Community Gardening and New York City

Like other cities across the country, New York City today has a well-developed and diverse community garden movement. The earliest organized urban community gardening effort anywhere in the U.S. was launched during the 1890’s, a period of industrial slowdown and unemployment. Detroit's Mayor Hazen S. Pingree coped with the growing congestion and squalor in the inner city by providing garden plots on municipal and privately owned donated vacant urban lots. The plan was so successful that it was copied in cities throughout the country.

World War I bought Liberty Gardens and at the height of the Depression in the 1930's, there was a rapid increase in the number of­ community gardens nationwide. New York City’s Garden project in 1934 consisted of 300 plots, all of them located in Brooklyn. During the next year, the Federal Work Projects Administration (WPA) employed expert gardeners to work and establish about 5,000 gardens on vacant lots in four boroughs of New York City. By 1937, the community gardening movement ended, when the economy improved, the production of goods increased and the severed of the Federal WPA relief program. With the coming of World War 2, the City of New York again announced that vacant city owned land would be available for Victory gardening.

During the 1970’s many New York City neighborhoods experienced disinvestment, abandonment, and a lack of municipal services. At this time the city was near bankruptcy, and this caused the reduction of many services. The effects were devastating especially to low-income communities. Community groups all over New York fought back by reclaiming vacant land and creating a variety of community gardens.

A nonprofit environmental group dedicated to preserving urban gardens, the “Green Guerillas,” started in 1973 by lobbing "seed bombs" packed with fertilizer, seeds, and water over fences around vacant lots to beautify some of these spaces. This move not only beautified vacant lots but soon it became a grassroots program. Although neighbors embraced the new gardens, City officials initially accused the Green Guerillas of trespassing and threatened to remove them from the lots. In response, the Green Guerillas coordinated a successful media campaign to garner public support. As a result, in 1974, the city relented and granted a one-dollar-per-month lease for New York City’s first officially recognized community garden, then known as the Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden.

In 1978, the City launched Operation GreenThumb (now the GreenThumb Program) to grant leases, provide coordination and assistance for community gardeners on City-owned vacant land. Early gardens often operated under token leases of just one dollar per year, but as gardens flourished throughout the 1980s, GreenThumb introduced long-term leases, creating a formal partnership between community gardeners and the City. Community gardens became bedrocks of New York City’s most resilient neighborhoods for decades.

Throughout the 1990s, tensions emerged when government officials wanted to sell many lots to residential and commercial developers. In 1995, GreenThumb ended its long-term lease program, replacing it with individual licensing agreements that stripped away much of the gardens’ autonomy. One year later, the city demolished seventeen gardens in Harlem and six in Bushwick to make way for public housing.

In May 1998, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani put into motion a series of policy changes that transferred ownership of many community gardens from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. In 1999, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer challenged the City’s decision to put over 100 community gardens up for public auction, arguing that the city had a responsibility to review the environmental impact of developing the lots under New York State law. The New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn enjoined the City’s auction, preventing the sale of these gardens. The City appealed the ruling, but the injunction remained in effect through the remainder of the Giuliani administration.

At the same time, The Trust for Public Land, New York Restoration Project, and other non-profits rallied to save gardens from destruction by placing them in private ownership. The Trust for Public Land purchased and saved sixty-nine gardens, and the New York Restoration Project helped to save fifty-two community gardens throughout the five boroughs, which they still own and manage today.

The longstanding tension between New York City and community gardeners came to a temporary resolution in September 2002, when then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Attorney General Spitzer negotiated a Memorandum of Agreement to preserve 400 gardens; this agreement expired after eight years, leaving hundreds of gardens vulnerable to development.

After the 2002 Memorandum of Agreement negotiated between the State and City officials ended, and the 2019 licensing agreement between GreenThumb and community gardens features changes that put approximately 100 community gardens in danger of closing. Among other issues, the licensing agreement fails to provide liability coverage for gardeners, limits the number of fundraisers allowed per year, and requires a strict approval process for all events. Because of onerous indemnification requirements, gardeners are forced to expend their meager funds to insure against injuries in the garden space, threatening the survival of the gardens.

There are now over 550 GreenThumb community gardens across the five boroughs. Of these, more than 300 gardens fall under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, while over 100 are privately-owned community gardens open to public use. All community gardens are run by local volunteers, with the assistance of the GreenThumb Program.

References:

Fox, T., Koeppel, I., & Kellam, S. Struggle for space: The greening of New York City, 1970-1984. Neighborhood Open Space Coalition. 1985

From the Ground Up (A Petition to Protect NYC’s Community Gardens). Earth Justice and New York City Community Garden Coalition (NYCCGC), Nov. 2020

Staeheli, L.A., Mitchell, D. and Gibson, K. Conflicting rights to the city in New York's community gardens (pp. 197-205). Social Transformation, Citizenship, and the Right to the City, Vol. 58, No. 23. 2002

Smith, C.M and E. Kurtz. H.E. Community Gardens and Politics of Scale in New York City (pp. 193-212). Geographical Review, Vol. 93, No. 2, Apr. 2003

Althaus Ottmann, M.M., Maantay, J.A., Grady, K. and Fonte, N.N. Characterization of Urban Agricultural Practices and Gardeners’ Perceptions in Bronx Community Gardens, New York City. Cities and the Environment, Vol. 5, Iss. 1 Article 13. 2012

Schmelzkopf, K. Urban Community Gardens as Contested Space (pp. 364-381). Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 3, Jul. 1995

Von Hasssel, M. The Struggle for Eden: Community Gardens in New York City. Jan. 2002, Praeger

Birch, Eugenie “From Flames to Flowers: Twenty Years of Planning in the South Bronx. ”Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 1998, http://www.mit.edu