politically radical groups of squatters, now almost gone from the area (see "Salvation from Salvage"). The artists and activists of the Puerto Rican community, who christened the neighborhood Loisaida, had an especially visible impact. They built traditional wooden structures called casitas and open plazas along with gardens on vacant lots, and painted murals on the surrounding buildings depicting historical events and memorializing heroes, from the Brazilian political activist Chico Mendez to the Tejano singer Selena. Though the artists mostly worked independently of one another, their creations were universally understood as retorts to the creeping gentrification of the neighborhood. Against the advance of upscale bars and boutiques on the avenues, squatters hung banners on their buildings and artists built sculptural barricades and painted murals depicting allegories of displacement. In the midst of this oppositional landscape, community gardening on the Lower East Side underwent a certain creative ferment. What started as a way to reduce street crime and give kids a place to play began attracting and cultivating citizens with an ambitious, long-term vision of what their environment ought to look like. What emerged, above and beyond what the city had hoped for, were gardens with their own agendas. It is nearly impossible not to be impressed by the 6BC Botanical Garden on a midsummer day. On the way into the garden one day last summer, I passed a cop on some kind of maneuvers. He was peering through the fence, surveying the blooming roses, the vines dripping off the grape arbor, the red Chinese teahouse, and the wildflower meadow. Suddenly, switching off his walkie-talkie and turning to me, he broke character: "Isn't this beautiful?" he asked wistfully. "It's like we're not in New York City!" On a more recent afternoon, I sit with 6BC garden president Diana Signe Kline on the porch of the rustic wooden toolshed, looking over the koi pond. It's barely 10 feet across, but it seems to have been inspired by some grander model, like the ponds at Kyoto or Giverny. It is bordered by blue stone slabs and stocked with slowly swimming carp. "Wait, let me turn on the waterfall," Kline says, stepping inside the shed for a moment. Water begins coursing down a pile of stones at one end of the pond and the noise of a babbling brook fills the air, masking the sound of traffic. "This is our fourth pond, and maybe our tenth waterfall," confides Kline, recalling several attempts the gardeners made before their plastic pond liner stayed intact and the fish stayed alive. "We started out knowing nothing" about gardens, she continues. Over the 18 years 6BC has existed, Kline and her fellow gardeners have learned to be persistent with ponds and other ambitious projects. She leads me down one of the serpentine brick paths, stopping to pull weeds that have grown between the bricks. As she describes the creation of the solar-powered waterfall, a recently repaired smaller pond, and the soon-to-be-replanted meadow, it becomes clear that 6BC's current state of grace has been hard won. The money for these projects has to be raised through yard sales; plants, tools, and landscaping materials were donated and salvaged. Gardeners grow some plants from cuttings taken from other local gardens or from parents' suburban backyards. Even the soil had to be imported. "Under here, it's all brick," Kline explains. When Kline joined 6BC about 10 years ago, it was more a regular Greenthumb site than a botanical garden, consisting mainly of a series of raised wooden boxes for growing vegetables. ("They look like coffins," she recalls a fellow gardener saying.) Kline and others soon convinced the group to abandon the boxes and plant in the ground. Rather than separate people's plots, they placed them close together to make the garden feel more unified. The gardeners' interests eventually led them away from flowers and vegetables to plants that offered a feast for the eyes and the nose. 6BC's most recent addition is a stone grotto with plants native to the woodlands of the Northeast, including trillium, foam flower, and lady's slipper. "It's more like a museum than a park," Kline says proudly. Next year, she adds, they plan to identify the plants with scientific labels, as in a formal botanical garden. As the 6BC gardeners pursued their own aesthetic, their garden grew increasingly permanent looking, belying the temporary status of its lease. "We were always building the garden, never knowing what the future would bring," Kline says. For the past few years, though, they have had to devote an increasing amount of energy to protecting their creation. The garden became a nonprofit organization in 1995, and members began lobbying to have the site adopted by the parks department. In that effort, they've been assisted by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national nonprofit that is committed to preserving scarce open land. TPL's New York City office has worked with community gardening groups citywide and has secured permanent leases for several gardens. According to Andy Stone, TPL's program director, gardeners intent on keeping their land must become adept at public relations. "We help gardeners reach out to their communities... We'd like to see as