Gardens Win Breathing Space
112 Green Spots Saved; 600 Still in Danger
by Dave Lutz

On May 12, 24 hours before 112 community gardens were to be auctioned off by the Giuliani administration, a collaborative of private funders purchased the green oases in order to protect them. But more than 600 gardens remain threatened, and the Mayor has absolute power to destroy 62 of them, as they have already passed through the ULURP land-use-review process.

The garden saga would have been great fiction. A self-centered. unhearing villain wanted to wipe out 20 years of community service by thousands of New Yorkers. The mean-spirited Mayor considered the gardens little more than vestiges of the “communist” ’60s to be erased from our civic memory. But the contest to save them assembled a huge and diverse constituency of gardeners, good-government types, church people, environmentalists, social-justice groups, philanthropists, and colorfully dressed activists. Together, they exposed the lie of Giuliani’s “gardens versus housing” arguments.

The climax was the “Earth-Shaking Protest” May 5 where almost 1,000 New Yorkers assembled, some dressed as fruits or insects, to watch 62 New York heroes get arrested to the sound of a festive brass band, tossing hundreds of flowers into the circle of protesters sitting in on Chambers Street, outside a “pre-auction seminar” at Borough of Manhattan Community College. While months of letter-writing, demonstrations, public testimony and legislative initiatives failed to move the Mayor, a last-minute court injunction stalled the auction and opened the way for renewed negotiation with the Trust for Public Land. In the end it was New York’s own bath-house angel, Bette Midler, who provided the extra money needed to save all the 112 gardens on the auction block. While the city celebrated the rescue of over 100 verdant green spaces from doom, over 600 gardens still have questionable futures, and the Mayor has shown no evidence that he cares about the gardeners’ work.

It was apparent as the last-minute compromise was formulated that the Mayor wanted the lawsuits to protect the gardens dropped. Instead, the garden supporters will continue to press their claims, and perhaps provide relief to some of the 600 other threatened gardens. The entry of state Attorney General Elliot Spitzer into the fray is especially significant. Several pieces of garden-preservation legislation have been introduced in the state Legislature, but it is not yet clear which will move forward.

Gardens Or Garbage: More Evidence

It was Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden’s report that helped the media understand the destructive nature of unrestricted auction of gardens. He presented statistical evidence that lots purchased at auction stay blighted for years. Even land given to builders for immediate construction often stays fallow. In Coney Island, gardens bulldozed years ago again attract drug dealing and crime. Sometimes developers get control of sites long before financing is in place to build the promised homes.

Cynthia and Haja Worley, the Harlem gardeners who have been working citywide for preservation, have brought us additional evidence that gardens once bulldozed often become empty lots. “The George Brown Garden, bulldozed six months ago, is now a huge cavern. The site of the ex-129th Street Community Garden is now being used as the launching place for a series of burglaries as the garbage piles up.” Cynthia told us. Their Project Harmony’s one remaining site has mature fruiting trees that attract scores of songbirds, and children flock there to learn about the feathered critters. The Worleys would like to work a deal with the city that would exchange the developer-owned land for a truly vacant Harlem lot. “We have plenty of land to build on,” Cynthia said. “The developer has told us that he is willing to deal.”

Reprinted with permission from the Urban Outdoors and Neighborhood Open Space Coalition. Free subscriptions to Urban Outdoors are available by e-mailing nosc@treebranch.com.