Kids enjoying the greenery at Brook Park

Restoring a stream would bring environmental benefits

Brook Park takes its name from Mill Brook, whose waters once burbled through today’s Webster and Brook Avenues.  Now the environmental organization that helps oversee the park wants to bring the brook back.

“What we are trying to do here is make a green park, and a blue park,” says Aaron Petersohn, manager of the Friends of Brook Park’s Brook Daylighting Restorations Project.

Petersohn is heading an effort to bring the buried stream that once ran through Mott Haven back to the park at Brook Avenue and East 141^st Street.  If the plan succeeds, visitors will hear the sound of water trickling into a pond that attracts dragonflies, frogs and migrating birds.

The South Bronx has been shortchanged on green space, said Harry Bubbins, director of Friends of Brook Park. It “needs greater access to nature and restoration of our natural environment.”

Not only will the water make the park more inviting; it will make the neighborhood healthier, Petersohn says.

Wetland plants will perform their function as nature’s filtration system, capturing and cleaning storm water before it reaches the sewers, where it would carry motor oil, antifreeze, litter and other pollutants into the Harlem River.

For most of the 19^th century, the Mill Brook River flowed through the South Bronx, following the course of today’s Brook Avenue, before emptying into the Bronx Kill, the narrow stretch of water between the Bronx and Randall’s Island.

When the sewer pipes were laid in the 1890s, the river was diverted into them.

“We want to bring back an old river that disappeared,” said Petersohn. Friends of Brook Park has a $45,000 federal grant to design the project and is hoping to raise $300,000 more to unearth the portion of the historic Bronx waterway beneath the park’s soil. The process of bringing that groundwater to the surface is called “daylighting.”

The Friends group partnered with the environmental engineers at the Bronx-based Gaia Institute to locate a source of water for the pond and surrounding wetlands. They found it at the nearby Nehemiah Homes on 140^th Street.

Plans call for diverting to Brook Park the 800,000 gallons of water that now flow into the sewers from the roofs, sidewalks and streets of the housing development. Another 700,000 gallons will be collected from the rainwater and snow that falls on the park itself.

Removing 1.5 million gallons from the sewer system will help clean up the city’s waterways, and will ultimately save money, Petersohn said. When storm water goes into the sewers, New Yorkers pay twice. “As taxpayers we are paying to have rainwater cleaned up when it’s already clean,” said Peterhsohn.

What’s worse, even a short storm can overwhelm the city’s wastewater treatment plants, forcing them to dump untreated waste flushed from toilets into the rivers and bays.

One of the Bloomberg administration’s goals is to improve the quality of the water in New York harbor by capturing and retaining storm water runoff before it enters the sewer system, said Mercedes Padilla, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Environmental Protection.

The Brook Park plan has won applause from elected officials and park users. A spokesman for Rep. Jose Serrano, who secured the federal funds for the project’s design, echoed Bubbins, saying the congressman “wants more green and natural space and places for folks to have room to the outdoors, and not just see concrete.”

“We have actually been vindicated with the fact that there is water found here,” said City Council member Melissa Mark Viverito, who has advocated for the restoration of the brook since she took office in 2005. “That reality is going to be integrated with the design of this park. It reflects and acknowledges the history and reality of this community, that there’s a stream that runs under here.”

“It will be fun for the kids, and something different that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the neighborhood,” said Margarita Herrera, who was strolling in the park with her one year old daughter and two little girls of her friend’s on a recent Sunday.

A version of this story appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Park users relax at Brook Park.Photo by Joe Hirsch

City officials insist community gardens have nothing to fear

Eight years ago, the city, the state and the creators of 500 community gardens on city-owned land reached an agreement that ended a long battle that began when the Giuliani administration sought to auction the garden lots to developers.

Now, that agreement is set to expire, alarming gardeners in Mott Haven and Melrose who fear that new rules drafted by the Parks Department threaten their green mini-utopias.

The community gardens they created by cleaning up vacant lots offer respite from wilting summer heat and a harvest that is tastier and more nutritious than the produce in local markets, they say, but they fear that real estate will trump their efforts to provide life’s basics for locals who live with less.

City officials contend residents have nothing to worry about. They say whatever new agreement gets hammered out to replace the pact that expires in September will be an improvement on the present arrangement, and that they have made every effort to take residents’ concerns into account.

Harry Bubbins, director of the area’s largest community garden, Brook Park, is among the skeptics. “They want to put up condominiums, big boxes, you know the deal,” Bubbins warned a crowd of about a hundred at a festival honoring immigrants at the park in July.