many gardens as possible [be recognized as] the highest use of their land." Following TPL's counsel, 6BC has extended its public hours, and members are expanding their focus from adult-oriented horticultural programs to those for children, for whom they are planning a new section of the garden. They are also promoting the space as a location for community meetings, weddings, and film and photo shoots. Among the dozens of community gardens in the Lower East Side, 6BC is one of just a few large, well-organized groups that appear well on their way to official recognition. One of these, the nearby 6th and B Community Garden, was recently designated part of the parks department, a result of a TPL-sponsored program to develop playgrounds in underserved communities. To qualify, 6th and B--a large, lush space dominated by a tower of wood, junk, and stuffed animals--built a play structure in one corner of the garden, adding to an already full complement of sitting areas, picnic tables, a gazebo, and a stage. The performing company Earth Celebrations (EC), directed by artist Felicia Young, gives the Lower East Side gardens a more unconventional public face. Every May, EC stages the Rites of Spring Procession to Save Our Gardens, a neighborhood-wide parade and pageant that lends high drama to the garden cause. A cross between pagan-inspired ritual and modern dance, Young's production brings together throngs of glitter-and-gauze wrapped marchers, dancers, and percussionists with giant puppets in a spectacle that would give Disney a run for its money. Performers playing Mud People, Butterfly Children, and other sprites act out the story of the birth, marriage, kidnapping, and ultimately, redemption of the Earth spirit Gaia--an allegory for the struggle of the gardeners to keep their land. In true guerrilla-theater fashion, the pageant is filled with political references and scenes such as "Saving of Gaia (Nature Spirits Battle Developers)." In 1996, as the city began pressing its claims on the garden sites, Earth Celebrations launched the Coalition to Save the Gardens, a neighborhood advocacy group that lobbies the local community board, the city council, and anyone else who might help. "The coalition got us to wake up," says 6BC gardener Eileen Sutton. "We realized that [the city] won't let you just keep gardening." Emphasizing neighborhood unity, the coalition aspires to preserve all the gardens--not just the ones that are established enough to have received official recognition. The city maintains that every vacant lot is urgently needed for low- and moderate-income housing. But Lower East Side community activists argue that most of the housing planned for garden sites is not truly affordable, and will only serve to accelerate the displacement of the area's poorer residents. And gardeners and their supporters at organizations like the Open Space Institute and the Trust for Public Land maintain that there is no reason not to have both gardens and housing: the city owns between 10,000 and 14,000 vacant lots, only 6 percent of which host gardens. (HPD has disputed the accuracy and relevancy of these figures.) In a sense, the battle over the gardens is just another chapter in the debate begun a century ago when the Lower East Side housing reformers fought to change the tenement building codes and construct public parks. The questions are the same: What amenities do all citizens have a right to have? What are the minimum standards of a livable city? From the point of view of the Trust for Public Land, a neighborhood that has only 0.7 acres of open space per 1,000 people, as the Lower East Side does, is not truly livable, no matter how high the rents get. At the same time, the garden debate is essentially about who has control of public spaces in the city. More than 100 years ago, the city redesigned Tompkins Square, the local public park, to discourage large public gatherings in the aftermath of an 1874 labor riot. In 1991, Tompkins Square's bandshell was demolished after groups of homeless people set up an encampment there. Some Lower East Side activists can't help connecting the city's garden policy to its historical record in the neighborhood park. "The powerful people of the city don't want to see neighborhoods organizing themselves," says David Crane of the Lower East Side Collective. In stopping the profusion of less official parks, perhaps the line that the city is most interested in blurring is that between civic desires and political agendas. As of this spring the controversy shows no signs of letting up, whether it's being fought plot by plot, as it has been for years, or on a city-wide scale, as intimated by HPD's latest actions. In fact, the gardeners of the Lower East Side seem as habituated to the seasons of politicking as they are to the cycles of nature. As surely as planting follows tilling, the recent press releases about Greenthumb are being followed by Rites of Spring planning meetings at the office-slash-costume shop of Earth Celebrations and the Coalition to Save the Gardens. Fax and e-mail alerts rain down, and flyers circulate like butterflies. ANDREA MOED, who was priced out of the East Village in 1996, now writes from her home in Brooklyn. |
Keywords:
gardens, community, activity, Lower East Side, New York