Jenny Kwon

his film began as a love letter to New York,” introduces Alexandra Isles at the Museum of Modern Art screening of her documentary, The Healing Gardens of New York, “but I ended up falling in love with the people in this film.” The heart of Isles’s documentary, which closely examines the aesthetic, social, and environmental functions of New York City’s community gardens, relies ultimately on the intimacy it achieves with the individuals onscreen. In an urban landscape dominated by steel and concrete, the gardeners featured in Isles’s film attempt to maintain a sense of community and peace through the creation, cultivation, and preservation of green spaces. Instead of focusing on the city’s most obvious commercial and cultural assets, the film explores how inspired and inspiring individuals transform forgotten, vacant lots into gardens that thrive as farmer’s markets, spaces to socialize, and, quite simply, spaces to reflect in a city where very few such places exist. This spontaneous, grassroots gardening is a phenomenon referred to in some circles as “guerrilla gardening,” and this movement has become the focus of ongoing contentions between disenfranchised communities who struggle to maintain control of their spaces from incoming developers.

DRAWING: ANNA SO

Abu Talib, a gardener from the South Bronx featured in Isles’s documentary, decided in 1991 to transform a vacant lot in his neighborhood into a community garden. Before its transformation, the lot was abandoned and forgotten, as dusty and dry as a bone, littered with bricks and drug needles. Very much a grassroots effort, Talib recruited a small labor force—mostly composed of family members—to begin the impossible task of renovating this dead space into lush soil, fruit trees, and vegetables. His project to create a community garden was dismissed by many as a futile effort, but Talib, determined to find life in a space so dead that not even a bug crawled, tilled the dry sod until one day, he found a centipede. Talib says, “I was never so glad to see a centipede,” because it was the first sign that life did in fact exist, even in a space many others had given up on.

Today, Talib’s garden is a hub of activity, a place where members of the community go to barbeque, picnic, and socialize. Talib’s garden, also a farmer’s market, does not distinguish between its social and environmental functions. For instance, Talib made the unexpected decision (much to the dismay of his daughter) to give away the garden’s food for free, citing that there are too many poor and hungry people in the community. Students and youths are hired to cultivate, harvest, and distribute the food to neighborhood clients. Talib justifies his decision to give away food for free saying, “We’re not raising food. We’re raising people.” The story of Talib’s garden is a microcosm of what is happening to the city at large: communities dismissed as a lost cause are being paved over for new development. Individuals such as Talib insist, however, that there are ways to revitalize a community besides gentrification.

There are approximately 200 grassroots organizations in New York City alone that represent community gardens much like the one Talib began in 1991. These gardens are often created without permits and are established in vacant, city-owned spaces in low-income, minority, and disenfranchised communities such as the empty lot Talib converted in his Bronx neighborhood. The guerrilla gardening movement began roughly around the1970s. New York City, then confronted with a financial crisis, made a decision to abandon a tremendous amount of public and private land. Because the city refused to take responsibility of these abandoned spaces, the citizens took it upon themselves to transform these often unsafe, unattractive territories into functional, purposeful gardens. Since then, the history of guerrilla gardening has become very much a David and Goliath story. It is the story of local gardeners who, in face of rising condos and urban developments much like Columbia’s Manhattanville Expansion, fight to protect their patches of green. Because these gardens are often planted without the city’s permission, gardeners have become embroiled in legal contentions with the city in a fight to preserve their green spaces, but more largely, to preserve what has become the community center of their neighborhood.

In 2002, Eliot Spitzer’s administration made the significant decision to protect 391 community gardens. 193 of those gardens would be preserved under the Parks Department or the Green Thumb program, a 26-year-old organization that provides services and resources to help sustain over 600 community gardens. Therefore, if a gardener wishes to establish a garden that will be protected by city law, it must register with Green Thumb and obtain a license. Meanwhile, the other 198 gardens protected under Spitzer’s jurisdiction would be preserved permanently through the Parks Department or a “nonprofit land trust organization (at nominal cost).” Although Spitzer’s decision was undeniably good news for many community gardens, Spitzer’s administration also decided that 114 gardens would be subject to “possible future sale or development by the City.” Such gardens were ones that had not completed local land use reviews, reports that detail how the land is being used. Spitzer’s 2002 decision, however, offered the possibility of alternative garden spaces. Isles, however, argues that offering communities an alternative space for their garden is besides the point, “The city has bulldozed gardens that are valuable cultural centers and in return given [the community] land adjacent to public parks. It’s better than nothing, but misses the point because the beauty of community gardens is that they are truly in the community where they make such a difference to the residents.”

