Radicalism, Re-‐appropriation, and the Roots of the Urban Garden History and Future of the Community Garden and Casita in the Bronx For more than a century, the urban green has enjoyed special status as the darling of planners and developers looking for an easy and unassailable strategy to inject beauty, salubrity and social welfare into depleted, overcrowded or underperforming urban landscapes. But the role of urban parks has changed dramatically over time. From the City Beautiful to the Garden City, open space was employed to serve an ideological function — mapping ideas of natural order, social class or utopian fervor (sometimes all three at once!) through space. As man’s dominion over nature, over his fellow man, and over the poverty and disease of yesterday found expression beyond the promenades of Olmsted’s romantic park-‐scapes and the greenbelts of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-‐morrow, open space took on other physical typologies, and found other ideological and social purposes to fulfill. One form that arose was the small-‐scale, community-‐centered urban garden. Becoming common in New York City in the ‘70s, these broke radically, both physically and ideologically, with the history of open space that had come before. They were often started illegally, and can be seen as an alternative to larger scale, city-‐owned and city-‐administered public spaces — many of which presented the same obstacles to ownership and accessibility that so often kept marginalized communities alienated from the city’s built environment, in general. The garden movement in New York became a way through which communities could define themselves and their place in the neighborhood, in the face of abandonment, economic catastrophe, and the forces of urban decay. While a wide variety of gardeners have inscribed themselves on the cityscape in New York’s poorer districts in the th latter part of the 20 century, one tradition of urban gardening stands out uniquely in its quest to carve an expression cultural identity from the physical spaces of the city: this is the tradition of the casita garden, inspired by the Puerto Rican casita del campo. Today, cities are once again mired in economic recession, and we are once again seeking ways to reinvent the landscape. After nearly two generations, small-‐scale community gardens have gained a degree of acceptance: driven by a fresh wave of environmental concern, cities are scrambling to green up, and New York is no exception. Small urban gardens are finally being protected — indeed, endorsed — by administrations. Still, groups must struggle to gain city sponsorship, and as they succeed, these once-‐radical spaces, which relied so heavily on individual pride and a unique sense of ownership, risk being appropriated and incorporated into the ranks of impersonal and generic open spaces they first arose to supplement. New policies toward urban gardening affect all types of community-‐operated green space, but create special challenges for the populations that gather within the city’s casitas — for these gardens are far more than green spaces or sites of food production for the communities they serve: they are social spaces, spaces of memory, spaces for uniting in the performance of culture.
The Problem of the Park “In orthodox city planning,” Jane Jacobs declares in her 1961 opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes.”1 With an urban renewal agenda sweeping the country and a nascent environmentalism beginning to influence discourse about landscapes both manmade and natural, Jacobs’ tongue-‐in-‐cheek jab was a twist on the tenor of popular opinion about urban life. Concern over urban conditions, rooted in the social welfare movements of the early 20th century, had found feverish expression in a mid-‐century wave of projects aimed at resolving the messy, chaotic city into clean, ordered vistas of health and prosperity. Known most famously for fiercely combating the crusading master planner Robert Moses in his numerous and influential revitalization initiatives that emphasized efficiency and modernity – especially automobiles and highway transportation – to the detriment, many now believe, of neighborhoods and communities, Jacobs was a groundbreaking figure.
1 Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. 90.
