The Fight to Keep NYC’s Green Spaces in Black and Brown Communities Intensifies
It’s a scorching Saturday on Mosholu Parkway in The Bronx. At Meg’s Community Garden, some volunteers hand out banana loaves and ginger lemonade to locals. Others make sure kids don’t run into the street while their parents pick corn. The rest teach plant names to passersby and take pictures for the garden’s Instagram page. When visitors have questions, they are directed to Raymond Pultinas, the former English teacher who founded the garden in 2016.
Just a few weeks ago, these Bronx residents were not enjoying fresh-baked bread and each other’s company. They were signing petitions, painting cardboard placards and planning a sit-in outside the DeWitt Clinton Campus, protesting an eviction notice the high school handed them in April, arguing the garden was not in the best interest of students.
The volunteers fought tirelessly for their survival, sending dozens of emails to the school’s principals and holding meetings with their City Councilman Eric Dinowitz all summer. “It paid off,” Pultinas said. Meg’s garden is safe, and he is now part of a new Clinton garden Advisory Committee, comprised of students, teachers and parents, who will decide how campus property can be used for green spaces.
This is not the first time community gardens have been at risk of losing their land. The fight pitting community activists against city officials and developers goes back decades. In the late 1990s, the city put over 700 community garden lots for sale to residential and commercial developers. These days, as the pandemic continues to rage, green spaces feel more necessary than ever. In predominantly Black and brown, lower-income neighborhoods like The Bronx, the attempts to shut down the gardens are common and another hindrance to improving the communities’ health outcomes.
It certainly felt like that for the founder of Meg’s Garden. Pultinas once taught and served as the Clinton school’s sustainability coordinator. The idea for a project that would promote healthy eating and nutrition started in 2010 with his students, and became Meg’s Garden in 2016, named after the late Bronx activist Megan Charlop. A year later, once retired, Pultinas formed the nonprofit James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center to teach students and locals how to grow fruits and vegetables at Meg’s Garden.
“It’s like an outdoor classroom for the stuff they don’t learn anywhere else,” he said. “Students and locals get to share skills for growing healthy food and leading sustainable lifestyles.”
Less than a mile from Meg’s Garden, on Bailey Avenue, the gardeners of Tibbett’s Tail are still locked out. When the pandemic started, volunteers from the North Bronx Collective — which Tibbett is a part of — saw great potential for their local community in this long-neglected strip of land, and spent months picking trash, cleaning the soil, shoveling and planting herbs to turn it into a vibrant green space.
On March 28, the NYC Parks Department put up a chain-link fence, blocking access to the garden. “Tibbett’s Tail is not a park, it is an unsafe highway slope that falls directly onto the Major Deegan Expressway,” says Charisse Hill, a spokesperson for the Parks Department. “As such, we will not allow public access to the area. Breaching this site is illegal. The spaces closed to the public are done so primarily for everyone’s safety.”
LoriKim Alexander, one of the collective founders, disagrees. Tibbett’s Tail may have a drop off onto the highway, she said, “but you would really have to put a lot of effort to roll down the hill.”
As they cleaned up the land, the volunteers made an organic barrier, a log wall from fallen branches. Alexander said they kept the Parks Department updated as they went, who were initially supportive of the initiative until they “suddenly” changed their minds.
Now “air rights are getting sold, zoning regulations are changing, and we’re going to pay the price,” she said. “What is going on is a serious land grab.”
The gardeners of Meg’s, Tibbett’s Tail and others are not fighting to beautify their block or keep their Sunday afternoons busy. They’re fighting for what has proved to be a life support as the pandemic laid bare inequalities in neighborhoods susceptible to lower physical and mental health outcomes.
“Green spaces were keeping people sane,” said Alicia Grullon, co-founder of the collective restoring Tibbett’s Tail. A Bronx native, she said such areas became essential to seek relief from indoor confinement, especially where “people live in big buildings surrounded by asphalt with few trees around,” and many are “already struggling with housing insecurity or food scarcity.”