Bubbins, whose gruff demeanor more closely resembles that of an embattled rural homesteader than a crass New Yorker, recalled the state of the park, which occupies the better part of a square block on Brook Avenue between 140th and 141st streets. “We cut the locks to get in here. It was an abandoned lot.”

Community gardeners want the city to sign an agreement that would grant the gardens permanent status and protect them from future development, a demand the city says is impossible to meet, and unnecessary.

“There is no legal mechanism that guarantees permanency,” said Jack Linn, assistant commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Linn says his agency is sensitive to the nervousness garden users are feeling in the face of the expiring agreement, but that their fears are unfounded.

“I certainly understand their anxiety when there’s change, but their concern is not rooted in history,” he said.

Separately, the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development is set to implement new rules for community gardens on its land that license existing gardens but also provide for the possibility that in the future they could be evicted. The new rules emphasize that the gardens are not parks, that the city retains title to the land and that the gardeners gain no right to it through their work.

Aresh Javadi, a former Melrose resident who counsels kids during the summer at the Padre Plaza Success Garden on St. Ann’s Avenue and runs the moregardens.org website thinks the city is being disingenuous by extolling the virtues of gardens on one hand, but refusing to make them untouchable to developers.

“We find it a little frustrating that they won’t write it down,” Javadi said of the city’s assurances.

“We ask that they state specifically that all gardens in good standing stay in parks,” he added.

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito who represents a small section of Mott Haven and also chairs the Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, says she agrees about the need to protect gardens, saying “I believe there has to be some measure of permanency written in.” But Mark-Viverito was less than hopeful about prospects for the gardeners getting what they’re asking for.

“We’ve taken it as far as we can because the Mayoral administration has said ‘this is as far as we’re going to go,’” she said, but added “we still have a ways to go,” in negotiations with the Mayor.

But Jack Linn of the Parks Dept insists the Bloomberg administration’s policies have been favorable to community gardens.

“No group of gardeners has been evicted” in the eight years in which the current agreement has been in place, Linn said, and added that “not one garden has been lost.”

Longtime Mott Haven resident and park user Flora Garcia Cruz, who moved to Mott Haven from Mexico decades ago, has been persuaded that the danger to Brook Park is worth worrying about.

“If they try to take it, I’ll chain myself to a tree,” she said in Spanish, in the company of several Mexican friends relaxing on benches under shady trees at the park. “We’ll all chain ourselves to trees to keep this garden for our children.”

Harry Bubbins thinks there is cause for alarm, and that gardeners have been “lulled into complacency” during the eight years of the existing agreement.

“Nothing is protected forever unless we make it so,” he said.

A version of this story appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Pablo Rivera reaches down to check on vegetables in the Bronx Community and Cultural Garden (Click on image to see more)

Urban farmers won’t rest when the last crop is picked

On a warm weekday morning in September, Valeria Cantero arrives at Brook Park, on Brook Avenue between 140th and 141st streets. She opens the gate with a key and locks up behind herself. After leaving her things in the center of the garden, Cantero ducks into the back of the lot, emerging with an armful of sticks to light a cooking fire.

One of 20 people who maintain plots of vegetables in Brook Park, Cantero grows tomatoes, beans, peppers and cilantro for her family. She is in the park almost daily, often working alongside her daughter Esperanza, who tends to her own neighboring plot.

Even as the last vegetables are harvested in Mott Haven’s gardens, the work won’t stop. For Cantero and the others who maintain the gardens and the organizations that support them, the colder months are a time to build, plan and finish projects so that next summer’s crop will be even more bountiful than this year’s.

If the off-season, Raymond Figueroa, the Youth Farm Coordinator of Brook Park, who organizes programs and partnerships for young people, will continue to work with students from the International Community High School on Brook Avenue.

This summer they dug up an area of asphalt right in the center of the garden. This fall a hoop house–a simple greenhouse that uses the sun to heat a protected room–will go up, making it possible to grow early vegetables as well as delicate seedlings that will be planted in the spring and become part of next year’s crop.

Another project in the works for next season will be the expansion of the park’s composting system. Composting is a way to treat waste from the kitchen so that when it decays it enriches the soil. Brook Park currently composts its own waste and accepts food waste (but no meat) from homes in the neighborhood. With more space to treat compost the operation will grow, helping the park’s urban farmers to produce higher quality food.

Encouraging this cycle of planting, growing, eating and composting is all a way for the Mott Haven community to become healthier in the long run, according to Figueroa. “I’m looking at this from a real community development vantage point,” he says. “You have to engage young people.”