A self-‐taught urbanist, Jacobs’ keen insights into the ways people live and work allowed her to defend practical and responsible design based on the real and varied functions of the city as it was used – not as it was imagined. Under her pen, the refrain of More Open Space is personified as a vapid sort of every-‐ day villain, the pervasive solution-‐by-‐default that, like a virus, quietly insinuates itself, hoodwinking the body into ensuring its own reproduction. “Ask a houser how his planned neighborhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self evident virtue, more open space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progressive codes and he will cite, again as a self-‐evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving more open space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood,” one can almost hear her voice rising as she makes her point, “and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of MORE OPEN SPACE!” 2 For Jacobs, the crisis of unexamined faith in the public park was part and parcel of the larger problem of urban revitalization, and of the history of urban science in general: a codified system of top-‐down planning that emphasized idealistic – and often completely invented – theories over real observation and analysis. Architects and planners have long believed in the need for nature, however captive, to make an appearance in the cityscape as an antidote to the pressures of modern living and as a safety valve where urbanites could let off steam. From Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of To-‐morrow, designed with parks and agricultural buffer zones to sort distinct land uses from one another while controlling the metastasizing spread of the city, to Camillo Sitte’s sanitary green, the mere sight of which was presumed to cure the melancholic city-‐dweller, the urban green has been imagined as a source of recreation, a humanizing influence, or merely a place for the city to breathe (a notion which Jacobs debunks by reminding us that it takes three acres of forest to absorb as much carbon dioxide as four people exude in respiration, cooking, and heating3). The public park enjoyed an unperturbed reign as the crown jewel of urban planning when Frederick Law Olmsted scattered his Emerald Necklaces across the country – picturesque backdrops against which all classes were meant to gather, “helping to the greater happiness of each.”4 And with modernism came the impulse to rectify the city into neat stacks divvied up for home and work, opening the resulting interstitial swaths of land to light, air and the presumption of health – the iconic “towers in the park” scheme of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The idealism underlying this history of urban greening notwithstanding, it may be hard to understand how the public park could raise such a passionate reaction in someone who championed the “ballet of the sidewalk” and argued for “eyes on the street”5 – both terms Jacobs coined to attest to the power of unplanned interaction in the urban landscape. In the face of urban renewal efforts that were unfurling concrete expressways through neighborhoods, displacing minorities and destroying access for already disenfranchised groups, how could planning for more open and accessible green space be a bad thing?
2 Jane Jacobs. “The Uses of Neighborhood Parks,” in Small Urban Spaces, ed. Whitney North Seymour, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 1969. 44. 3 Ibid. 45. 4 Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns.” American Social Science Association, 1870. 5 Jacobs, 1969. 44.
Jacobs does not take issue with the park, per se. It is the ubiquity of the prescribed and proscribed, monumentally scaled and monumentally underused park to which she objects. For Jacobs, the problem is not one of successfully conferring the park on the “deprived populations of the cities,” but of conferring life onto the park itself.6 The crux of Jacobs’ argument, then, stems from a crucial difference in interpretation of the modus operandi of the city. For the myriad planners with whom she so famously butted heads, the city is a machine: something that you design, set in motion, and sit back to watch tick in keeping with a certain set of well-‐laid-‐out rules and specifications. For them, simply building the park bestows the supposed benefits, pursuant to the theory and intention with which it is built. For Jacobs, the city is an ecosystem that changes and evolves according to complex processes based on the cumulative impacts of thousands of small, generative actions taking place on sidewalks, in doorjambs, through windows, and in other unadministered spaces. She rails against “die-‐stamped design for die-‐ stamped functions,”7 talking instead of smaller, “bread-‐and-‐butter” parks suited specially to serve the everyday needs of urban inhabitants, and calling for, among other characteristics, intricacy and enclosure. The diverse, appropriable type of open space that Jacobs promotes is not new; it has been the basis of urban fabric for centuries, as illustrated in the figure-‐ground analyses of modern and medieval cities made by Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe in their treatise on urban form, Collage City. Koetter and Rowe make the case that modern trends in architecture concern themselves with the primacy of object, resulting in a consequent insipidity of space. In “Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture,” they highlight the inverse relationship between the medieval piazza surrounded by urban poche and the modern object-‐building, whether it be a Corbusian tower set into a park, a public housing project set into a battered, windswept stretch of grass, or a home set into the wholly unimaginative suburban lawn.
8
1 Rowe and Koetter, figure-‐ground relationships in Le Corbusier’s Plan for Saint-‐Die, left, and plan of Parma, right.
The much-‐depleted qualities of such open spaces, cordoned off from authentic urban fabric, leads the scholars to attest to the importance of a symbiosis between park and city: “A debate in which victory 6 Ibid. 43. 7 Ibid. 52. 8 Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe, Collage City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978.
