Eat the City(24)

Around 1978, Peter P. Smith III, commissioner of the Department of General Services, the agency in charge of all city-owned property, dreamed up Operation GreenThumb. He had been struck by the utility of gardening while gazing at roses in bloom on the site of the old Women’s House of Detention near his Greenwich Village home. In his plywood-paneled office in the Municipal Building, smoking cigarillos and sipping from a coffee cup labeled PETER, he outlined his strategy to The New Yorker: “The fact of the matter is that a vacant and unprotected lot can result in many more injuries and lawsuits against the city than a lot used and protected by a group of gardeners,” Smith said. “If we’re just lucky enough, a community group will come in and clear it,” he said. “When a group has a lot and farms it, the members stop thinking, That’s the city’s land over there, and start thinking, That’s ours. And of course, it is, too. If the city owns it, they own it.”

A coatroom at General Services was converted into an office for Frank Silano, the silk-tie-and-shades-wearing bureaucrat charged with managing the program at its inception. Flooded with fifty applications a week, almost all of which were requests to grow food, he developed the grand ambition of renting out 10,000 lots to gardeners for a dollar per year per lot, furthering the process of turning green a good portion of the most ravaged land in urban America. Some twenty-one agencies offered horticultural advice, seeds, topsoil, and tools. Would-be lessees crowded into the converted coatroom to sign the agreement. The New Yorker related a jovial transaction:

“Sign right by the X,” says Commissioner Smith to one applicant, the last in a line. “Good luck.”

“Did you get the three dollars?” the commissioner asks Frank Silano.

“Sure did,” says Silano.

“We just made six dollars for the city!” says the commissioner.

Soon the city was also in the business of manufacturing soil for gardens, using compost from truckloads of grass cuttings, tree trimmings, and leaves to produce two hundred tons of topsoil a month.

“The ultimate use would be to build housing. But we didn’t have the money,” said Mayor Ed Koch, years later. “If you have the money, you can do anything, and if you don’t have money, you do the best you can,” he said. The job the city did was, in his estimation, “terrific.”

“It was a bit of a sop,” said Ken Davies, who was another of the program’s early managers. At twenty-eight years old, just out of ag school, he would drive an old broken-down, city-owned car to the far corners of the boroughs to check in on hundreds of lots under his jurisdiction. “It was a way of giving a little something to communities. You could say it was awfully little.”

The view from Harlem was more critical. Mildred Gittens had worked to keep her piece of West 136th Street free of vacant lots, but as far as she was concerned, the city should have long before found ways to provide the full retinue of services—mortgages and loans, building code enforcement, firefighters, police officers, slumlord courts, housing rehabilitation—to prevent the dangerous vacant lots from ever existing. Gardening was irrelevant, she said—“I thought it was ridiculous.”

Willie Morgan also believed that government should have kept housing viable. “I was mad,” he said. “I felt that the politicians could have done something to get the buildings for people. Build them up. Let people have them cheaply.”

But people who had retreated behind triple-locked doors, ceding their streets to dealers, came back outside. Their plants needed watering, pruning, and weeding, even amid drug deals and shootings. These people made their blocks safer by their very presence. In that sense, it was the most basic form of community development.

The gardeners also actively battled local forces of destruction. One group on the Lower East Side wielded hoes to chase away junkies and pushers. Others schemed to take so many photos at weekly barbecues that the heroin traders would flee. With grim energy, another group quietly re-requested streetlight repairs every time their neighbors tore them out from their bases to cloak themselves in darkness. There were more prosaic struggles too: theft, vandalism, attrition. Birds ate the baby lettuce, and squirrels, the corn.

Another problem lay in wait. From the city’s perspective, the gardeners were temporary custodians until land could be improved or sold. But everyone knows a loan can be hard to recall. From the beginning, some bureaucrats “were scared about where it would lead,” said one of them. At private meetings, the question kept coming up: “How are we ever going to get it back?” “We put in bold red letters on our Green Thumb leases that this is a temporary use,” said Terrence Moan, the deputy commissioner of the Department of General Services in the 1980s. “To create a force that would oppose the development—that would make no sense.”

Some community groups had the foresight and resources to form land trusts to purchase the gardens outright. Some lost the gardens when the city’s Division of Real Properties deemed a site “prime” for development. Most kept renewing their leases. By the 1980s, the most quintessentially urban city in America had sprouted as many as 1,000 gardens and 10,000 gardeners.


EVENTUALLY, in the 1970s, when buildings all around Willie’s garden had come down, there was no reason to stay on 118th Street. “My customers were gone,” he said. He stopped paying rent, let his small farm lie fallow, and moved on.