Mott Haven and Hunts Point have New York City’s highest adult rates of diabetes, a disease that is linked to obesity and a lack of available healthy food choices. Residents can’t count on finding affordable, fresh foods nearby, Figueroa points out. That is why, he says, it is so important that local gardens teach young people to farm, and why the Brook Park garden donates much of the food it produces to local churches and soup kitchens.

A few blocks away in the Bronx Community and Cultural Garden, at 143rd Street and Willis Avenue, there is an entirely different “to-do” list. For starters, says Liz Gonzales, an active gardener there, “Animals have to eat!” She points to the chicken coop where a number of shiny brown hens are marching around, and to the cage that houses a few floppy-eared rabbits.

Under plenty of flapping Puerto Rican flags, the Community and Cultural Garden produces peppers, squash, tomatoes, eggplant, corn, tomatillos, basil, cilantro, pumpkins, cabbage, and even a small patch of aloe.

After the harvest, a crop of winter rye will be planted to enrich next year’s soil, says Simon Skinner of the New York Restoration Project, the group that owns the land and supports the garden’s programs. Grass will be reseeded where dancing has flattened it over the summer, and members are looking into building a raised deck next to their covered stage.

Major mulching and tree-trimming projects will also happen over the winter in “one of the few gardens where,” Skinner says, “people will sit outside all year.”

In the Community and Cultural Garden, as in Brook Park, schoolteachers are meeting with gardeners about working together this fall to use the garden as a teaching tool for the neighborhood’s children.

Back in Brook Park, Cantero has started a small fire underneath a huge black pot filled with water and ears of corn from the local bodega. She makes a lid out of a large checkered cloth and stands watch over her cooking under an old Willow tree.

Another woman strolls in and asks if she can pick a few sunflowers. Meanwhile, a fourth-grade class from PS 369 has entered the park. They gather in the corner with Figueroa to check out the student farm.

Over in the tool-shed last year’s garlic is hanging to dry. This year’s crop of garlic won’t be planted until after the first frost, sometime in November–one of the many tasks still to come in Brook Park.

The gardeners won’t just be planting the ingredients of future meals, Figueroa says. They’ll be “planting social responsibility while planting seeds.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

An anti-war banner outside Brook Park, the site of the first Bronx Anarchist Fair

Mott Haven fair showcases new politics

By Sarah Trefethen
sarah.trefethen@motthavenherald.com

Anti-authoritarian radicals occupied Brook Park for the first-ever Bronx Anarchist Fair on April 4. The park’s regulars didn’t seem to mind.

The fair featured workshops, bookstalls, movie screenings, food vendors and something called a “really, really free market,” all focused on the theme of far-left-wing politics.

Aazam Otero, 24, lives in the neighborhood and helped plan the fair. He said that anarchism is about people working together outside the mainstream.

“We wanted to create a space where we can connect with other people who organize in the area,” he said.

Workshops covered a range of themes, including the relationship between the police and the public, consensus decision-making, and hip-hop dance.  A panel discussion on the history of squatting –as in, living in a building without permission from its owner–featured historians and activists, including Fordham University professor Mark Naison, a student leader in the 60s, and neighborhood activist Hetty Fox.

Almost a dozen kids joined in a hip-hop dance workshop led by Billy Martin, a 30-year-old South Bronx native who now lives Brooklyn and works as an M.C. under the name Spiritchild.

He said he doesn’t have a political definition for himself, but he likes the idea of community leaders coming from within communities.

“You look at how we’re living today, and electoral politics in general hasn’t really benefited black and brown people,” Martin said.

The day of the fair was windy, overcast and cold, but Angie Spitzer, 25, was happy with the turnout.

“We’ve had a fair number of community folks come through,” she said.

She said the food vendors from the women’s health center Casa Atabex Ache and the squatting discussion were both particularly successful. The “really, really free market”—a kind of garage sale with no prices –attracted participants as well.

Otero explained that the “free market” wasn’t a swap meet, but an opportunity to share.

“It’s a free exchange that has kind of an anti-capitalist bent to it,” he said.

Elliot Liu, 27, said the economic downturn is making anarchism more relevant.

“People just aren’t going to have the resources they once had,” said Liu, another resident who helped organize the day’s festivities. “People are going to have to work together to solve their problems, and I’ve always just looked to anarchism as a great way to do that.”

Spitzer said planning the fair started with an idea for a “satellite site” to the annual Anarchist Book Fair in Manhattan.

“We decided we wanted to have our own event focused on the Bronx, instead of having a bunch of Brooklyn and Manhattan anarchists come up here,” she said.