Photos by Jim Flynn
Yisbely Alevante in Green Oasis Community Garden. RIGHT: Peter Cramer, left, and Jack Waters in Le Petit Versailles garden.
Gardeners are ready to dig in and fight city’s new rules
By Jim Flynn
With the Bloomberg administration revising rules that have protected community gardens since 2002, local green thumbs are feeling anxious about the future of their beloved urban green spaces. The new regulations — being written by the city’s Parks Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — could potentially designate some gardens for development as affordable housing.
Under the current agreement gardens must comply with Greenthumb rules that require them to be open to the public for 20 hours per week. Gardens that are out of compliance have two years to improve. The newly proposed rules allow the city to displace gardens with 45 days notice regardless of whether or not they are in compliance.
There was some encouragement for the future of the gardens at the last meeting of the New York City Community Garden Coalition. A Parks Department official who asked not to be quoted assured the meeting that the city has no intention of developing gardens that complied with the Greenthumb rules.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” Lower East Side gardener Aresh Javadi told the Parks representative. “We just want you to put it in writing.”
Garden Coalition president Karen Washington stated that while the current administration has been supportive of urban agriculture, the new rules might lead to challenges from future administrations when the real estate market improves.
With this dark cloud hanging over the gardens, their members are organizing to meet the threat. Yet, at the same time, they continue contentedly to till the soil and tend their flowers and vegetables. And, in return, the gardens work their magic, soothing away the stresses of city life, providing a communal space to meet and mingle with neighbors, putting people back in touch with nature, adding to the neighborhood quality of life.
Each garden has its own story of how it came to be born, was cultivated and bloomed.
Fed up with the junky-infested, rubble-strewn lot in the middle of their block on E. Eighth St. between Avenues C and D, in 1981 Norman Valle and Reinaldo Arana began clearing it to create a space for neighborhood children to play. With the help of friends and neighbors, Green Oasis Community Garden blossomed into a lush refuge filled with fruit trees, a koi pond and a stage. Volunteers began offering writing and art workshops, and each year the neighborhood kids staged a production of “The Enchanted Garden.”
Despite the garden’s transformation into a positive space, in 1995 Community Board 3 voted to designate the site for development for middle-income and market-rate housing, unleashing a torrent of letters from the garden’s supporters. Demolition was eventually averted when the garden was taken over by the Parks Department. Soon after, Green Oasis joined together with its neighbor, Gilbert’s Sculpture Garden, and the members took down the fence separating the two properties. The gardens continue to host cultural events and workshops for children in the neighborhood.
Yisbely Alevante, 17, a senior at East Side Community High School, grew up across from Green Oasis and has been involved with the garden since she was 8 years old. A place where she received early education and later found a support network, the garden has played a positive role in her life.
“When I first started coming here, it was about the cookouts, carving pumpkins on Halloween and drawing pictures,” she said. “As I got older, I started doing workshops where we’d write essays about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Sometimes we’d just sit around the garden and talk about life. A lot of the kids that hung out didn’t really have no other place to go, so it was really cool to have a safe place to stay away from the gangs and the drugs.
“My parents both migrated here from the Dominican Republic to have a better life, and over there education wasn’t really part of their culture,” Alevante continued. “At age 5 you start working just to survive. My parents didn’t speak that much English, so they weren’t really aware of how to take advantage of opportunities growing up in New York, but by me coming to the garden, that really opened my eyes to different perspectives. Now I’m looking to go to college, and some people that I met through the garden are helping me fill out the applications. It really feels good, because I’m the first person in my family to even graduate from high school.”
Asked what Eighth St. would be like without Green Oasis, Alevante said it was inconceivable.
“It’s really hard for me to even imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t have this place,” she said. “Just having that unity and that sense of family has really inspired me to give something back. Right now, I’m doing teen counseling and I’m going to start doing some workshops here in the garden. I think that if anybody tried to take this place away, we’d do everything possible to keep it.”