There is another catch to Spitzer’s 2002 agreement. At the very end of the document detailing the agreement, it is written, “A garden lot shall remain subject to this Agreement until…eight (8) years have elapsed from the date the Agreement is fully executed by the Parties.” Considering that Spitzer’s decision was originally made in Sept. 17, 2002, and this decision is only valid for eight years, there are less than two years left before community gardens will once again be subject to the will of incoming developers. Abu Talib’s lease on his garden will be up in two years. The current Bloomberg administration has not expressed any plans to reinforce the preservation of these gardens. In fact, Spitzer’s agreement has faced some contention from several city officials.

As early as 2002, Mayor Giuliani insisted that these community gardens should be used for housing, economic development, or be sold to developers, a suggestion that has upset environmentalists and community groups alike. In the New York Times, Giuliani describes the decision to protect community gardens as “absurd.” He elaborates, “There are people that don’t have homes. I think at least one if not two of these sites are for senior citizens.” Others, however, such as those in the South Bronx who have lost their gardens to developers, challenge how effectively “low-income housing” would house those who truly need homes.

Because in most cases, development for construction is not for luxury condominiums, but low-income housing, communities have a hard time opposing the decision to begin construction. As a result, communities lose the argument and lose their gardens most of the time. In the South Bronx, where newly developed row houses replaced community gardens, the buildings require a mortgage of $250,000, a price that truly low-income individuals cannot afford to pay. Meanwhile, other members of the community insist that developers should not create a situation that pits gardens versus housing and that coexistence of housing and gardens is possible. In several instances, there are opportunities for both housing and gardens to coexist, and community members are baffled when developers don’t consider this alternative. In 2003, when the city decided to destroy up to four gardens in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Steve Frillman, executive director of the Green Guerrilla, pointed out, “There are scores of vacant lots in the neighborhood, some directly across the street from gardens where housing could be built.”

Alexandra Isles adds, “The irony of [a garden’s] aesthetic value and sense of well-being is that it raises the real estate value of the neighborhood.” It is a fact that there are many empty city-owned lots available for affordable housing that are not occupied by gardens, but a factor that compels developers to renovate spaces occupied by gardens is because these green spaces have revitalized the appeal of the community. The existence of gardens is essentially a rather tragic paradox: while it offers the community a sense of revival, at the same time these very gardens attract developers. The high cost followed by gentrification, ultimately, might push out the very members of the community that made their neighborhood so appealing in the first place. The coexistence of gardens and housing is an option not often considered by developers.

Although most cases of development are actually for low-income housing, there are several instances in which they are not. The most local case of this struggle between community gardens and developers is a drama currently unfolding in East Harlem. The Nuevo Esperanza Community Garden, originally created in 1988 and also a registered member of the Green Thumb community, is currently planned to be demolished to make way the construction of a luxury condominium high-rise sponsored by the Museum of African Art. This eliminates the argument made by some developers, who claim that the construction of these new buildings will in fact house members of the community that are currently homeless.

Although there are two years left till Spitzer’s agreement expires, there have been frequent cases throughout New York City since the 2000 decision in which defiant communities have fought to preserve their gardens from construction. Most of the time, the communities who have the most to lose are disenfranchised neighborhoods of low socioeconomic standing because these are the very communities that benefit most from their gardens. When gardens are designated for development, gardeners are given short notice and have difficulty getting in touch with the city. There is, therefore, too little time to campaign for the preservation of these gardens. Ultimately, the loss of these gardens becomes something collectively personal. Ann Thompson, member of the Future Leaders Gardens in Brooklyn, laments after the demolition of the garden, “The children will be just heart broken about this. They were planting vegetables on Wednesday and now it is all gone. We tried so hard to work with the city and it has just come to this. The whole neighborhood has lost something today.”

Isles emphasizes why the function of gardens has more to do with a community than any building: “Gardens stabilize the blocks and neighborhoods they’re in. Old people and small children are safe, people get a chance to meet and find common ground, marginalized people have a place to go… artists and activists have a wonderful platform for their ideas.” The fight to preserve these gardens is in essence an attempt to preserve the existence of a community. In a city known for its neighborhoods, community gardens serve as a reminder that in spite of rapid gentrification, New York City is and should be about more than just museums, skyscrapers, and luxury condominiums. To some individuals, New York City is home. It is a place to have a garden, a place to hold picnics and block parties, a place to grow vegetables and feed the hungry. As one individual interviewed in Isles’s film simply put it, “It’s not about the plants. It’s about the people.”