Herbicidal Maniac Loose in City!
Giuliani Moves to Uproot Gardens
by Steven Wishnia

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has canceled the leases of more than 700 gardens operating on city-owned lots under the "Green Thumb" program, virtually every community garden in the city.

On April 24, the Mayor ordered HPD Assistant Commissioner Mary Bolton to request "holds" on the 741 affected lots, which are currently administered by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS). "The Department of Housing and Development requests emergency CLC holds and transfer of the 741 lots on the attached list," read the fax from Bolton's office. "Upon transfer of jurisdiction and management the license agreement between DCAS and Parks dated January 8, 1996 is to be terminated." Garden activists reacted angrily. "Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has issued an edict that has as its goal the destruction of community gardening in the five boroughs of New York," wrote the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition. The plan, which could be approved by the City Land Commission by May 8, would affect almost all of the city's community gardens, except for about 40 which have already become parks, been purchased by land trusts, or aren't part of the Green Thumb program.

HPD says the lots will be used to build low, moderate, and middle-income housing. The department issued a statement saying that current garden leases will remain in effect, but emphasized that the gardens were a "temporary use of city-owned vacant property."

Garden supporters believe there's plenty of room in the city for both green space and housing. "There are 14,000 truly vacant lots that can be used for housing without targeting the gardens," wrote Felicia Young of the New York City Coalition for the Preservation of Gardens. "The City has failed to acknowledge that after 20 years, these gardens have become more than temporary use of vacant land. These gardens have totally transformed neighborhoods riddled with abandoned buildings and neglected rubble-strewn vacant lots that had become dens of crime, drugs, and toxic waste." "The claim that gardens must be destroyed to make way for affordable housing is a cruel lie," read a statement issued by Met Council, the Lower East Side Collective, the Queens League of United Tenants, and the Riverside-Edgecombe Neighborhood Association. "There is no shortage of land on which the City could build desperately needed housing. Instead of creating low-income housing on these sites, the City has been in a fevered rush to sell off City land-to Mayor Giuliani's campaign contributors. The small amounts of subsidized housing that the City has developed have been condominiums priced out of reach of low- and middle-income families. We reject the Giuliani Administration's attempt to justify bulldozing gardens by appealing to the City's affordable-housing crisis."

Most of the gardens affected are in poor neighborhoods, built on land reclaimed after the demolition of buildings abandoned in the 1970s. Garden groups estimate that there are 30,000 community gardeners in the city, and that the 700-plus sites affected add up to at least 90 acres of open space. Some sites have already been slated for commercial development or luxury housing. In March the city auctioned off two Lower East Side community gardens, both on tenement-size lots, for $270,000 and $350,000. "Giuliani seems to be getting more and more overboard," says Lower East Side garden activist Todd Edelman. He acknowledges that the gardens' leases are temporary, but argues that their cancellation is absurdly arbitrary and harsh: "A city agency taking such a hard line is ridiculous. There should be some room for flexibility and compromise, and there isn't any at all."