Eat the City(25)
In the decades that followed, he opened a new numbers spot and tended another garden—a little lot on 123rd Street owned by another numbers man. He bought a new business, a bar called Top Club, as Harlem settled into a new low of violence and desolation. When the state-run Lottery considered running a daily game to compete with the local numbers joints, the Harlem numbers barons sent a telegram: “Mr. Governor, if you have this taken away from us we will all have to apply for welfare, which you say you don’t have a budget for. We do not intend for anyone to take numbers away from us because we invented it.” The Lottery launched anyway, undermining an active, if illegal, spot in the Harlem economy. Tiny rocks of concentrated crack cocaine hit in one last, all-encompassing wave of destruction. Kids would hold a gun to you for nothing. Bulletproof Plexiglas appeared in every corner store. Top Club and other bars failed, said Willie, “because people were afraid to go out.”
Yet Willie joined a fellow retiree from the nightlife—and two others retired from union jobs at Ford and General Motors—in a new garden. This particular terrain had once been occupied by 2197 Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Long ago, Willie recalled visiting a high school friend who lived there to rehearse R&B in the living room. Neglect had made that living room an open field, under hoe and rake for more than a decade by the time Willie arrived. By the early nineties, his colleagues wanted more to relax than to produce, and they offered industrious Willie ever-larger pieces of rubble to turn. Keeping nightclub hours for farmers’ tasks, soon he was sowing half the lot, which took up a quarter of the block. Early in the season, he sometimes worked until two a.m. with a few friends for company, his hands rhythmically patting seeds into the cool earth. He set up an informal business selling what he grew from the ground. This time there was no gambling involved; Willie was dedicated to vegetables alone.
By the late 1990s, a new Harlem was emerging yet again. Although many brownstones had been destroyed, neglect had preserved others—original marble vestibules, stained-glass windows, oak and cherry floors and stairs, brilliant tile fireplaces, and twelve-foot ceilings were shabby but intact. As real estate values rose citywide, Harlem residents began to find handwritten notes taped to their windows and slid under their doors: “Want to sell?” In 2005, the Corcoran real estate company opened an office just a block from Willie’s garden, where seventeen full-time agents pushed uptown properties.
Downtown, the dot-matrix printers of the city’s Integrated Property Information System spat out green-lined reports on Harlem gardens, saying, “QUERY DISPO REQUESTS,” which in city jargon meant to check for potential for disposition: development or sale. Representatives of various agencies would meet and trade properties: “I’ve got three lots on DeKalb Avenue, and you’ve got two lots. I need to build a school. What do you want me to give you for your two lots?” Letters went out to GreenThumb gardeners: “Please be advised that your organization’s agreement with GreenThumb is CANCELED, effective immediately.” A neat checkmark would fill the box by a handwritten fill-in-the-blank explanation: “Site has been sold to private owner for development.”
Pleased with the incoming funds, Mayor Rudy Giuliani set about selling off the city’s surplus land in earnest. A fax dozens of pages long spilled onto the floor in the downtown offices of GreenThumb, notifying directors that all the gardens under their jurisdiction—more than seven hundred—were to be transferred to the city’s housing department to be developed. Soon, more than a hundred gardens were put on the auction block. Vegetable plots were bulldozed, protests were organized, and gardeners arrested. “This is a free market economy,” Giuliani told protesters, with his inexorable tendency toward confrontation. Welcome, he said, “to the era after communism.”
His obtuseness helped turn a tribe of peaceable, solitary gardeners into activists. “No gardens, no peas!” yelled Haja Worley, a tall, soft-spoken Harlem construction worker who was incensed when a bulldozer mowed down his forsythia, Rose of Sharon plants, and several rare mulberry trees. Eventually Haja got his own talk radio show on WHCR, Harlem 411, which he used as a forum for eviscerating local politicians. He called Harlem gardeners together to strategize. Even apolitical Willie took the A train down to City Hall to save his tomatoes.
The gardeners argued that time had changed the deal. A few decades prior, no one would have guessed that ephemeral vegetable beds could have the concrete physical power of bricks and mortar to change a neighborhood. But the gardens had become community institutions, where people organized birthday parties and Mother’s Day picnics. They were places that confronted problems—where neighbors would enforce a drug ban, and where juvenile offenders were sometimes sentenced to work rather than detention or a fine. While cleaning and clearing and planting and harvesting, people had preserved and protected their small spots of land. “We consider ourselves grassroots developers,” said Haja Worley.
It’s a tricky thing to figure out when to sell a property in a neighborhood coming out of its nadir. A 1999 study by the Brooklyn borough president found that 96 percent of 440 sites sold at public auction in previous years had remained vacant, often used for illegal dumping or car storage. When the direction of the neighborhood is still uncertain, developers may be willing to stockpile properties but not actually build. Sometimes gardens were torn down for no particular reason.
For renters who garden in a tough neighborhood in recovery, development brings the feeling of watching something slip through your fingers. Several NYU researchers proved the intuitive claim that community gardens increase sales prices of nearby properties, most noticeably in the poorest neighborhoods. So gardens can have an ironic effect: They improve the neighborhood enough that real estate values pick up and someone wants to develop—and eradicate—the gardens. And rental prices can rise high enough to force out the gardeners.