Farewell, Sweet Little Gardens

Tags

alphabet city, art, east village, gardening, gardens, maps, new york city, photography, sketchbook

I finally closed on my new apartment, so I’ll be heading uptown later this week and moving in. One thing I’ll miss in the East Village is the plethora of community gardens. I thought it would be fun to sing a farewell love song to Alphabet City, an ode to the gorgeous oases that dot its streets. (If you don’t know where this area is, here’s a little help.)

I drew a map of the neighborhood’s community gardens. Look at them all. Amazing! Each is named. Some are over 35 years old.

When I first started wandering around the hood on my morning walks, I was surprised by the number of gardens. I’d never seen so many gardens in one area before, a number of them mature and substantial. After all, NYC real estate is valuable, and I wondered how these patches of community-supported soil had managed to stave off man’s irrepressible impulse to claim and build, not to mention the city’s ability to use “eminent domain” to seize any patch of earth it chooses.

The story of the development of these gardens is long and rich. In the 1960s and 70s, this part of the city was deeply neglected, falling prey to crime and slumlords. A number of buildings were destroyed by arsonists. The city razed these buildings, leaving open land, and since the neighborhood was dangerous and destitute, there was no interest in rebuilding.

In 1973, Liz Christy, an artist and activist, founded an environmental group called the Green Guerillas. They began by throwing “seed bombs” over the fences surrounding the lots, packed with seeds, fertilizer and water. She caught the attention of the city’s Parks Department, who leased her an empty lot on the corner of Bowery and Houston Streets for $1 a month. This became the Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden, the first community garden in the city. It eventually contained 60 vegetable beds and inspired a horticultural revolution.

In 1978, the GreenThumb program was born, which encouraged neighborhood groups to lease land parcels for sometimes as little as a dollar a year. This program was intended to encourage grassroots neighborhood revitalization and was wildly successful. The catch? The gardens created were considered temporary and the city still retained rights over the land. This concept hummed along nicely until the 1990s, when the city decided it wanted to sell some of the gardens to developers to shore up the budget. By this point, the gardens had become such an integral part of their neighborhoods that the prospect of losing them was unthinkable. This being New York, all hell broke loose.

The Attorney General had to step in to broker a deal. One of the key players in that deal was Bette Midler, who, appalled at the lack of community green space in the city, had founded the New York Restoration Project a few years earlier. Her group bought 52 of the gardens outright. Of the 520 gardens in the city at that time, 400 were saved, many becoming permanent as part of the Parks Department.

Today, NYC has about 640 community gardens scattered among the five boroughs, with about 60 clustered in the East Village and Lower East Side. The gardens boast 20,000 members; the gardens themselves make up about 32 acres. Wow! is all I can say. Each garden hosts events and workshops and all are open to the public.

The garden below is a tiny sliver of land, yet it explodes with greenery.

Each garden has its own sign.

A bonus of the gardens is that lucky apartment dwellers can look out their windows and instead of seeing other buildings, they see trees.

Mural and garden and comfy bench! Does it get any better?

Some gardens contain sculptures, decorative nicknacks, or someone’s latest creative installation.

These lots once represented the detritus of a neighborhood under siege. It’s amazing to see how the concentrated work of determined visionaries was able to utterly turn around this devastation and from it, create not just a sense of community, but a vital part of the local culture that brings people together with a sense of purpose and joy.

Today, it’s thrilling to walk in Alphabet City and stumble on these lush pockets of green, welcoming anyone to sit down and take a deep breath. I’ll miss them on my morning walks, but I’ll be back often to wander among them again.

Travel Sketchbook: Mapping it Out

Tags

art, Australia, drawing, florida keys, france, italy, maps, sketchbook, sydney, travel, uae

I’ve been keeping a travel sketchbook for twelve years now. No matter where I go, one kind of drawing that makes it into almost every trip is a little map.

Drawing out excursions, whether made by foot, boat, train, car or plane, helps to remind me of the little moments that I might otherwise forget. It also helps me to understand the geography of where I’m traveling. By looking at other maps to guide me as I draw, I learn more about the place I’m visiting.

Here’s a little map of a walk I took in Sydney, Australia.

Sometimes I’ll start off a trip with a global map to emphasize the distance traveled.

Or an overall view of the destination.

At other times I’ll document a small excursion, like this London walk…

or a particularly memorable day, which in this case was a day spent puttering around Sydney Harbor in a little motorboat.

I draw with a black pen, filling in with Prismacolor pencils. I like Prismas because they’re waxy, they don’t bleed if they get wet, and the colors can be blended, so I need to bring only ten colors along.

Sometimes I’ll draw the route of a long drive. This is on the North Island of New Zealand.

This was my path by train through Italy to the French Alps in 2004.

In 2006 it was off to Australia again. My sister lived there at the time, and this was my third visit. This is Magnetic Island, off the eastern coast of Australia, near Port Douglas. My sister and her husband owned a house there for a few years. Koala bears perched in the trees, Kookaburras visited us in the morning for their ground beef treats and a bird called the Bush Stone Curlew screamed all night long. Quite a memorable trip.

In 2007, we planned a family trip through Scotland and the UK. My black pen was on its last legs.

2007 was a fun year. In the fall, I went to Australia again. We planned on visiting Ayers Rock, now called Uluru. Where is it again? Oh, right, smack in the middle of nowhere.

While on our way to Uluru, we visited the gorges of the West MacDonnell Range, a beautiful area near Alice Springs.

Here I tracked the routes we skied over four days in Zermatt, Switzerland in 2008.

By 2010, my sister had moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Abu Where? Notice that the Persian Gulf is named the Arabian Gulf from this vantage point.

Abu Dhabi is an unusual city, composed of a group of natural and manmade islands.

In 2010, off to Florence!

I tried to keep a daily record of our epic treks around Florence. It got a bit messy! Sometimes it’s good to know when to start a new map.

And to close, our drive on our most recent vacation to Vancouver and the Olympic Peninsula. May there be many more maps in the future!