15 Community Gardens Could Be Destroyed In De Blasio's Affordable Housing Plan

In October residents volunteered to clean up Morningside Height's Electric Ladybug Garden  located at 239-37 West 111 St. in Morningside Heights. They started clearing it out two years ago after being vacant for three decades. Nine of the gardens slated for development under De Blasio's affordable housing plan are in Brooklyn and six are in Manhattan.  (Photo: electricladybuggarden.org via DNAinfo)

Manhattan/Brooklyn

At least 15 community gardens on city-owned property could be bulldozed to make way for new buildings under the de Blasio administration's affordable housing plan, community advocates said, according to DNA info.

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development published a list this week of city-owned sites that housing developers can apply to build on, shocking those who tend to and enjoy the green spaces.

Developers were asked to submit proposals for nearly 180 sites — which could include rentals for families earning nearly $140,000 a year and paying $3,000 in rent — by Feb. 19.

Locked garden - January 15, 2014. Residents were looking forward to planting this spring. The garden is now on a list of city-owned sites that could be developed under the city's affordable housing plan.  (Photo: Sybile Penhirin/DNAInfo)

John McBride, one of the residents who helped Morningside Heights' Electric Ladybug Garden get off the ground, was surprised Thursday when he found the city had already padlocked his block's space.

"We were just getting ready to start planting for the spring and now it's padlocked," said McBride, 46, who was part of a two-year labor-intensive effort to clear rubble from the vacant lot on his West 111th Street block and replace it with clean topsoil from the Parks Department's Green Thumb this summer. 

McBride said he understood the de Blasio administration's "huge commitment to housing," but he didn't understand why the city was targeting lots with flourishing gardens when it owned other parcels of land that were sitting truly fallow.

Of more than 1,000 HPD-owned vacant lots, approximately 74 have community gardens, according to research from 596 Acres, the nonprofit that helped provide technical support to transform Electric Ladybug.

Nine of the gardens slated for development are in Brooklyn and six are in Manhattan. They range from spots like East Harlem's Jackie Robinson Community Garden, which has been around for more than 20 years, to Williamsburg's La Casista Verde, which opened in September.

"We're not in denial about the terms of the use [since the garden sits on HPD land]," McBride said.

"What we're reacting to is a sense of misplaced priority.  It would be so easy to avoid affecting these gardens when you look at HPD's inventory.

"This garden has allowed people to create a sense of community where it didn't exist before between the old timers and the newcomers. I think people are surprised at how quickly the garden has flourished. It's really given the block a positive tone."

Read More:

De Blasio's Affordable Housing Plan Could Destroy 15 Community Gardens

DNAinfo  - January 16, 2015 - By Amy Zimmer and Camille Bautista  

Nick’s Garden 'Violation'

The Parks Department removed a section of snow fence protecting Nick's Garden in McCarren Park last week, but gardener Walid Mokh put it back up. The Parks Department is claiming it did it to reclaim the land (with its fence restore, below) for the general public.  Photo by Bess Adler

BROOKLYN

A Parks Department official revealed this week that the agency’s removal of a fence around a privately cultivated garden inside McCarren Park last week was the latest salvo in a war to reclaim the land for the public, according to the Brooklyn Paper.

One day after parks workers uprooted a gate surrounding Nick’s Garden, a small garden near Lorimer and Bayard streets, North Brooklyn Parks administrator Stephanie Thayer accused gardeners Walid Mokh and Gina Risica of fencing off an area that is public space and promised additional changes.

“Working in parks, I am well aware of the challenges in caretaking within public space, but privatizing public space is not the answer to the challenge,” Thayer wrote in an e-mail to the pair. “The garden area should be accessible for all park goers to see the beauty that’s been created, and for all to enjoy.”

On April 24, the fence was breached to allow a Boy Scout troop to plant several flowering trees in honor of its centennial. After the gardeners protested, the Scouts retreated, and Mokh hastily restored the garden’s fence.

Mokh and Risica argue that the fence was torn down, not opened for more access, and that the Parks Department’s disruptions could harm flowers in the garden. Both gardeners assert that they are constantly present in the garden and available to any community member who wants to learn more about horticulture.

“We’ve had a really good relationship with the Parks Department,” said Risica. “We’re in the park, we’ve been there forever, and it’s never been put to question that it shouldn’t be a community garden.”

Read More: 

Park official on ‘Gate-gate’: We violated garden to save it! 

The Brooklyn Paper - May 3, 2010 - BY Aaron Short 

Red Gate (aka Nick's Garden) Community Garden McCarren Park

Community Newspaper Group / Aaron Short

Legal Protections for Many Community Gardens Expire In 2010

With the termination looming next year of a legal agreement protecting community gardens across New York City, gardeners are working to formulate strategies for how to ensure that neighborhood green spots continue to flourish, according to an article in City Limits.

They’re eager to avoid the pain of uprooting suffered by gardeners like Tom Goodridge, who helped to create a garden at P.S. 76 in Harlem in the early 90s. Dubbed the Garden of Love, it replaced a trash-strewn vacant lot in the kind of transformation being repeated in hundreds of other spaces across the city. But on Nov. 2, 1998, bulldozers plowed without warning through the garden’s fence, flowers and grove of mulberry trees. Along with 40 other newly flattened gardens, it was slated by the city for development into affordable housing.

Goodridge and his school community mourned their magical refuge. “I think it’s wrong to raise children without trees to climb and mudpies to make,” he said. Especially when two years after it was razed, all that the city had erected in its place was a sign announcing that affordable housing would be built.

Now, a vocal cohort of community gardeners across New York City worries that a similar fate could befall their own sanctuaries. A legal settlement that protects some of the city’s green spaces is set to expire in Sept. 2010, with no new safeguards to take its place.

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NO WINTER HIBERNATION FOR GARDEN ACTIVISTS

City Limits.org -  December 2009 -  By Jennifer Brookland