Eat the City(22)
A tough, vigilant neighborhood advocate could sometimes stop vacant lots from taking over. Mildred Gittens, for instance, made it her business to ensure that her bit of West 136th Street did not sink into decline. She joined the police council and routinely called the cops to eject squatters from empty buildings. She knew the local urban renewal rules forbade demolitions, so when she found a demolitions man at work on a brownstone a few doors away, she threatened to sit on site until he stopped. “The minute you put a hole in the street on the block, you get garbage and everything will be thrown in there. It would look like H-E-L-L,” Mildred spelled out genteelly. “No empty lot,” she said. “No, darling. No empty lot is going to be there.”
But elsewhere, kids played ball on fields of glimmering, multicolored shards of glass. They made trampolines of ripped, rotted mattresses with coils like rusted talons. They swung from the ends of thick, oxidized wires dangling from upper-floor fire escapes. They hid in abandoned refrigerators, pulling the door shut and playing with that stickiness that made it hard to reopen. They tripped over used syringes piled in prickly mounds like poisonous, low-lying urban cacti. They played with matches, watching as the flames spread, double-scorching already burned places. They went digging and turned up knives and guns. People died on those lots. Worse than worthless, the areas were liabilities.
A new Vacant Lot Task Force in the Sanitation Department experimented with barricades, bollards, and berms to stop dumping. Deploying a fleet of heavy-duty dump trucks, hydraulic lifts, and front-end loaders, the force cleared about 22,000 tons of debris a year—only to see new garbage appear in the same places, said Ginny Gliedman, the task force director at the time. Besides, the goal was never to keep every vacant lot in the city clean—but rather, in the way of the shrunken ambition of bureaucracies in crisis, to spend federal grants.
In another attempt to expend minimal effort for maximal return, the city seeded 150 junked-out acres with clover, rye, fescue, and wildflowers, a mixture farmers use to replenish the soil in fallow fields. The result was sometimes “quite peculiar,” acknowledged Gliedman, as the seeds took root in some places and not others, giving the effect of a bald junky patch scattered with a scruffy stubble of growth—and some residents complained. They wanted manicured lawns and garden beds, they wanted evidence of concern and protection, they wanted their neighborhoods not to be burning and vacant and look like a war zone subject to odd, desperate horticultural experiments.
All over the city, people began to clean and plant and seed and hoe. They grew cotton for Q-tips and tobacco for cigarettes, but as often as not, they planted to eat. Peanuts, beans, and black-eyed peas, cherries, figs, and peaches, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and squash. It was as though people were summoning the resources of their country childhoods to get them through city hardships.
Their plants thrived in the abandoned lots in cut-off milk containers, half-gallon ice cream boxes, and even ancient tea kettles. People grew seedlings in tires and rusted boilers and funerary urns, old work boots (one seedling per shoe), and the giant wooden spools Con Edison used for cable wire. Greens shot out of sinks, porcelain bathtubs, and plumbing fixtures, as though someone had dropped whole bathrooms outdoors to be seized by the forces of nature. Old Colt 45 malt liquor bottles served as watering cans, and broken eggshells and coffee grounds as fertilizer. To stymie rats, they turned hamster cages over young seedlings. They locked their hoes and spades and trowels into dead, old cars parked on the lots like four-door toolsheds.
Discarded bits of cars had piled up in a lot on Maggie Burnett’s block of West 149th Street. “I was in shock,” Ms. Maggie said, when she realized that drug dealers had also taken over apartments in the cream-colored tenements across the street. One day, a thug threw a pistol into her basement, she said, and afterward, she accompanied the cops to another building, where they found two bodies perforated by gunshots. Finally, sick of the chaos, she decided to clear out the junk-filled lot. The dealers didn’t want it clear, she said, they didn’t want do-gooders out on the street watching their business. “They threatened me,” she said. Yet she and a few defiant others planted cabbages, cucumbers, squash, onions, and tomatoes. Mr. Walton—“God rest his soul”—served as sentry, day after day, sitting in his chair by the garden fence. For Ms. Maggie, digging into the earth recalled a South Carolina girlhood, walking in her father’s tracks while he sowed seeds with the mule. But in New York, she often had to break to call the police. The dealers were raided, and raided again, and then, after many years, they were gone. “People like that, you can’t let them tantalize you, get on your nerve,” says Ms. Maggie today, clear-eyed, straight-backed, relaxing in her shady, carefully landscaped garden near her fruiting pepper plants. “You got to fight.”
A quest for agricultural land was turning into a citywide movement. Downtown, a woman named Liz Christy hurled balloon “bombs” filled with water, peat moss fertilizer, and wildflower seeds over chain-link fences onto city-owned vacant land. After a year of bombings in 1973, her Green Guerrillas group gained the imprimatur of legitimacy when the city offered its first “community garden” lease in 1974: a lot for one dollar a month.
The City developed a new policy of permitting residents to plant on urban renewal sites when financing was still years away. Effectively, officials were contracting out their own mandate to keep city-owned properties clean and safe. There was no longer any pretense that government was up to the task.