Eat the City(23)

Yet the lots were multiplying faster than they could be planted. By 1978, the city owned 32,000 unused lots, most filled with rubble and urban detritus. “Parts of New York City seem to belong neither to man nor to nature,” wrote the Times. “The former’s work [buildings] has been demolished, the latter’s [vegetation] erased by rubble. What’s left are wastelands.”


IN Harlem, love of the land was fraught. Early on, conservative black intellectuals had argued that African Americans would always be bound to southern agriculture. Booker T. Washington described the farm as the “Negro’s best chance,” maintaining that only a country life “working on the soil” could “uplift,” and he founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama as an agricultural college. Some of the great literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance came from a farming background, including Jean Toomer, who had majored in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin, and Claude McKay, who attended both Tuskegee and an agricultural college in Kansas. Yet African American notions of agriculture were tainted with memories of the hard labor and brutal force of enslavement.

Eldridge Cleaver noted in the 1960s that during slavery “black people learned to hate the land” and for this reason, “even today, one of the most provocative insults that can be tossed at a black is to call him a farm boy, to infer that he is from a rural area or in any way attached to an agrarian situation.” He wrote that blacks “have come to measure their own value according to the number of degrees they are away from the soil.” Even nowadays, says Karen Washington, an African American advocate for gardens in New York City, it can be hard to combat the sense that farming is the kind of demeaning labor that people left the South to avoid.

But for Willie Morgan it was simple: Growing things was part of his past. No one ever meant to abandon agriculture, he insists. People came north for jobs, hoping all the while to retire to the farm. In any case, in his generation, African Americans who started their lives on the farms of the South would stamp their history on the geography of New York City.


IN Washington, on the roof of the Longworth House Office Building, the Brooklyn congressman Fred Richmond planted a vegetable garden. He installed four-by-eight raised beds of squash and tomatoes, radishes and lettuce, in dark earth mixed with manure and sludge furnished by the USDA. Richmond was the only urban member of the House Agricultural Committee. He liked to explain that New Yorkers ate the combined output of forty-two million acres of farmland, and a million people in the city used food stamps, whose terms were set in the Farm Bill. His position also made sense because Richmond was considering a run for statewide office and ag could win over upstate voters. In the meantime, the millionaire industrialist entreated colleagues to clamber awkwardly out his office window and visit his garden. “You’d have to flop one leg out and climb out, and women with skirts would grumble, ‘How am I going to do this?’ and they’d get up on a chair and swing their legs out,” said Glenn Van Bramer, Richmond’s legislative assistant.

During a visit to a steam bath, Richmond convinced Jamie Whitten, the powerful southern congressman in charge of the appropriations subcommittee for agriculture, to fund a $1.5 million pilot program for food gardens in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Houston. Others barely noticed that a section on urban gardening had been included in the 1976 agricultural appropriations bill. “This is a step to improve urban blight,” said Richmond, who had taken to reading magazines such as National Hog Farmer on the commuter flight from Washington to New York. An arrest over soliciting sex from a sixteen-year-old boy ended Richmond’s political career—but his gardens were just taking off.

Soil holds the history of a place. In New York, it’s a tale of boom and bust, as almost all city soil has at one time or another had a building on it—and then, when the building came down, in it. John Ameroso, who was hired to implement Fred Richmond’s federal urban agriculture program in Brooklyn, found his staff knew plenty about crop rotations but had much to learn about this brick-riddled earth. “Rubbled soil” is the term Ameroso began to use, as he figured out that bricks—composed of lime, clay, and sand—combined with organic matter to make ideal growing material. “They kept pulling bricks out. I said, ‘Use the bricks as part of your growing medium,’ ” said Ameroso. His Cornell University Cooperative Extension Program hauled horse manure from police department stables to hundreds of sites, and in 1978 alone produced 540,000 pounds of vegetables and fruits worth $400,000.

All of urban agriculture was experiment and improvisation. Soil in many lots was saturated with lead used in gasoline and cadmium used in diesel fuels, as well as other dangerous heavy metals. To investigate their effects on plants, Cornell grew crops in tainted soil and fed them to guinea pigs, and examined both the plants and the guinea pigs’ livers. Ameroso soon found that keeping the pH of the soil near neutral tied up the metals so the plants did not take them in, and any trace amounts concentrated in the leaves, not the fruit. Adding organic compost could help reduce the concentration. There were ways to make polluted land produce wholesome food.

Urban gardening was one of those brilliant ideas that worked like a Rorschach test to reflect whatever the beholder wished to see. It would provide food for the hungry, nutrition for the ailing, therapy for the distressed, and expression for the creative. It would educate children, employ the elderly, and help fix the environment. It would reclaim neighborhoods from blight, build community, and reform and redeem the city.