Even longtime residents of New York City are often unfamiliar with the South Street Historic District, a very small section on the east side of downtown Manhattan. Situated below the Brooklyn Bridge, the neighborhood once served as the city's port, was long home to its wholesale fish market, and later the shopping mall at the South Street Seaport, which has recently gotten a snazzy makeover. Less still is known about the residents who changed the shape of that neighborhood's course, mostly artists and writers who moved there in the 70s, 80s and 90s because it was one of the last remaining affordable parts of Manhattan. Despite its location at the tip of the island, and next to two of its major bridges, when I was growing up there in the 90s and early aughts, the Seaport felt mostly isolated from the city at large, trapped between industrial and tourist aesthetics; each time my grandmother would visit the loft my family lived in, she would gleefully tell us the cab driver had yet again been uncertain whether he should drop her off alone in front of our building.
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It was in this place, surprising as it may have been, that my mother and our neighbors banded together to transform an abandoned city lot into what would eventually become a community garden, and then a tiny city park. Modern community gardens in New York have their genesis in the 1970s, when the city's disastrous financial situation left many lots vacant, and residents, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods, began to take over those lots for their own use. In a city of limited space, they are constantly at threat (though, due to the internet, the barrier of entry to understanding how to get one started is much lower than it used to be). FishBridge Park —dubbed that by its makers as an homage to the neighborhood's fish-mongering legacy and location—is a ripe example of a community project that came together largely because of the forces that are working against many of the communities in the city that would benefit from such a place. The garden was one of my purest childhood pleasures, and its creation one of my earliest memories. So for Earth Day, I spoke to some of the community members involved—including my mother—on what it took to take over a place that had been neglected and was now wanted, what it did for that community, and where both stand now.
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GENESIS OF THE GARDEN
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The genesis is a bit clouded in the mists of time, but you remember that parcel, which, when we moved there, it looked like two different parcels; a lower parcel on Dover and Water, and then the upper parcel, which had been taken over by a parking lot, before the Jehovah's Witnesses built there. The lower parcel was just being used as a rat-infested garbage dump. It was around '86 when a few of us decided that it seemed to be abandoned. First thing we did was cleaned it up a bit. I remember going in there with a wheelbarrow and heavy gloves and pulling out all sorts of awful crap and garbage.Then we got the city to come in there somehow and clean it up—I forget how that happened. But as soon as it was cleaned up, there was a guy that had a parking concession under the Brooklyn Bridge ramps, and he started parking cars in there. We were outraged by that. And to make a long story short, we put up a ruckus, and the city came by and basically kicked him out and put up a chain link fence.
DERRY: Gary went to the city, and asked for permission, and they said 'It's a city lot, you can't have it.' That was in the fall of 1990.So we said, well, that's too bad, and cleared out all the trash ourselves and built beds. I don't know where the money came from, I don't know where the lumber came from, but we built these beds and we planted tulips. [A Post article from the time claims the money was raised through a neighborhood party.] None of us knew anything about gardening. We planted a bunch of tulip bulbs and daffodil bulbs and I remember planting them and not knowing which end went down. Like I wasn't even sure we had the right end down and up, because we knew so little.
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Then winter came, and spring came, and the tulips and the daffodils started coming up, and we were like, wow, this is so cool. At the same time, right before Earth Day, Gary got a notice saying, 'You now owe the city $7,000 a month in rent because you're squatting on this property.'
EARTH DAY, 1991
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DERRY: I got this phone call Monday morning at like 6 AM, and Gary's like, 'You gotta get over here, there's all these cameras, and all these people here.' It was a slow news day—hard to believe in this day and age. We called all the people in the neighborhood, and everyone showed up with their kids, and the tulips were blooming! It was a perfect Earth Day story. We were all over the place with these little kids and this community garden with the little tulips.FAGIN: Of course, what happened was all the other networks saw it, and they started sending crews down all afternoon. So we were on the afternoon show and then we were on the evening show and they would interview us and they would call the city, and the guy there was like, 'Why am I getting all these calls from TV stations as to why we're kicking these kids out of the garden, this unused vacant city lot?'DERRY: The mayor's office is like, well, this doesn't look good for us. [laughs]FAGIN: That next day we got a meeting at City Hall and that was the beginning of us getting the parcel, which turned out to be more than just the lower parcel, it turned out to be that whole sliver all the way to Pearl Street. Then we got a temporary lease, then we got put into the GreenThumb program, and then the GreenThumb program got put into the Parks Department, and we were one of the first two GreenThumb gardens to be issued permanent park status. When you're a GreenThumb park you're always susceptible to being taken over by anybody, a developer, or whoever buys the property. But once you're a real park, you're city park land and that never goes away.
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GARDENING AND KEEPING THINGS ALIVE
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BECOMING A CITY PARK
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