Occupying 17,000 square feet and with a membership of more than 100, the Sixth and B Garden is one of the largest in the East Village. Until two years ago, it also sported the biggest structure in a local garden, Eddie Boros’s six-story-tall Tower of Toys.
Sixth and B was founded in 1982 by members of the 6th A-B Block Association. In its first two years, the garden’s supporters successfully fended off an attempt to turn it into a parking lot for garbage trucks, as well as a proposal to auction the site to developers. Now incorporated as a nonprofit organization, Sixth and B hosts more than 75 cultural events per year. (For schedule and membership information, visit www.6bgarden.org .)
Founding member Joanee Freedom — who was accompanied recently in the garden by her two parrots, Alberto and Locita — described the early years of the space, at the southwest corner of Sixth St. and Avenue B.
“When we first started this garden the East Village was a bombed-out neighborhood,” she said. “They used to say that you put your life on the line when you walked from Avenue A to Avenue B. You didn’t even want go to Avenue C. The garden was an empty lot where people were throwing out garbage and dealing drugs. People were afraid to let their children outside.
“We started by clearing a small plot on Avenue B, and then other people in the neighborhood saw what we were doing and wanted to get involved,” Freedom continued. “When developers tried to grab the garden from us, we’d have bake sales and get signatures on petitions. Because of that, this whole community became really, really strong. Twenty-seven growing seasons later, we have a beautiful garden.”
The benefits the garden provides are numerous, according to Freedom.
“First, the air quality is much better,” she stated. “Another benefit has been working with the schools in the neighborhood. The Children’s Gardening Program started right here. Growing up in the city, kids had no idea where their food came from. ‘Oh the tomato, it grows at Key Food right?’ Now they’ve got gardening programs all around the city. It all came out of here.”
As for local gardeners’ reaction to the city’s pending rule changes governing the green lots, Freedom said they’re prepared to stand their ground.
“When 6B first received Greenthumb status in 1996, we were supposed to be saved forever,” she said. “I don’t know if the city is trying to backtrack with this now. It’s a valuable piece of property, but it’s more valuable to the neighborhood as it is.”
Artists Peter Cramer and Jack Waters founded Le Petit Versailles garden in 1996 on the site of a former automobile chop shop on Houston St. between Avenues B and C. The garden is managed by the nonprofit organization Allied Productions and is committed to providing a space for artists, performers and filmmakers to show their work. On Aug. 7 at 8 p.m., Le Petit Versailles will host the play and art installation “Go Green.” (For more information, visit alliedproductions.org .)
Cramer said the inspiration for creating Le Petit Versailles was at once a reaction to the city’s policies but also something deeply nurturing to him as an individual.
“Mayor Giuliani was systematically going through city-owned vacant properties and making plans to develop them,” he recalled. “Rather than possibly see another building go up, there was a lot of support from the community to turn this lot into a creative space for local artists. Also, on a more personal level, I had been diagnosed as H.I.V. positive a few years before that, and I was going through those initial struggles of dealing with my own mortality. The garden became a seedbed for dealing with this idea of how things die and come back, a kind of symbol of renewal.”
Cramer said Le Petit Versailles has a unique character all its own.
“We’re a very out, very queer garden,” he said. “The Radical Faerie community is very involved, but when I say ‘queer,’ I don’t mean that singularly as sexuality; it’s also about people whose social identity could be considered outside the loop in any number of ways. The garden is a kind of celebratory place where we can come to relax; but it’s more than just a physical space. It’s also a place to foment ideas and learn about a variety of social issues.”
The East Village would be much the poorer without gardens like theirs, said Waters.
“Without Petit Versailles, I think the neighborhood would be missing a link to tradition and history,” he said. Of the new rules, Cramer indicated the administration might be underestimating the gardeners’ organizing and determination.
“The city can be very cavalier in terms of its commitment to these spaces, so it’s a very fragile thing,” he noted. “The new language would make it easier to remove gardens. Over the past few years, the garden community hasn’t been as visibly active as it was when the gardens were threatened, but there’s still a strong community out there that is following what’s going on and will give voice to something that works for everybody.”