Yet, Black and brown and low-income neighborhoods tend to have significantly fewer acres of green space available than wealthier, whiter parts of the city, according to a report published in May by the Trust for Public Land.
These areas were also the hardest hit by the virus. But the city scrambled to address the issues faced by these neighborhoods, Alexander said, forcing members of the North Bronx Collective to jump into mutual aid. “We had to help each other out,” she said.
For months, volunteers raised money, distributed gift cards, went grocery shopping for those at risk and partnered with City Harvest to provide their neighbors with fresh, healthy produce.
Pultinas took a similar action to support locals. During the lockdowns, he and his partner walked miles every other day to care for the garden. They distributed over 700 pounds of food through community fridges. And with residents unable to visit the green space, they provided materials to grow fresh vegetables at home.
“They gave us the seeds, the soil, everything, and taught us how to do it,” said Clementina Sarpong, a former DeWitt Clinton student.
Annalicea Deer, a senior at the school, agrees, “When it’s just bodega after bodega around, or fast-food chains, you never really get fresh food like that or learn how to make it,” she said. “It really helped to stay healthy.”
That’s why “it was such a shocker” when Meg’s Garden eviction notice came in April because they thought they had survived the worst of the pandemic, Pultinas said. “We felt like we were frontline workers.”
In East Harlem, it was the city’s composting service that shut down a few weeks into the pandemic due to lack of funding. Quickly, a team from the Pleasant Village Community Garden took over. “We processed over 20,000 pounds of food scraps in eight months,” said Kim Yim, who oversees the garden. “All of that would’ve gone to land waste.”
They expanded their plot for food donation, where they grow everything from pears, plums, tomatoes, zucchini to squash and lettuce.
“It’s frustrating and a little confusing that they would want to destroy all that,” Yim said. Her garden is one of many community gardens targeted since 2015 by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s initiative to build affordable housing. The pandemic stalled many real estate projects, but developers are now eying her land once again.
Community gardens and affordable housing “shouldn’t be competing against each other,” Yim said. Throughout the pandemic, she says community gardens like hers also served as havens for self-care, conversation, recreation, and physical activity.
“I don’t know how I could have handled being quarantined and isolated from everybody had I not had that garden to use as my open space and place of self-care,” she said.
A recent study found that urban green spaces provide a range of mental and physical health benefits, which becomes even more critical in times of crisis. Not only does proximity to parks decrease the chances of heat strokes, heart disease and overall mortality, but people who used them also “felt less stressed, less anxious, and benefited from a sense of social cohesion,” said Christopher Kennedy, assistant director of the Urban Systems Lab at Parsons School of Design.
But Kennedy warns against focusing on park proximity because “that doesn’t really mean it’s a good park, right? Or that it has the amenities the locals actually need? Or want?” He says there is still often a mismatch between the needs of a community and the spaces they are offered, especially in underserved neighborhoods.
Alexander, one of the collective founders, has noticed this discrepancy in her neighborhood. “If you go to Van Cortland Park, you’re smack dab in The Bronx,” she said. “But a lot of Bronx folks don’t feel comfortable in that space because [there are so many] cops there.”
She sees community gardens as a way to bridge this gap. That is, when they are open.
“Gardens are very vulnerable to destruction,” said Alexis Andiman, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental legal non-profit. In November 2020, the organization started a petition to request better legal protection for community gardens, stressing their value to Black and brown communities.
If successful, “developers would be faced with an extra procedural step to take over the land,” Kara Goad, a legal fellow at Earthjustice, explains, “and gardeners would have more of a say in the decision.”
Earthjustice is still waiting to hear back from the city on the petition.
In the meantime, most gardeners share in the sentiment that “[developers are] happy to let us clean up the land for free when they don’t want it,” Grullon from the Collective said. But as soon as something more profitable comes along, “we’re out.”
In The Bronx, Pultinas still revels in his win, for now, enjoying time back in Meg’s Garden, teaching and growing crops with locals.
“It’s a big victory for us,” he said. “We are here to stay, for the students, for the community [and] we can start to dream again.”
