New Yorkers Against Gun Violence brought a giant puppet to the 40th Precinct, where they joined with Occupy the Bronx to protest the arrests at Morning Glory Garden. Photo by Elizabeth Chen

Five arrested at Morning Glory Community Garden site

Police arrested five people at the Occupy the Bronx general assembly in Mott Haven Saturday, preempting the organization’s plans to hold a rally and “festival” in a community garden fenced-off by the city in mid-November.

“Of the general assemblies I’ve attended, this is the first that I’ve seen this kind of police presence,” said Carl Lundgren, a member of Bronx Greens, a local environmental advocacy group.

The group had publicized plans for a “day of festivities” at Morning Glory Garden a vacant lot on Southern Boulevard and East 147th Street, where gardeners, many of whom are also among the most active people in Occupy the Bronx, had grown flowers and vegetable for the last two years.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development kicked the community group out out and tore up the garden, where it plans to build housing.

In protest, participants in Occupy the Bronx had briefly occupied the offices of Community Board 1, demanding that the board support its efforts to meet with the city housing department.

According to Elliott Liu, both a gardener and a member of the Occupy the Bronx facilitation working group, police ordered the protesters to “keep moving,” saying their meeting was blocking the sidewalk. Although the group did move, Liu said, the police arbitrarily singled-out people to be arrested.

According to NYPD spokesman Mike Wysokowski, the five people were arrested for “blocking pedestrian traffic.”

A video taken by a member of the organization seems to confirm the protesters’ claim that they did not block the sidewalks. It shows the general assembly moving to the fence around the garden, leaving ample room for others—including police officers—to walk by.

In the video police are shown interrogating a News 12 reporter and arresting a freelance journalist, Carla Murphy.

In weekly meetings since mid-October, including one at the Hub on Nov. 17, police stood by while the group held its general assembly, and even provided free entrance to the subway on Oct. 15, when protesters marched from Fordham Plaza to head downtown to Zuccotti Park, headquarters of Occupy Wall Street.

“I’ve been doing this type of work for 15 years and this was the most quiet, peaceful convening I’d ever seen,” said Lisa Ortega, a mainstay of Occupy the Bronx and a leader of the Hunts Point-based organization Rights For Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities. Ortega’s husband, Carlos Sabater, was one of those arrested. “NYPD was already very hostile and aggressive when we got there,” she said.

After the arrests, the general assembly, swelled by marchers from New Yorkers Against Gun Violence who had been protesting violence in the community and by others made aware of the arrests via messages on Facebook, moved to a street corner directly across from the 40th Precinct on Alexander Avenue and demanded the release of those arrested.

“Let them go!” the crowd chanted at the precinct, while holding up a giant, dancing Statue of Liberty puppet draped in the Puerto Rican flag.

The protesters were released from the precinct’s holding cell in the afternoon after being detained for about three hours. They were given summonses to appear in court.

Alex Kahn, a 25-year-old software developer was among those arrested . This was his first time attending an Occupy the Bronx general assembly.

“It was a little scary, but I was with people who I felt safe with,” said Kahn. “It’s the kind of experience that makes it clear that what the role of the police is in society. If their job was to protect the community, they wouldn’t be arresting people for having a meeting.”

After celebrating the release of their comrades, the general assembly joined the anti-violence march.

Occupy the Bronx members say they plan to continue to defy orders to stay away from Morning Glory Garden. Next Saturday, they say, they will meet at the corner of 149th St. and Third Ave. in Mott Haven to rally again.

They are also asking supporters to attend the 40th Precinct Community Council meeting on Wednesday, where they plan to interrogate officials about the arrests of their members.

“We’re community residents who’ve been oppressed for a long time and we don’t intend to back down by any means,” said Ortega. “And if it means that tons of us will continue to be arrested, we’re willing to do so. We’re not afraid.”

Audience members had a chance to voice their opinions after the panel discussion

But new city rules still have gardeners on guard

South Bronx gardeners responded to New York City’s new guidelines for the protection of community gardens with cautious optimism at a town-hall-style meeting at the New School on Oct. 2 that included a panel of local leaders and gardeners.

A number of Bronx residents were there to represent their communities, and they shared their questions and concerns with the group of several hundred that spent a long Saturday afternoon strategizing for the future of the city’s gardens.

The new rules were revealed after the last set, drafted in 2002, expired in September. Officials from the Parks Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development say the rules, which establish a registration system to formalize the plots are designed to protect gardens built on city-owned property,

Among other safeguards, they also promise to offer alternative land to gardens that are being taken over to make way for new development projects.

But many gardeners are concerned that years of hard work could too easily be bulldozed by developers looking to profit in up-and-coming areas.

Hidden loopholes in the rules could provide opportunities for builders to take over healthy gardens down the road.

They “can be used by developers when there is property that they can take hold of,” said Vandra Thorburn, of the NYC Community Garden Coalition. “These gardens are vulnerable.”

In Mott Haven’s gardens, the new rules are being considered with caution. From Padre Plaza to La Finca, the concerns are consistent. For one, these rules will be subject to change when the next mayoral administration comes to power in New York City. In addition, there is language in the rules that refers to gardens “in good standing.”

In good standing “according to whom?” asks Mike Young, president of Padre Plaza, a vibrant corner garden that houses a farmers’ market on Wednesdays. “There are days when our garden is closed.” What if someone were to come by on one of those days and declare Padre Plaza “inactive,” he asks.