consists in each component emerging undefeated, the imagined condition is a type of solid-‐void dialectic which might allow for the joint existence of the overtly planned and the genuinely unplanned, of the set-‐piece and the accident, of the public and the private, of the state and the individual.”9 This condition of “alerted equilibrium” requires that neither faction – the building nor the open space – become an ultimately stagnant or complacent feature of the city. A sharp contrast to the diagrammatic, highly readable urban schemes popularized by Le Corbusier and his contemporaries, the collage city is traditionally dense, hectic, intimate and not fully knowable. It favors occlusion and hebetic friction over order and legibility, providing users greater opportunities for spontaneous discovery and growth – a scalable notion that constitutes the very basis of our interaction with the built environment. The idea is that our ability to derive utility from an experience relies on both context and agency. Not only must we be able to form an understanding of how our setting fits into the larger environment, we must also have some ability to shape it, to interpret it, and to imbue it with functions and uses that are personal and highly specific to our needs. It’s a concept that Yale architectural historian Kent Bloomer scales down all the way to the level of ornament. In “The Picture Window: The Problem of Viewing Nature Through Glass”10 Bloomer argues that we derive little value or satisfaction from the falsely “true” – but uncomplicated – experience of relating to nature through a seemingly unmediated plate glass window; we derive far more benefit when our attention is drawn to that mediation (as in a traditionally gothic window with tracery, mullions or other ornament) because we are allowed to challenge, confront and assimilate that mediation. Similarly, the large undifferentiated open spaces of Corbusier’s Radiant City, and of many urban parks, feel deserted and unsafe, yielding few “activation sites,” to borrow a term from chemistry, for users to interact. Better are the mixed-‐use urban spaces that combine nature with other elements – seating, sidewalks, cafes – that make them more like the diverse and lively piazzas in Koetter and Rowe’s medieval city, which yield multiple opportunities to relate and engage. Today, parks are often touted as hubs of public interaction, community participation, and political discourse. And yet, the lineage of park space is of romantically designed backdrop for the activities of the wealthy, or idealized instrument of social good. Jacobs argues that a rich city is one in which people create their own opportunities, using space “inventively and exuberantly.”11 The effort to create centers and climaxes, as Jacobs calls the specificity and differentiation of successful parks, can be undertaken by the designer, but can be achieved even more meaningfully when people create these variations themselves. Jacobs concludes by asserting, “City parks are not abstractions, or automatic repositories of virtue or uplift, any more than sidewalks are abstractions. They mean nothing divorced from their practical, tangible uses,”12 and thus they mean nothing divorced from their users. Only after some degree of control of the park is deeded to the user, by policy or good design, does a dialectic like Koetter and Rowe’s arise.
9 Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe, Collage City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978. 83. 10 Kent Bloomer. “The Picture Window: the Problem of Viewing Nature Through Glass,” in Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life, eds. Stephen Kellert, Judith Heerwagen and Martin Mador. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008. 11 Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. 105. 12 Jane Jacobs. “The Uses of Neighborhood Parks,” in Small Urban Spaces, ed. Whitney North Seymour, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 1969. 58.
Users of the Park: Gardens as Rebellion Inventive and exuberant use of space gained an unexpected foothold in New York in the 1970s — a time when economic recession and contracting real estate markets left behind, like a wave retreating from the beach, an empty landscape littered with broken glass. In addition to thousands of newly vacant lots, the disinvestment also meant diminished maintenance, law enforcement, and an accompanying rise in crime. The lofty aspirations of urban renewal — grand visions of a clean, convenient, rational city — and the surplus cash that bolstered the quest to attain such ideals belonged to a bygone era. The troubled conditions reinforced the need for a more populist approach to organizing public space (a necessity that critics of the top-‐down agenda of urban renewal, like Jacobs, would argue had always existed) while providing something new — an opportunity. According to the radical Italian architect and theorist Gianni Pettena, such a crisis causes users to re-‐engage with their surroundings, not as constructed thing, but as working landscape. In “Understanding and Constructing Physical Space,” Pettena, whose work focuses on the intersection of art, agency and environment, situates the impulse toward counter-‐culture and rebellion as a natural reaction of populations struggling with the often-‐ brutal conditions of the contemporary built environment. Drawing on the North American movement of Land Art, Pettana explains that agency is derived from the “reappropriation of physical and conceptual spaces left vacant, abandoned as a field of investigation.” For users grappling with the devastation of 1970s New York, these abandoned fields of investigation were not merely philosophical; they were literal, as was the rebellion and reappropriation that ensued. 