Putting the Farm Back in West Farms; Local Gardens Thrive as Interest Blossoms
July 15, 2009
Kaman Fong first saw Drew Gardens through the windows of the Q44 bus. The garden, a lush, two-acre strip of lawn and community vegetable plots running along the Bronx River on East Tremont Avenue between East 177th Street and West Farms Road, sits behind three bus stops and attracts plenty of attention from riders as they go by. Some stop and ask for a tour. Others get off and garden.
That’s what Fong did. A petite, mostly wheelchair-bound woman with an accent from her native Guangzhou, China, Fong was evicted from her room in Queens three years ago and found herself in a Bronx shelter. She was traveling to a doctor’s appointment when she saw the garden. She’s been a gardener ever since, tending a bed of cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro, sweet pepper, chard, and peppermint.
“I love this place,” she said. “It feels like I started a new life in here.”
From Garbage to Gardens
New York City boasts some 700 community gardens, with about 120 in the Bronx. Of those, the vast majority are in the southwest Bronx. Community District 6 alone is home to about 20. The gardens are a silver lining to the area’s history of abandonment and disinvestment in the 1970s and ’80s, as community members took over vacant lots and transformed them into gardens, said Karen Washington, president of the NYC Community Garden Coalition, and a Tremont local.
That’s how Washington herself got involved. When she moved to the area in 1985, “There were so many empty lots,” she said, including one across the street from her house.
“I got tired of looking at the cars and mattresses and garbage piled up,” she said. “[One day] I saw a guy across the street with a shovel and a hoe and asked what he was doing; he said, ‘I want to make it a community garden,’ and I said, ‘I want to help you.’”
Community gardening in the Bronx got a boost in 1988, when the New York Botanical Garden launched its “Bronx Green-Up” program, offering technical advice, plants, and workshops to residents. With the program’s support, Washington created the Garden of Happiness, now a thriving oasis on Prospect Avenue between 181st and 182nd streets.
In the late ’90s, the city’s gardens faced near-extinction when the Giuliani administration proposed auctioning off much of this land.
“It was a slap in the face,” Washington said, and it sparked a mobilization among gardeners which has continued to this day. Gardeners caught the ear of then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who sued to stop the auctions. A 2002 settlement between Spitzer and the Bloomberg administration saved most of the gardens, placing them under the stewardship of the Parks Department’s Green Thumb program.
But that agreement expires next year, leaving the gardens’ status in doubt. Washington, whose Garden of Happiness is one of several in the area affected by the agreement, is part of a coalition seeking to designate the gardens as permanent city parkland.
This new debate comes at a point when interest in gardens is surging. Sara Katz, the community horticulturalist at Bronx Green-Up, says she has seen “a wild increase” in potential gardeners in the past year. Washington attributes the leap in part to a growing awareness of the importance of a healthy diet in a community plagued by diabetes and obesity.
But mostly, she thinks, it’s because of the recession. “Are you kidding?” she said. “It’s free food!”
“The Garden Pulled Me In”
Drew Gardens was a latecomer to the Bronx garden party. In the mid-’90s, it was a vacant strip of land owned by the Department of Transit attracting drug dealers and garbage. In 1995, a group led by the Phipps Community Development Corporation convinced the DOT to lease them the site. But it wasn’t until the arrival four years ago of Jennifer Plewka, the current environmental educator for the Phipps CDC and the garden’s manager, that Drew Gardens exploded.
It now boasts plots for 42 households, a medicinal herb garden, a butterfly garden and a porch overlooking the river. Plewka also founded the West Farmers Market, selling vegetables from the garden and local farmers. That makes two local farmers markets – the other is the six-year-old market run by La Familia Verde, a coalition of local gardens, in Tremont Park.
Gardeners list all sorts of reasons for joining the gardens – to save money on groceries, to give their kids a taste of nature, to grow vegetables they can’t find in stores.
But most gardeners agree that gardening is more of an imperative than a choice.
“The garden pulled me in,” says Alex Rodriguez, who discovered Drew Gardens while waiting for a bus. “If I didn’t have the garden, I’d go find one – even in another borough.”
Fong actually does cross boroughs to garden. Except for the 17 days she spent in the shelter three years ago, she has never lived in the Bronx. Instead she has traveled nearly every day from first Brooklyn and now Queens by bus, in her wheelchair, two hours each way, to tend her beds in Drew Gardens. This year she has applied for public housing closer to her beloved garden.
“This place took me in in my worst time in my life,” she says. “This place took me in and I feel I finally got a home – in here. In Drew Gardens.”
By RACHEL WALDHOLZ
Ed. Note: To find a community garden near you, call Bronx Green-Up at (718) 817-8026; or City Parks’ Green Thumb at (212) 788-8070.
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