Eat the City(2)
In the early 1990s, the Lower East Side was a free-for-all where you could do anything you wanted in a vacant lot, and it turned out that a lot of people wanted to produce their own food. The farming felt somehow like an antidote to the fires, the drugs, and the death that had come before. In a place that had seemed bent on self-destruction, people had figured out collective action to sustain themselves with something as elemental as food. It was like an old-fashioned morality play, the destroyers against the producers, where the producers win—with the rooster as the standin for the phoenix rising from the ashes.
EVENTUALLY I left Fourth Street to work as a journalist in the Middle East. For years I trundled back and forth between various points in the U.S. and abroad, and in 2005, when I came back to New York for good, little was recognizable. Gardens had been bulldozed, vacant lots built into orderly new condos, murals painted over, gunshots stopped. Empty storefronts along Avenue C had turned into sweet little bistros and wine bars. Landlords were recruiting more high-rent professionals, and a lot of my former neighbors had moved away. Once or twice when I got out of the subway station and saw glimmering glass towers, I did a double take, thinking I’d exited at the wrong stop.
Already dispirited from reporting on war, terrorism, and destruction, now I also felt unmoored in the place I had called home. Maybe, I thought, I should literally plant roots. I started with tomatoes and cucumbers and basil in the garden on Fourth Street, which had survived after my neighbors fought to change its status to an official city parkland. Soon I realized I was more fascinated by the stories of the other gardeners than I was patient with the solitary labor of coaxing life from soil.
A debate was raging over the latest batch of roosters in the garden. Newcomers complained to the city about the racket—one rooster seemed to think each bright light was a new dawn and crowed at every set of passing headlights, while the others would chime in when a car alarm went off or they heard the bass in a boom box. The roosters had their supporters. But a vocal new faction was convinced that the birds posed the threat of avian flu. Emails with the subject line “The Chicken Question” piled up in my inbox. Soon the roosters were hustled into a borrowed truck and dispatched to an upstate sanctuary.
Yet elsewhere in the city, chickens were suddenly showing up as the backyard pets of young professionals. In one family I met in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn—a real estate agent and a college administrator with three kids—the woman of the house rose early in the morning, went out to the chicken coop, fed the birds, gathered their eggs, and sold a cartonful to anyone who came knocking in response to the sign in the window promising EGGS FOR SALE. The family kept four Rhode Island Reds, good sturdy American chickens, layers of eggs, survivors of winter, busty purveyors of white-meat flesh; two Golden Polish, birds with a feathery waterfall of bangs over their whole heads; two delicate little Egyptian Fayoumis, descended from the Nile Delta; and four French birds: two black-bodied, blue-legged Crèvecoeurs, and two Cuckoo Marans that laid chocolate-brown eggs. The man of the house took overly aggressive roosters to a nearby slaughterhouse and then cooked them on the grill. The family dreamed of expanding into a full-fledged urban egg farm, of coming home from the office to clean chicken shit.
What was going on here?
“It’s this new thing,” a friend told me knowingly. “I think it’s an urban back-to-the-land trend.”
But I knew that producing food had already transformed at least one neighborhood in the 1990s: mine. And I wondered if it had happened before, throughout the city. I began to investigate.
MORE than a century ago, far away in the little villages of eastern Europe, tired mothers crooned to their wakeful children the Sholom Aleichem lullaby: In America, there will be chicken soup in the middle of the week. They fulfilled that promise when they arrived in the newly constructed yet already crowded tenement buildings of my neighborhood, where they kept chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese. There was squawking and clucking in hallways, apartments, basements, and narrow airshaft yards. It’s not hard to envision a mother walking up wood stairs in my building, carrying her young child past an occasional flapping and feathery flight to the windowsill. For how long has a rooster wakened the people of Fourth Street? A hundred years? Two hundred?
How did history bring us to where we are? In an enormous, overdeveloped city with millions of citizens and hundreds of years of momentum, how do people mark the landscape with their own personal hunger?
I decided to find out. I took the subway deep into the boroughs to meet people who grow vegetables and fruits and mushrooms, who fish and forage, who go clamming and trapping, who collect honey, who produce cheese and yogurt, who make beer, wine, hard liquor and liqueurs, who keep goats for milk, and quails, ducks, and chickens for eggs, and who butcher city-grown rabbits, turkeys, roosters, and pigs. They invited me to rooftops and basements, rivers and fish tanks, fire escapes, window ledges, warehouses, packing plants, storefronts, breweries, wineries, and community farms.
Some of them were misplaced rural folk dreaming farm dreams on the subway. They were next-generation foodies forever seeking a more complex and rustic thrill from the homemade. They were people of limited means looking to save or make money. They were eccentrics obsessed with process. They were sentimentalists chasing tradition; they were parents concerned with health. They were professional artisans, and they were manufacturers focusing on profit. They were philosopher-farmers trying to build a new American urban life. In the most heavily built urban environment in the country, they showed me an organic city full of intrepid people who want to make things grow.