13 As New Yorkers began to claim the city’s vacant lots for their own use, they were participating in a form of dissent. That those lots were mostly used for activities traditionally carried out in “nature” made it doubly-‐so. Though reappropriation can be played out in any type of space — for example, skateboarders laying claim to an urban courtyard — reshaping the urban, built environment to mimic natural and traditional landscapes is a particularly poignant act. Sculpting the urban environment in the image of the subsistence landscape signifies a deconstruction of the centralized systems of power and capital encoded in the modern city. Furthermore, food and food systems are inherently political: one need look no further than the victory gardens of World War II; activist groups like Food not Bombs and Food not Lawns; and the continuing struggles, even today, over agricultural freedom, whether they be complex and distinctly modern, like the debate over genetically modified organisms, or absolutely fundamental, as in the case of North Korea’s peasants who must farm tiny subsistence plots illegally to keep their families from starving, because all food produced is technically property of the state. Pettana’s work with land art claims that reappropriating the built environment through the lens of nature is a fundamentally political act. It signifies a return, a breaking down of the imposed mores of civilization and the establishment of home-‐rule – a narrative easily applied to acts of those implementing small-‐ scale garden enterprises in New York’s forgotten landscape. In contrast to the large, manicured swaths of land in the city center, small urban parks, sometimes called a vest-‐pocket parks, provide the perfect setting for the performance of cultural dissent. They function more like the medieval piazza in Koetter and Rowe: appropriable by the users, and in dialogue with the 13 Gianna Pettana, “Understanding and constructing physical Space,” in Artscapes: Art as an Approach to Contemporary Landscape,” ed. Luca Galofaro, tr. Steve Piccolo, Paul Hammond. Barcelona: Aleu, 2003. 11-‐13.
surrounding city – important in 1970s New York, a time when most public open spaces were highly institutionalized vehicles of control. A map of the Tremont neighborhood in the Bronx shows that, outside of Crotona Park, nearly all of the open space in the area is that surrounding public housing projects. The map betrays a Corbusian-‐type scheme of towers set in large open lawns, the very definition of Koetter and Rowe’s dreaded object-‐set-‐in-‐landscape. These filing cabinets for the urban poor serve to filter out and contain any undesirable or unassimilated elements, straining them and containing them within a vast buffer zone — the now “purified” (i.e. unoccupied) public park. Scholar Luis Aponte-‐Parés calls these ‘tower-‐in-‐the-‐park’ enclaves “legacies of government housing paradigms that were envisioned, perhaps, as instruments that helped ‘eradicate the most vocal and visible pockets of non-‐white inner-‐city life.”14
2 Post-‐war public housing in The Bronx, from The Bronx Community Renewal Program, New York City, 1962, left, and Le Corbusier's unbuilt Voisin Plan for Paris, which would have replaced much of the city's organic fabric with neat, filing cabinet-‐like housing set in open space, right.
In “Tenants Gardens in Public Housing,” Ira S. Robbins explains that “the New York City Housing Authority has always provided abundant open space in its developments, for the buildings usually cover only around 15 to 20 percent of a site.” In an attempt to understand and improve the use of such spaces, Robbins conducted a study of different approaches to gardening on the land. He concluded that the open spaces were successes only where “total responsibility for the gardens has been accepted not by the staff, but by groups of residents.”15 His studies reinforce the understanding that open space is ineffectual in providing a social benefit when it is not accompanied by a sense of agency. But the reverse is also true: it is no surprise that in the ‘70s, when activism was the word of the day, squatted community gardens began to digest the rubble and trash of vacant lots — over 25,000 of them by 197716 — that economic recession left littered all over the city. Community gardens rapidly outstripped their brethren, far outnumbering “official” parks to this day.
14 Luis Aponte-‐Pares, “Appropriating Place in Puerto Rican Barrios,” Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, eds. Arnold R. Alenen and Robert Z. Melnick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. 95. 15Ira S Robbins “Tenants Gardens in Public Housing,” in Small Urban Spaces, ed. Whitney North Seymour, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 1969. 141. 16 Mark Francis, Lisa Cashdan and Lynn Paxson, Community Open Spaces. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1984. 4.
