Eat the City(17)
He would go out in the evenings, either to the club or the garden, to meet friends, take bets, and maybe put a trowel in the earth, and by day, he would give away almost all that he harvested. While his customers got addicted to betting, Willie got hooked on the seeds and the soil.
He would dust the earth with lime to “sweeten” it—though New York’s rubbled dirt already had high pH, unlike the red, acid Georgia earth he knew in childhood. Eager to offer something special and rare, he would seek out hard-to-find seeds not listed in the catalogs, such as red okra, violet potatoes, purple string beans, and collards with dark, bluish crumpled leaves—“I always want to give people something they couldn’t buy in the store,” he notes. Friends of friends would send their favorites from their gardens and little local seed shops in Georgia and the Carolinas. He would fertilize with horse manure, when he could get it from the NYPD stables. He would build himself a spot of southern farmland in the teeming city.
Never a simple farmer, Willie was more of an agronomist-about-town. He would strut the streets dressed in a suede jacket and pants, fondly showing off “rhinestones, shiny stuff, anything flashy.” He hit the numbers big in 1974 and opened Bodacious Unlimited, where he sold custom-designed clothing manufactured under the supervision of his seamstress mother. He has photos of himself drinking with Harlem aristocrats including the legendary boxing promoter Don King, also a onetime numbers man—“Sugar, he’s the biggest promoter there is!”—and the musician Count Basie, celebrating at an after-fight party for Muhammad Ali.
Since those days many have followed Willie’s path. Now it seems as though someone is angling to farm most every flat, open surface in the city. Beyond New York, across the country, new businesses will plant your yard for free and share the harvest, or home-deliver hoes and seeds and help you use them, or build a boxed farm fitted to your fire escape, or engineer your roof to bear heavy crops. Seed stores are sold out. Community gardens have wait lists a hundred names long. Despite this sudden interest, urban farming is no passing fancy; its history is as old as the consolidated New York City.
As late as 1880, Brooklyn and Queens were the two biggest vegetable-producing counties in the entire country. “The finest farmlands in America,” one observer wrote, “in full view of the Atlantic Ocean.” Outer-borough farmers trundled their peppers and corn and apples to the Manhattan market by boat and used the copious manure of city horses to fertilize their crops. Local farmers avoided cheap, durable crops such as wheat—which could be planted at a distance—and concentrated on expensive, fragile, and perishable fruits and vegetables that had to be produced near a market, setting up a model for what is harvested around cities to this day.
As New York developed and its land steadily filled with buildings, growing vegetables became a marker of crisis, during wars, recessions, and depressions. Over more than a century, land for agriculture has expanded and rolled back again and again in a dizzying reformat of the cityscape. Tens of thousands of people and thousands of lots have turned to agriculture as a way to deal with unused land and food shortages at every new nadir in the city’s ragged cycle of boom and bust.
The idea of the urban garden first caught on just as local farms were disappearing, during a recession in the 1890s, when a group purchased vacant lots for the hungry to till. In 1917, as war ravaged Europe and its farmland, President Woodrow Wilson appealed to every man, woman, and child with access to ground to plant. “So far as possible,” added the president of the National War Garden Commission, “all food should be grown in the immediate neighborhood of its place of ultimate use.” Dutiful Manhattanites planted “all higgledy-piggledy”—in truth, their efforts were amateurish. People dumped seeds into the earth at all the wrong times, and so close together that few plants could survive.
After the stock market crash of 1929, the city got organized. Gardens were set up at sites throughout New York, each staffed by two expert gardeners issuing seeds and rigid planting schedules to men who rolled up their shirtsleeves and women who hiked up their gingham dresses. By the mid-1930s, they had planted five thousand gardens producing more than a million pounds of food.
During World War II, regular Americans all over the country grew more than 40 percent of the nation’s fresh vegetables in Victory Gardens. Cabbages and corn poked out of the plaza of Rockefeller Center, bushy greens took over Manhattan backyards, and some people even commuted to other boroughs to plant and weed and harvest. The Jacob Ruppert Brewery on the Upper East Side ran advertisements urging, “Remember, ‘V’ stands for Vegetables … and for Victory.”
Unknown to federal administrators, and even to many chroniclers of the times, an underground culture of gardening continued long past the various government mandates, as immigrants in skinny, humid tenements turned rusting tomato cans and wooden soap and cheese boxes into planters for tomatoes, eggplants, beans, and corn.
Vegetables sprout in the city when food prices suddenly soar, when incomes drop, and when buildings fall down and fail to be built back up, leaving behind that rarest of urban commodities: space. They grow when influxes of people come from the country, think to raise food, and know how to goad it into maturity. All of these factors converged in Willie Morgan’s late 1960s Harlem. And there was also a new scourge destroying the fabric of a neighborhood, even as it created new possibilities for agriculture. Fire was sweeping Harlem and beyond, creating a city of vacant lots. In 1978, in a measure against blight, the city launched Operation GreenThumb, to make vacant lots available to gardeners. Willie signed up.