New York City gardeners, who were once vulnerable to city evictions, will be able to see next year’s harvest to fruition.
In West Harlem, local gardeners said they are pleased with a new piece of legislation passed last week by the Bloomberg administration, which offers an umbrella of protection to the city’s 282 embattled community gardens.
The newly adopted Community Garden Rules go into effect next month—promising limited protection to tidy and well used gardens. Activists say they are relieved the gardens are currently off the chopping block, but are still very concerned about the future.
“We are very happy about it,” said gardener Ivy Walker, who lives across the street from the Carrie McCracken TRUCE Community Garden in West Harlem, a community garden that benefits from the city’s new rules.
Before the city enacted the guidelines, the garden fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which reserves the right to evict gardens at any time on two weeks notice.
The new rules brought the garden under the control of the Department of Parks and Recreation, which now says it has committed to protect gardens from commercial development, as long as they are well maintained.
As an active garden member, Walker tends to the flowers and teaches on-site gardening classes.
“I hope we never lose it,” she said.
But green activist groups like New York City Community Gardens Coalition say the new rules do not offer community gardens lasting protection from developers eyeing “unused” space.
“The new rules don’t give the gardens permanence,” said Steve Kidd, a NYCCGC board member, who initiated the revitalization of the McCracken garden in 2008: “They only offer us a respite.”
A flaw that critics cite with the Community Garden Rules is that they can easily be overturned by a new city administration, sending the garden preservation effort back to square one.
Until last week, New York City’s gardens were under the protection of the Spitzer Agreement, a hard-won piece of legislation enacted in 2002 that prevented the city from selling the gardens to developers for eight years.
“Unless you have something in writing, they will destroy it,” said Bill DiPaola, executive director of Time’s Up!, an environmental activist group.
“I’ve always believed the taxpayers and the gardeners own the gardens,” DiPaola said, adding that Time’s Up! recently led a campaign to highlight the history of New York’s community gardens.
He reasoned that back in the ’80s, when the city was broke, community members reclaimed the many vacant lots that blighted their neighborhoods. By themselves, they transformed the derelict land into much-needed gardens. As New York began to prosper in the ’90s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani began selling off the gardens to developers for housing. Time’s Up!, along with More Gardens! Coalition, Lower East Side Collective, and other groups, organized to save the gardens and keep them in the hands of the people who created them.
According to Kidd, the new rules are vague and need to be carefully analyzed from a legal standpoint to fully determine their implications. He said he hopes to take the gardens’ plight to the state level to ensure their continued protection.
“We got to get the message out,” Kidd said. “Save all our community gardens.”
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