In “A Brief History of Grassroots Greening in NYC,” Sarah Ferguson contends that the 800-‐some community gardens that have taken root in New York were indeed born, not from government support, but from neglect. “During the fiscal crisis, waves of arson and abandonment left the city scarred with thousands of crumbling buildings and vacant lots … Littered with trash and rats, these open sores became magnets for drugs, prostitution, and chop shops for stripping down stolen cars. Yet the city’s only response was to spend thousands of dollars enclosing the lots with cyclone fencing.”17 Liz Christy, the founder of Green Guerillas, is often cited not only as the first to haul over a fence on the Lower East Side with a bolt-‐cutter and pickaxe, but is also credited with the creation of ‘bombing’ techniques: balloons and Christmas ornaments stuffed with seeds and fertilizer, lobbed over fences as “seed green-‐aids.”18 Green Guerillas was soon joined by groups like the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, Council for the Environment (CENY) and the New York Parks Association — a community-‐run David not to be confused with the Goliath Department of Parks and Recreation. In an effort to gain a modicum of control over the bourgeoning situation, many speculated, the city established Operation Green Thumb in 1978, a Department of General Services-‐sponsored leasing program that rented land to gardeners for $1 per year.19 While, to some, this was a valid way to legitimize urban farming, most bristled at the bureaucratic imposition — a power play by the city in a clear attempt to control the ad-‐ hoc appropriation of abandoned land. In an interview, longtime Lower East Side squatter Rick Van Savage said of the City’s programs, “They made you agree to work with them so that when they decide to move against you, you don’t have a strong leg to stand on. In helping the gardening community, they also have the power to divide it.”20 The Case of the Casita One group that remained distinct throughout this history of rebellion and appropriation were the casita gardeners in the Bronx. For newly immigrated Puerto Ricans in the 1970s, the gardens became sites of cultural transplantation — with the brightly painted wooden houses and surrounding beds not only providing the largely marginalized population with a source of supplementary vegetables, but stability and a sense of place, as well. Urban theorist Dolores Hayden describes the Puerto Rican casita garden as a place where “rural vernacular architecture was chosen to serve a polemical function, emphasizing the importance of the “enacted environment” as a bridge between the built and natural worlds.”21 In Hayden’s work, the casitas become an example of Henri Lefebvre’s “counter-‐space,” that is, the re-‐ appropriation of physical space to “demand amenities or empty spaces for play and encounter,” and the locus of the conceptual fight against “specialized space and a narrow localization of function.” 22 It is the physical manifestation of what Pettena describes, in analysis of Land Art, as the “autonomous reconstruction of the universe of languages and conceptual means.” But rather than being an artistic concept, for the disenfranchised Puerto-‐Rican populations that settled in the Bronx (and the story was mirrored elsewhere in New York: East Harlem and the Lower East Side, for example), the reconstruction
17 Sarah Ferguson, “A Brief History of Grassroots Greening in NYC.” New Village Journal. Oakland: New Village Press. Issue 1, http://www.newvillage.net/Journal/issue1.html 18 Ibid. 19 Anders Corr, “Squatting the Lower East Side: an interview with Rick Van Savage.” Kick it Over, #35, Toronto. 20 Sarah Ferguson. “A Brief History of Grassroots Greening in NYC.” New Village Journal. Oakland: New Village Press. Issue 1, http://www.newvillage.net/Journal/issue1.html 21 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. 35. 22 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 382-‐383.
of language and creation of means becomes a literal reference to the space where a marginalized group can create and re-‐create itself. Community gardens, and casita gardens in particular, are not demographically neutral spaces. They remain very fundamentally the property of the poor and disenfranchised. Areas with lower land values beget vacant lots. Vacant lots tend to have more stability (stay vacant longer without the fear of bulldozer) in low-‐income areas. Lower-‐income people, in general, have more time and effort to divert into community garden projects. But most importantly, lower-‐income people – who often lack access to resources and gathering spaces available to the rest of the population – have the greatest drive to create alternative sites to interact. These projects become the community’s blood, sweat and, when taken away, tears.
3 Map of Garden Locations: Community (Light Green) and NYC Department of Parks and Recreation (Dark Green) Numerous Community Gardens spread out open space, whereas parks concentrate it. Map courtesy Oasis. 4 Aggregate Income tends to correspond to location of NYC Department of Parks and Recreation maintained open spaces, within each borough. In Manhattan, Central Park and Battery Park; in Brooklyn, Park Slope; and in the Bronx, Coop City and the area west of Bronx Park. Likewise, lower aggregate income areas correspond to a concentration of community gardens. Map courtesy Bowen, Digital Atlas NYC.
