I’m Starting a Garden, of Questionable Legality

This article originally appeared in my newsletter.

I’m starting a new community garden.

Technically, we don’t have permission to do this (yet). The city’s Department of Transportation owns the land. I haven’t been able to get ahold of them. We’re starting the garden anyway.

It’s a long, narrow strip of land.

When I invited an experienced community gardener to see it last year, he told me that it looked like it used to be, or was supposed to be a sidewalk.

“But it’s the Bronx,” he said, “So they just left it like this.”

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

1) No Green Space is Too Small

In the 1970s and 80s, after many buildings in the South Bronx burned to the ground, the people hauled out the debris and turned those lots into gardens.

Hundreds of those gardens exist today.

They often fill large plots the size of an apartment building.

Today, the once-neglected land in the Bronx is now very valuable. Our best bets are the spaces that others don’t want.

That means spaces that are too small or awkward for buildings.

This strip of land is over 600 feet long, but only 26 feet wide. Maybe you could make a home for Flats who wanted to kick SpongeBob’s butt, but not for anybody else. It’s going to be a far better home for native bees and insects than it would be for us.

2) Take The Minimal Viable Step

I had walked by this space dozens of times, nearly stepping on dog poop almost every time.

The idea that it could be something more had seeped in.

One day last fall, I was talking about it at Maria Sola, the community garden.

“You know, there’s not as much planting to do here anymore. What we need are more green spaces,” I said in a small group of volunteers. “It’s time to take over that space on 132nd St.”

“Let’s just go buy a planter and do it,” someone said. He left on his ebike right then, bought some crappy plants and two planters, and we went that afternoon.

We used low-lying fencing that someone else at the garden had found in the dump at Central Park and brought back.

Two weeks later, the planters survived on their own outside, exposed to anyone who walked by.

So we planted a few daffodil bulbs we had lying around.

3) Invite Everyone to Participate

At a neighborhood environmental event, I wouldn’t shut up about it, and a short Guatemalan man named Cesar overheard me. “I can get you a meeting with the community board for support. But they’re going to want to see that you’re engaging the community, that it’s not just you.”

“Oh well, I’ll tell everyone about it.”

“Yeah, but like they gotta have their input, so you should host an event or something.”

I told everyone I knew to come and hosted two sessions for on different weeks for those who couldn’t make it.

At those sessions, we began to share ideas. We came away with some consensus on a few key things.

First, move in phases, year by year. Don’t do the whole thing at once. It’s too much work.

Second, we wanted a walking path without fences instead of a traditional community garden.

Third, we just wanted to do it. We didn’t want to be slowed down by bureaucracy or go for perfection.

Find a Core Group

After the second session, I’d convinced a guy in my building who was a landscaper to help.

“I need you there,” I told him bluntly at the end. “I actually don’t know what I’m doing.”

He laughed. “As long as we have three of us, we’ll be good.”

“Only three?”

“Yeah, man. Three of the right people who can do the work.”

He was talking about manual labor. But I thought about it more broadly. Volunteer projects can not rely on one leader or person to do the work. I think three is the magic number.

4) Remove as Many Political Obstacles as Possible

“It’d be nice to have benches,” one neighbor said during the brainstorm.

“Well if you have benches, it’s gonna turn into a hangout spot,” someone else said.

I jumped in. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about the hangout spots or the NYPD. If you create a hangout place, either the city or the police will want to monitor that. I say we keep benches out of the plan for the first year. Remove the political obstacle.”

100% Volunteer and Donation

In the same spirit, we decided that we could execute our plan with our own time and some easy donations.

Someone from the New York Botanical Garden attended the meeting and offered us plants. We have shovels and tools at Maria Sola. We have rain barrels we can install as a water source later. We have compost. We can get wood chips delivered by our friends at Concha Arborist Service any time.

5) Attend The Boring Meetings, But Don’t Let Them Stop You

We’ve done this without permission from the Department of Transportation. We haven’t been able to get a hold of them.

That’s not ideal. Without some kind of formal maintenance agreement from DOT, we’re one bureaucratic mood swing away or one bad elected official away from losing everything.

They could decide tomorrow that they want to make it a sidewalk again and tell us to kick rocks.

So the meetings matter. As the urbanist Jon Jon Wesolowski put it: “Between now and meaningful change in your community are 1,000 boring meetings that need good people to attend.”

I’m on meeting four.

I had to present to a community board committee and get approval, just for the privilege of presenting to a bigger meeting to get a letter of support. Then that isn’t permission from DOT. It’s just evidence that the community wants this, that it’s not just one person with a shovel.

I don’t want to let the planting season go by while we wait for city agencies.

We decided that cleanup, mulching, and composting are fair game right now. Who’s going to object to us making a neglected strip of land look better?

But we’re not putting more plants in the ground until we have something in writing from DOT.

So that’s where we’re at, with planting season fast approaching.

Action Is an Antidote

Is this going to save the world? No, it won’t. And I don’t even want to pretend that I’m doing it for purely altruistic reasons.

When I was a little kid, I loved the blue Nutri-Grain bars. Yet, every time one of them broke, I cried. “IT’S BROKEN,” I would yell, saddened about this unfortunate incident.

These outbursts, I think, were ways I tried to deal with the anxiety of the mysterious and uncontrollable world around me.

Am I just psychologically tricking myself into feeling better by throwing myself into this project? Maybe.

But I know that when I’m spreading compost that we made right now and adding it to this abandoned strip of sidewalk in the Bronx, I don’t feel helpless. The daffodils, after all, are coming up.