Friends, This is from the "Newspaper of Record", the NY Times, on the losers in the community garden settlement. As elegaic pieces go, it ain't bad and I'm glad it actually got past the paper's City Editor. This, along with some good pieces by Anne Raver, were the only real mainstream documentation that the community garden crisis got in the major NYC print media, except, of course, the classic anti-garden editorial, "Garden Weasel's" NY Daily News editorial that appeared in August of 2001. I shouldn't be surprised, real estate advertising is a mainstay of our paper tigers, but as over 15,000 New Yorkers are engaged in community gardening, coverage should be better.... The NY Times did get a sweetheart deal on some prime real estate in Midtown for their new building (an occupied office building is being condemned for the purpose - I was at the hearings.)
This is a good piece of reportage - however, a NY Times editorial in favor of community gardens would have done more good. It sticks in my craw that the "Million Flower Compost" story got better coverage in Seattle than in NYC. It was the most tasteful, non-commerical and uplifiting post 9/11 event that I've ever attended - goodness knows the press releases went out to everybody, but the city desk editors nixed coverage. Fortunately, NY1 (the local Time Warner local TV station) covered the event - there's great footage of the Liberty Community Garden, the wheelbarrows of compost, Jon Rowley, Tessa Huxley, the gardeners and one great young boy in whom I see the future of the commuity gardening movement. It would be ironic if this story is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Best wishes, Adam Honigman, Volunteer, Clinton Community Garden THE NEW YORK TIMES Saturday, October 12, 2002 A BITTER HARVEST FOR THE LOSERS By Daisy Hernandez The agreement to preserve some 500 of the city's community gardens and allow about 150 others to be developed into housing seemed to many a fair solution to a long dispute. But some gardeners who stand to lose out in the deal are still hoping to hold onto the land. For three years, Helen Mason of Brooklyn has been cultivating a garden on Legion Street in Brownsville, where she and 12 neighbors grow banana peppers, lemon thyme and potatoes. There, they teach children the virtues of eating vegetables. Now, because of last month's agreement between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, the garden will be cleared for the immediate development of two- and three-family housing. A few blocks away, on Herzl Street, Ann Thompson, a retired nurse, opened a day care center in 1999 and converted the lot next door into a garden. The city calls it the Herzl Street Block Association Garden, but she renamed it after her day care center, Future Leaders Garden. This plot will also be developed with housing. In Manhattan, on East Sixth Street, Nancy Alusick will soon have to give up the 20-year-old Stannard-Diggs Community Garden. The land will be used for housing for the elderly. More than two decades ago, New York City gave community groups temporary permission to turn vacant city property into gardens. Many were turned into leafy oases, while in other places, gardens failed to take root, leaving litter-strewn eyesores. With the city's revitalized economy in the 1990's and the increasing housing shortage, some of those garden lots became valuable real estate. Lawsuits, including legal action by the attorney general, kept the city from developing the sites, and many New Yorkers agreed that it was hard to choose sides. The city needs both greenery and housing. "There's a demand for homeownership in Brooklyn and the Bronx," said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. "What houses do for a neighborhood is anchor a neighborhood in good and bad times." Even the losing gardeners admit the need. "They do need the old-age housing," Ms. Alusick said. "I cannot speak against that." But this does not make the loss easier. "Finding out that your garden is going to be bulldozed is like finding out someone has cancer," she said. Many advocates of the gardens counter that green spaces are just as essential as homes. "I look at the kids in this community," Ms. Thompson said. "They're just surviving. Central Park is like California to them. So I said, `Let me take this garden and make this their Central Park.' " They also say that they had no voice in the deal made last month. Ms. Thompson and other gardeners and community leaders say they were excluded from the negotiations between the mayor and the attorney general. Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn said he would meet later this month with people from the mayor's and Mr. Spitzer's offices. "I want them to reconsider the gardens that they're saving," Mr. Barron said. "My concern is that there's been a disproportionate number of gardens closed in Brownsville." Mr. Spitzer's office declined to discuss why certain neighborhoods were affected or how gardens were chosen for preservation or development. Ms. Abrams, of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said there were several reasons lots were chosen. Some, like Ms. Thompson's and Ms. Mason's, were reviewed by the city last year and approved for development pending the outcome of Mr. Spitzer's lawsuit. Other lots were requested by nonprofit agencies seeking to build multiple-unit housing for the elderly or for other people who need special services, like those with disabilities. Generally, the sites chosen for development were selected because they were larger or there were several lots available to build a cluster of new homes, Ms. Abrams said. Some gardeners, feeling locked out of the decision-making process, claim the plots they use were chosen over vacant lots. In some cases, gardeners say, other vacant lots offered as replacement gardens are not going to work. "We were offered another site, but it's no good" because hydrants or other water sources are not within easy reach, Cordelia Gilford of the Bronx said. Ms. Gilford has helped run the Community School 134 garden on Bristow Street in the Bronx since it opened in 1979. The decision to close the garden has left her frustrated, and she said she was trying to persuade Councilwoman Helen Diane Foster to defend the garden in City Hall. But Ms. Gilford held out little hope. "Once the city decides," she asked, "what can we do?" Most gardeners who were interviewed said they were still in shock, since they thought Mr. Spitzer had been defending them. Some said that they were in constant contact with his office during the lawsuit, so they expected their gardens to be protected. Meanwhile, those whose gardens are being preserved in the agreement are feeling something akin to survivor's guilt. "I don't feel great," said Carolyn Ratcliffe, whose garden on East Ninth Street in Manhattan was spared. "They love their gardens as much as we love ours." She disagrees with critics who say these gardens were meant to be only temporary until the city made decisions about development. "You feel like cannon fodder," Ms. Ratcliffe said. "That's what gardeners have been in New York City. The gardeners took vacant lots. They chased out the drugs. They spent thousands of hours of work, thousand of dollars of their money, turning these places into safe havens. And then, `Oh, yeah, don't get too attached to it.' " Although her garden has been spared for the moment, she does not feel secure about it. According to the agreement, the city has three years to decide if gardens like hers will be turned over to a public land trust or the Parks Department. The first possibility would require a review of the garden and the second would give the city the option of selling the lot in the future. She said she hoped the garden would one day become a city park. Harvey Epstein, chairman of Community Board 3 in Lower Manhattan, said that if gardeners have to lose their green spaces, the city had better make sure that low-income housing is really built in their place. During the late 1990's, he said, gardens in his area were taken for commercial developments with rents beyond what poor residents could pay. "I think people are more understanding when it goes to affordable housing," Mr. Epstein said. "But when it was going to market-rate development in our neighborhood, it was a real problem." According to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the new homes built on old gardens are supposed to be for buyers with incomes of $35,000 to $75,000 a year, and people living in the neighborhoods are to be given preference. This may be little comfort to the people who garden on Legion Street, since the census showed that Brownsville had a median household income of $19,722 in 2000, according to Susan Weber at the Department of Sociology at Queens College. Ms. Thompson knows the bulldozers could arrive any day. She has been contacting the local community board and council members, hoping to save her garden, which doubles as a gathering spot for neighborhood children. "It's not going to hurt me as much as it is those kids," she said. "I'm tough. I can take it. But where are those kids going to go?" ______________________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: https://secure.mallorn.com/mailman/listinfo/community_garden
