Brooklyn Queens Land Trust

LAND TRUST Gardens Memory Lane: July 1999 Reprint

Feb 09, 2008

A HARVEST OF HEADACHES
DICK SHERIDAN Daily News Staff Writer. New York Daily News. New York, N.Y.: Jul 11, 1999. pg. 1

Copyright Daily News, L.P. Jul 11, 1999

JAMES BARBER STOOD in the withering heat of a 100-degree July day and looked over 10 aboveground wooden boxes that sat side by side in the community garden at the corner of Remington St. and Shore Ave. in South Jamaica.

The former heavy-equipment operator, who has been retired since he had heart problems in 1987, shook his head at the small leafy vegetables and flowers that were struggling to poke through the dry soil in the boxes.

"They're a lot behind where they should be at this time of year," said Barber, a native of rural South Carolina who has lived on Remington St. for almost 30 years. "We got a very late start this year."

It was neither heat nor a lack of water that delayed the growth. It was bureaucracy.

For a dozen years, Barber has been a member of the Dunton Civic Block Association, which operates the 100-by-25-foot garden at the corner of Remington and Shore. It is run under the auspices of the city's 20-year-old Green Thumb program.

"We preserve some of what we grow and give away the rest," Barber said of the produce he and neighbors grow.

In addition to the garden boxes built by Carl Green, a carpenter who lives in the neighborhood the garden contains an open-sided shelter with benches. The shelter also was built by Green with lumber supplied by Green Thumb.

"There used to be a house here, but it burned down sometime back in the '70s," said Theodore Jones, 66, who is raising cabbages, tomatoes and collard greens in one of the garden boxes.

Green Thumb is funded by federal community development block grants and provides materials and technical assistance to local groups that want to create gardens on unused city land.

"At the peak, back in the early '90s," said Edie Stone, Green Thumb director of community outreach, "there were roughly 1,000 of these gardens. Now there are about 700."

Early each spring, said Barber, he and his neighbors would begin to prepare the soil in the garden boxes for planting. But not this year.

"Back around the beginning of the year, the city told us we couldn't come in here anymore and that we couldn't work on the garden," he said.

The city had transferred 400 gardens and license-issuing authority from Green Thumb, which operates under the umbrella of the Parks Department, to the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The department had plans to auction off more than 100 gardens. The plan was part of a larger scheme to return 11,000 vacant city-owned lots to the tax rolls.

After decades of encouraging community gardens, the city, which never gave up its right to reclaim the plots, was going to auction off 112 gardens so that housing and commercial structures could be erected on the lots.

The idea did not sit well with the gardeners.

In February, following a series of public hearings, 30 community gardeners some dressed as flowers and bumblebees were arrested for holding a 1960s-style sit-in at City Hall to protest the plan.

In early May, a gardeners group called the Green Guerrillas filed suit in Brooklyn Supreme Court seeking to block the auction. More gardeners and their supporters were arrested.

"No one's ever even seen anyone from the city out here to look over our community garden," said Karen Dinegar of the Van Nostrand Court Association in Little Neck, one of those who entered the suit.

"Everyone thinks this is something that is only happening in minority neighborhoods," she said. "It's not. We live in attached houses and have very little garden space."

Dinegar said the group's community garden was atypical. "We call it a green space," she said.

Despite the actions of the gardeners, the community gardens looked almost certain to be plowed under.

But then, just a day before the auction was to be held, the New York Restoration Project a preservationist group chaired by performer Bette Midler offered $1.2 million to purchase 51 of the lots.

"We need community gardens," said Joseph Pupello, president of the restoration project. "They give communities a sense of place."

Midler's offer cleared the way for the Trust for Public Land, which had been dickering with the city to buy the lots, to purchase the remaining parcels for $3 million.

In all, 11 community gardens in Queens were purchased by the two groups.

"We did better than we expected," said Dinegar, whose garden was rescued from the auction block by the restoration project.

The rescued gardens, said Susan Clark, a spokeswoman for Trust for Public Land, will likely be grouped into community-based land trusts headed by gardeners, community activists and others. "Then we will transfer ownership to the land trusts," she said.

However, Clark said, another 20 or so community gardens in Queens remain under the gun.

"We think that the real answer to the question of what to do about the issue of open space in the city is not private purchase, as occurred in this case," she said.