More important than the fact that dispossessed communities tend to foster gardens more is the fact that they tend to need them more. Interviews with casita gardeners living in the Tremont neighborhood since the early 1980s23 revealed that the Puerto Rican populations who build and maintain casitas tend to grow a significant amount of food on the plots, sometimes enough to feed family members living in other parts of the city. But even more crucial is the social space that casitas provide, particularly given the isolation and marginalization that recent immigrants, naturalized citizens, and even families who have lived in New York for several generations, can feel in the rest of the city. Pettena’s “autonomous reconstruction of languages and means” may be translated as the literal ability to have a place where
23 Interviews at the Hispanos Unidos and Garden of Happiness casitas, 11/10/2009, 11/23/2009, 11/24/2009.
one can comfortably speak Spanish, where one can turn labor into goods in a culturally affirming way, where one can engage in rituals and pastimes that preserve one’s heritage. These gardens even become nodes for garnering political power — serving not only as places for the dissemination of political information or the signing of a petition, but as highly visible symbols of the community which can be put to the task of gaining momentum or support for larger social and political goals. Thus, it is not just the physical spaces that must be preserved, but their unique character as inherently unequal spaces — a struggle that would begin as New York real estate values recovered in the mid-‐80s, and intensify as they skyrocketed in the late-‐90s. Rebounding real estate prices made development in degraded areas once again attractive to investors, meaning that squatters needed to rely on sponsorship from Green Thumb and other agencies gain legitimacy and preserve their lands. The more gardeners rallied to secure governmental or agency support and protection, the more they became neutralized. At the same time, casitas and squatted community gardens in general had become recognized as valuable community assets and were conscripted into service by the city for a public agenda of “greening” – offered the chance to stay if they would agree to be overseen by various state and local agencies. The dual process of protection and cooptation became most evident as interest in the gardens aroused competing agency agendas. According to Ferguson, “While the grassroots Community Garden Coalition, comprising 200 gardeners citywide, began mobilizing folks from threatened spaces to attend rallies and Council hearings, many of the non-‐profit advocates were helping Green Thumb develop a rating list — which plots should be saved and which were expendable.”24 The dispersal of community gardens to the protection of various public agencies became crucially important when increasing real estate values caused a watershed event in the struggle over the squatted plots: Rudolph Giuliani’s 1997 mandate to the New York Department of General Services (at the time, the Department to which Green Thumb belonged) to auction its entire inventory of “disposable vacant land” — more than 700 gardens and casitas city-‐wide — within five years. An epic political struggle ensued: some of the Manhattan lots were released, through cooperation with the New York Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, to the department of Parks and Recreation. No such plan emerged in other boroughs. Four separate lawsuits were filed on both the state and federal level. The Trust for Public Land assembled forces to attempt to purchase some of the gardens in the Bronx and Brooklyn. At what one clipping refers to as the “eleventh hour,” the Brooklyn State Supreme court issued an injunction to stop the auction, pursuant to which 114 Brooklyn gardens were transferred to the New York Restoration Project. Hundreds more gardens remained threatened.
24 Sarah Ferguson, “The Death of Little Puerto Rico.” New Village Journal. Oakland: New Village Press. Issue 1, http://www.newvillage.net/Journal/issue1.html
5 Hispanic Population corresponds neatly to incidence of community gardens. Note: between 1990 and 2000, Hispanic population becomes less dispersed throughout Manhattan, with concentrations decreasing in the Lower East Side and 25 Harlem, and net gains to the Bronx, and Bushwick.
6 Poverty maps of New York City. Notice high concentration of poverty in three most notable enclaves of community gardens: the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Harlem, and the South Bronx and Tremont neighborhoods in the Bronx.