Despite these concerns, the new rules are being accepted by community gardeners and leaders as a step in the right direction. But there is still widespread sentiment that gardens need more permanent, clearly-worded legal protection that will be effective beyond the current administration. The Community Garden Coalition is thinking about next steps for conservancy, or land trust, “so we’re not always at the whim of the Mayor,” said Thorburn.

Looking over the bustling Padre Plaza, Young invoked the neighborhood garden’s tradition of fighting spirit. “If we ever hear a bulldozer, we’ll be standing in front of the gates anyway,” he said.

A version of this story appeared in the Fall 2010 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.

At Finca del Sur, the corn is as high as an elephant's eye. Do Metro-North's commuters gaze at it in wonder?Photo by Joe Hirsch

Mott Haven and Melrose gardeners say they preserve rare green space

Mott Haven and Melrose are home to about two-dozen community gardens, lovingly tended green spaces tended by residents, who plant and harvest food and flowers, play music, exercise or simply kick back under stately shade trees.

With names like United We Stand, La Finca del Sur and La Casa de Chema, some recall the Puerto Rican countryside with their casitas, miniature wooden huts where friends gather for conversation.

Most are on land owned by the city, and were left to gather trash and breed vermin before they were reclaimed by residents. Now, local gardeners and their counterparts citywide fear the city wants them back for development.

Carlos Torres, who runs Vogue Community Garden, a pint-sized park with a few raised beds and a casita on 155th St. between Elton and Melrose avenues, used to oversee a garden four times the size next door.

Three years ago, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development sold the land to a developer, and now an apartment complex towers over the little pocket park Torres and others negotiated to salvage.

Still, Torres thinks he made out alright, and that the garden is safe now. He and others grow eggplants, tomatoes, carrots, bell peppers and hot peppers. In their larger garden, they had cherry trees, peach trees, raspberries, strawberries and apple trees, but those are gone.

“Finally, I got the corner,” he said. “I can’t plant the way I used to, but I’m content. They can’t move us.”

A mile or so south of Vogue, La Finca del Sur is a relative newcomer among local community gardens. La Finca, which is open to the public Fridays through Sundays, sits on a triangular three-acre lot, fenced off from E. 138th St. at the southern end of the Grand Concourse, flanked by elevated train tacks and an exit ramp off the Major Deegan Expressway. Cars and Metro-North trains race past. The entrance to the 4 and 5 subway line sits across the street, while Park Avenue a block away boasts a taxi garage and a strip club.

“They used to come in through the back from Sin City, the strip club, and walk right across here to get to the trains,” lifetime Bronx resident Nancy Ortiz-Surun, the garden’s unofficial steward, wryly recalled while tending to one of the raised vegetable beds. “This is not your typical garden,” she added.

Twelve residents plant at the year-old garden, which is operating this year on a budget of $12,000 from grants and private funding sources. Tools are kept in a former rail car Ortiz-Surun found on Craig’s List. The barrel that catches rainwater for irrigation was a New York Botanical Garden throwaway.

Ownership of the land is divided between the Parks Department and the MTA. In case of a subway emergency, riders would emerge from underground through rusted grates between the raised beds.

Given its location in the crosshairs of a transportation bulls-eye, the threat of any sort of real estate takeover by the city would appear unlikely, but Ortiz-Surun remains leery. “This is a bridge and tunnel location,” she said. “We could be threatened,” she added, but then said, “I’m not sure the powers that be know we’re here.”

Farther east on 137th Street between Cypress and Brook Ave, United We Stand offers cool summer breezes away from the stifling heat that surrounds it. Connected with two other gardens, Girasol and St. Luke’s Garden, United We Stand’s patrons have been relishing the shade and the veggies since the 1970s.

The lot was nothing more than an overgrowth of weeds on cracked pavement 30 years ago, says Jose Ramos, 82, one of a half-dozen Puerto Rican Mott Havenites who have nurtured the garden from urban neglect to quasi-rural leisure.

“It belonged to the city, but then we got involved,” said Ramos in Spanish, an ironic smile stealing across his leathery face. “Most of us are old,” Ramos said. “We suffered a lot at first when the trees were small, and we killed ourselves hauling bricks.”

“Any decent person can come and get food,” Ramos said, emphasizing that people don’t have to tend plots in the garden to share the harvest. “We are as if one person.”

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.

By Adam Liebowitz

This summer, youth in THE POINT’s Summer Day Adventure Program and the teen ACTION program launched a new initiative around urban farming. In EarthBoxes and gardens at both THE POINT and the Bryant Hill Community Garden we planted seeds and seedlings of many different types of vegetables.

This initiative hopes to inspire our youth and the larger community to get first-hand experience working with the earth and growing vegetables, as well as educating them about the healthy benefits of eating locally-sourced food both for themselves and the environment.

And its not just us! Check out the video below about the growing movement in the South Bronx and beyond! Featured in the video is Bissel Gardens, Friends of Brook Park, Part of the Solution, Brotherhood / Sister Sol, slides courtesy of the Majora Carter Group, Bascom Catering, and more!

And there are SO MANY other groups doing similar amazing work that didn’t make it into this cut but are just as vital to the goal, such as the BLK Projek, South Bronx Urban Farmers Collaborative, For A Better Bronx, More Gardens, Added Value, the list goes on and on.

The full length video will be screened in its entirety at a special World Premiere event happening at THE POINT CDC on Saturday November 14th, 2009.

Adam Liebowitz heads the ACTION Program at The Point CDC.