Sharing & Caring | Choosing to Live in Community

Aresh Javadi

transcribed by Momoko Price

There are black and white photographs that I would highly recommend, where you stand on Avenue A, and you see to Avenue C, it's just flat, a lot of people compare it to when Germany was bombed, or Europe had been bombed, you could see acres of land from one place straight to the other side, so it's this flat, burned down land of buildings that had been knocked down or cleared, so there's a lot of vacant lots, when there's an issue of housing versus gardens, people have to realize that there was 40,000 vacant lots in New York City, 700, which is not even 1 per cent was community gardens -- It's like a quarter of a per cent -- was community gardens. And these were in the neighbourhoods, the Lower East Side being one of them, which had the most Puerto Rican, low-income, African American, and then that's when squatters also saw that vacant land and vacant buildings that were there, that they came in, too.

Previous to that, there were still Puerto Ricans and African Americans there, and always the poor people had been in those neighbourhoods. The working class, the people who came in to build the industrial world that kind of, you know, pushing us to the edge of global warming, actually the middle of global warming, but those were the folks who'd been in those neighbourhoods.

So after they kind of got burned down by greedy landlords, it ended up that people were naturally looking at the land and going, ‘I come from Puerto Rico! This is the kind of land that I can plant food in!' No one's using it, there wasn't even like a picket fence or anything, it's just rubble. And so they cleared it, put dirt in there, little plots, and they start growing stuff.

And so it becomes something that -- it's safety, people and the kids instead of playing on top of all sorts of dangerous things, they have a nice place, they have a tree, they put their casita in there, so it's a little place out of the rubble and stuff, they put a wood structure, that it's not even for living, but it's just mostly for using as a community centre. People come, play bombaplana then there's also the African American folks who just put collards, and bell peppers and eggplants and all the things that they would have, really nice food.

Again like talking about food, those neighbourhoods get the worst food out of all of New York City. They get the crumbs, and even though like in Bronx, is another example, they're right where the best food in the world comes, gets flown in, then it goes to the Upper East Side, and Riverdale and everywhere else, and so they get, even the stuff that comes back from those places, or even the really rotten, horrible, low-quality, low-energy stuff comes to those communities.

So of course they're like, ‘I come from a place where I grew my own food, and it tasted so good,' and they do it and they're like ‘Wow, this is delicious, this is yummy, let's do that.' And it just makes so much sense, so that's the kind of landscape.

And I could see how squatters would come to those neighbourhoods and saw that there were community gardens around the neighbourhoods would be like, “Wow, this is great! All the folks who'd been doing it for 10 years, five years, etc. We can do that and save money, and at the same time connect with the communities that had been doing this for years and years and years."

Where I came in and I got to learn, activists, squatters, activists, Puerto Rican folks, activists, African American folks saw that they were able to make that connection of the community gardens. It was one of the few places I saw that was being done. A lot of times when people feel threatened from the outside, they tend to be like, “Oh, they're here, they're gentrifying, they're here and they're going to pave the way for gentrification."

But in the case of the community gardens, especially when they became endangered, and Giuliani came bulldozing the gardens and evicting the squatters, there was this place where people felt that the privilege of being white and having certain skills, the time and the energy to plan around civil disobedience, or organizing to defend gardens were something that could help each other in a very powerful way. I think that really brought the communities that may have been at one time at ends, really together. “Here is a common area, here is where we are all being attacked and we can really work together as a team and preserve these community gardens."

And that happened over a period of 10 years, where us, and kind of myself even as an outsider -- eventually I'm here 20 years -- that the people would trust a certain way of knowing that I'm willing to get arrested, and so are people who are in the community, youth activists, squatters, for the cause of preserving something that we really deeply care about, and to a lot of people, the garden, after a certain amount of years, is like a child, it's like you're having children. It's like, ‘this is my baby,' really. They talk to her, they talk to him, they really connect in such a powerful way, that coming to make sure that it is preserved and that they have the right, that this city is ours, it's not just -- a lot people say ‘oh, this city is coming to get the land,' and it's like ‘You are the city, we are the city!' There's a certain language, that, when people got it, they were like, ‘This is our right, this is a justice, it's an environmental justice, it's a race justice, a racial justice, all of these things came together as people stood up and said ‘wow, this is something we really deeply care about ...

And I think in the Lower East Side, there was a certain area that kind of drew in most of these squatters. That didn't happen so much in East Harlem, that didn't happen so much in the South Bronx, but because the Lower East Side, for whatever reason it is, it may be closer, it may be more white-surrounded, etc., that people felt like this was safer, or it was closer to the art world, possibly, too. That people came there and kind of worked that area with a concentration of squatters that wasn't quite as much anywhere else, even though there were other places, too.


So here we have '60s and '70s, more and more community gardens are created, to the point where by the 80s you have about over 700 community gardens city-wide. Lower East Side, Harlem, East Harlem, West Harlem, South Bronx, East New York, Brownsville, all over the areas, again, where the majority people of colour and working class and poorer communities live.

So here's a scenario, and it's getting larger and larger. So folks are like, ‘whoa!' and I don't know if they'd even thought of the laws that say after a certain amount of time you're allowed to own a site, it's debatable, there's a point where they kind of said, ‘We have to ‘control' this phenomenon, and what they did, they actually liked it, in some ways because here it is, out of the 40,000 lot, close to a thousand of them, people are taking care of it, they can see that it's not being trashed, garbage, there's a sense of community and people are saving them money in cleaning up the place, you know, maintaining it, watching over it, etc. etc.