25 Maps from: William A Bowen, Digital Atlas of New York City, California Geographical Survey. Northridge: California State University. 2000. Accessed at: http://130.166.124.2/NYpage1.html
Finally, in 2000, the New York State Attorney General secured a restraining order against the city, barring them from further liquidating the stocks of vacant land. During this time, the high-‐profile fight over gardens gave voice to some of the disenfranchised communities that were accustomed to being ignored by the city – a silver lining for some. And many gardens were eventually diverted into Land Trusts, private ownership, or sponsorship by the Bronx zoo or the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Indeed, there is hope for these gardens, but there is also a looming threat worse than development—the slow loss of control. In Richard Florida’s prizewinning essay for The Atlantic, “How the Crash will reshape America,” he cozyed up to the idea of financial crisis as engine for reinvigorating New York’s creative economy, harnessing Jane Jacobs’ assertion that, “when a place gets boring, rich people leave.”26 Landscapes of despair and disinvestment cause new uses to bloom, just as community gardens first did in 1970s New York. Even in the face of gentrification, urban gardens fill the unique role of spontaneous public space. But for the poorer areas where casitas thrive, Florida’s suggestion that squatters could be an important part of urban revitalization sounds frighteningly like a “gentrification engine.” “As a neighborhood gentrifies, so do its gardens,” writes Ferguson. “The handful of community gardens on the Lower East Side that have attained permanent status through the Parks Department have done so because they have exceptional plantings, as well as highly motivated members capable of writing grants, lobbying politicians, and hosting poetry and jazz performances to prove their worth as community assets. Tilling vegetable plots isn’t enough. What’s being overlooked, of course, are those modest spaces tended by poor people for whom gardening is not a hobby, but an economic necessity. It’s no surprise that the neighborhood’s casita gardens have been among the first to get the ax.”27 Forward-‐thinking as the endorsement of community gardens seems, the rabid quest to sweep up these spaces under the wide green mantle of city sponsorship denies their fundamental importance. As gardens are recognized, condoned, assimilated and finally legislated and mandated, they lose the fluid, adaptable ingenuity that made them successful, indeed, necessary, urban elements in the first place. The continued provision for systems of self-‐governing is instrumental to this process. While many community gardens can serve as green space even under city management, casita gardens, in particular, are outside the context of “urban planning.” The understanding of the casita solely as an open space denies their more important role—one of a political and social space. Mapping casitas alongside open space reveals that, even where significant amounts of structured green space exists, the need for the casita remains.
26 Richard Florida. “How the Crash will Reshape America.” The Atlantic Monthly. March, 2009. Accessed at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-‐geography 27 Sarah Ferguson, “The Death of Little Puerto Rico.” New Village Journal. Oakland: New Village Press. Issue 1, http://www.newvillage.net/Journal/issue1.html
9 (Left) Map of Community Gardens in the Tremont/Crotona Neighborhood (labeled), accompanied by significant amount of accessible park (dark green). Map Courtesy Oasis, my edits. 10 (Right) Building Footprints (gray) reveal that lots are mostly open: community gardens are less about providing open space than providing community. Map Courtesy Oasis, my edits.
11 Casita gardens (labeled) are heavily used, despite abundant green space nearby. “Traditional” parks and open space do not serve necessary functions of casitas. All residences pictured are within 5-‐minute walking radius of public recreation facility, yet the neighborhood supports high concentration of gardens.
12 Zoomed-‐in view of Prospect between E. 181 and E. 182: Garden of Youth and Garden of Happiness, in 1996 (top) and 2006 (bottom). Likewise, creation of gardens has little to do with available open space on lots. Gardens here are situated in continuous swath of treed open space (backyards of rowhouses) and yet, maintain a separate purpose, and are more populated. Indeed, far greater concentrations of open space existed in 1996, when gardens were built, than in 2006.
In choosing traditional Puerto Rican names for casita gardens, Aponte-‐Pares claims that residents were introducing and defending the “possibility of place, both physical and metaphorical.”28 It is this defense of culture that makes the casita different from other types of community gardens—squatters and rebels may have been reappropriating landscapes in protest, but Puerto-‐Rican gardeners are trying to maintain their culture. Arguably, though sad is the loss of any of the city’s garden spaces to gentrification, development, or ossification under city law, the stakes for the casita are particularly high. These spaces are less about gardening, and more about staking a claim in the city’s landscape, and defending it against outside forces. Aponte-‐pares provides us the perfect word for this process: rescatar. To rescue. Not just the physical spaces from the degradation they would otherwise know, if not under the tenure of loving hands—but the owners of those hands themselves, from a vast landscape in which they would otherwise be adrift. The casita is less like an urban oasis, and more like an urban island-‐-‐ a physical construction of a cultural need, on which that culture can rest.
28Luis Aponte-‐Pares, “Appropriating Place in Puerto Rican Barrios,” Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, eds. Arnold R. Alenen and Robert Z. Melnick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. 98.
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