So they're like, ‘control and actually this is great, since we can't afford doing it, let's emphasize that'. So they started a program called Green Thumb, and it was federally funded, that allowed monies to come in and put the fences, and give people tools, seeds, some teaching, and then allowed, almost say, even put it in the newspapers: ‘If you want to take care of a vacant lot, come to Green Thumb, and we will help you start the community garden.'

And it wasn't even ‘community,' even if one person, by himself or herself wanted to take care of this, and was bossy and told everybody to go away, they were fine with that, as long as you got -- now one thing they did do for the other folks who had been doing this by themselves for many, many years, they came and said ‘very nice, good job, but you got to sign this letter, that is a lease, and in the lease, they kind of said, 'well, now you have permission, real permission from “the city" to do this. However, in the lease, they did put like, “if there was any time that we needed to kick you out, we would kick you out in 30 days or 90 days or depending, some leases were for a year or two years.

This of course made the gardeners who had the right, squatters, to have, I can't remember the name of it, what's the name of the law that says if you're there for a certain amount of years, adverse possession, so of course that negated the adverse possession rights by signing on the paper saying “it is the city's, it's not ours, and we are here just leasing it."

So they basically got the papers, got them to sign it, and by signing it, they sort of gave away their rights as adverse possession.

And so here it is, there's kind of a balance of 700, 800 gardens, existing with now, a city agency that gives them letters of permission, and supports their cause, and actually adding more community gardens citywide by their support.

And the people in Green Thumb are not at all thinking, “oh we're doing this to destroy the gardens, or kick them out," they're like, “well, there's this many here, once in a while, there's a housing need," and there's plenty of land, there's like, still 40,000 vacant lands, that you know, somebody could move across the street, etc.

And so the policy changed as Koch administration and other administrations started seeding artists and people into the communities, kind of to improve it, but also kind of bring the value of, like Soho is one of the very focused areas where artists -- sold the buildings to make it nice and very fancy, and then of course everyone's like, “ooh, wow, cool place, I'm going to go live there, too!" 

And again with the squatters, I don't think anybody was like, “oh, I'm going to make this place nice so I'll be kicked out of my place," but it kind of allowed a certain “Oh, this is kind of a chic place, or this is alternative kind of living," etc. And started changing that. And the thing that I loved about gardens, was one thing that it did bring all the groups together to kind of work together, which the housing didn't.

Somehow housing was like, “there's a house, there's a group of people, they're defending themselves, and we're separate." It's like “apartments," everything is apart.

Community gardens, on the other hand is a name, “community" garden, so all the people come to be working as a team. So it's really a wonderful way of bringing people from all different backgrounds to a land that you work and you need to work as a team.

And so people come in, they hang out, they have barbecues, they have birthdays, so there's a lot of like, powerful memories of their children growing up, in those spaces. And it does really really strongly bring people together.

Not to say -- there's many gardens that are very exclusive, just for a family or one guy who's just like “I'm done with New York City, I just want to be by myself in green space." And at that point there was so many vacant lots, that nobody was like “oh well you gotta open it up," “Go over there, start your own garden, there, there, there, there!" So there was plenty of that energy.

And through the Giuliani terms when they specifically went after trying to sell all the vacant lots, nobody wanted all of them, so they're like giving it away, they're on auction, and there's investors saying “oh well maybe the prices will go up," but he very specifically went after the gardens. Right in the beginning. Right in the beginning he's like -- and we're like, “700 -- why -- 40,000? What's going on?"

And part of a possible policy might be that you go after the community that really takes care of the community, knows what their rights are, knows how to defend itself and watch out for it, and by destroying that and saying, we can do whatever we want, then you can put any kind of condos, and break the spirit of the community, the roots of the community. And once you've gotten that, then you can pretty much say, “here's my developer, here's this, I can do whatever I want."

And in a way it is to the power of the people that after 10 years, we were able to save 600 of those community gardens, they're permanent, they're here, people got arrested, they did civil disobedience, they came out to huge rallies, they wrote a huge amount of letters to their politicians, and at this point a lot of politicians have come up through that are now very supportive of the community gardens, they're very supportive of green space.

Everyone's like "a million trees there, a million this, a million green, let's plant bulbs and tulips," and even though I think, government versus people, people value the community gardens much higher because they see who's in there, while the governments see it as kind of a pain in the butt, but see the parks as kind of like, "it's controlled, we as agents are taking care of it, and we know what's best for the community."

While here you have the community gardens, people themselves are the agent of change. It's not always perfect and to the rule, it's fighting and angry and emotions, and life, which is what life is, versus paid staff that come and maybe have a couple of words with you, "oh you wanted trees, okay great, and oh you're a Puerto Rican neighbourhood and oh you want some benches that are for playing dominoes, okay," and they get paid $100,000 to plan that kind of conversation, while people for free, for nothing, they do it themselves, take care of it, they build a community, they build strength, yeah they get angry, and upset and all sorts of things, but it's like part of being in the garden, and the garden and the earth really heals, and allows them to see their more connected rooted parts to each other. So that something that comes really powerfully in that way.

And I've seen that happen with very diverse groups, and it's just very magical.