Eat the City(26)

It turned out that the gardens were the city’s soft underbelly, vulnerable to every kind of change. They had been the landscape of the city’s lowest point—places to shoot up and turn tricks and deal drugs. Zucchini and corn and tomatoes had risen from the ashes, in a kind of interim claim for the collective spirit. And now these same lots bore early witness to the real estate recovery, as the first shiny condo buildings appeared on them like a mirage in the char.

In 2002, the city finally settled a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general on behalf of the gardeners. The agreement allowed some gardens to be sold or developed, but offered hundreds of others permanent protected status and stipulated that in future, displaced gardeners must be offered alternate space nearby. A few years later, when the city moved to develop housing on his garden, Willie accepted relocation. He went shopping for a new garden, surveying the few remaining city-owned vacant lots in his corner of Harlem. He found a place on 122nd Street that seemed perfect: small, but bordered on one side by another vacant lot and on the other by a park, allowing for plenty of sunlight. “When I saw this—bam! That’s it!” said Willie. “People said, ‘They ain’t going to let you put no garden there! You dreaming!’ ” It was just a few blocks away from the busy commercial strip of 125th Street, where street vendors hawked bangles, bags, baubles, holy books and self-published novels, and enough scented oils to keep all of Harlem smelling like Rivers of Honey and China Rain. It’s a good neighborhood for growing things, Willie thought.

In fact, it had been done before. More than a decade prior, Haja and Cindy Worley had cleared out piles of axles, bumpers, fenders, needles, and a half dozen abandoned cars and delivery vans to garden those lots and several adjacent ones. In the mid-nineties, the city had closed the garden in order to develop part of the site. Now Willie’s garden could be built on the remainder.

GreenThumb director Edie Stone wrote Willie a formal letter offering a choice of three plots, including the one he wanted on 122nd Street and Eighth Avenue. It was Block 1928 Lots 104 and 105, a pile of garbage and concrete slabs Willie dreamed into his future farm. He moved in with new soil and seeds in June 2005, and that very first summer he planted a full and profitable harvest.


“WILLIE!” calls Belkys Diaz, who lives just around the corner on St. Nicholas Avenue, as she opens up the latch on the fence at the front of the garden. Her hair is pulled back tight in a ponytail, she is wearing a cross and a low-cut white tank top, and she is pacing, impatient. “I want some tomatoes,” she calls. “I want ’em half ripe!” Willie, ever amiable, goes wandering between the second and third rows of tomatoes, looking for some yellow ones. It’s okay if they have faint stripes of green unripeness or red readiness, but he knows what she wants, the in-betweens. “I’m a tomato eater. I eat ’em in the morning and at night,” Belkys confesses to me. “It’s the third day in a row she’s bought tomatoes,” affirms Willie.

I once asked Willie if he’d thought about planting organically. “I thought about it …” he said, and faded out. That didn’t even merit a real answer. What Willie wants is yield. If his corn stalks are seven or eight feet tall, and if Miracle-Gro helps them along, well, so much the better, and he’ll keep a row of gallon water bottles filled with a greenish chemical stew ready to bathe the crops. Willie believes the fertilizer helps compensate for a soil laced with bits of 275 West 122nd Street, the tenement building that once stood on this lot and long ago crumbled into the earth, and now also 273 West 122nd Street, the new building taking shape next door, shedding bits of cement and brick as it grows taller. Willie’s pest control system, however, is chemical-free: a pile of stones he stockpiles to lob at birds and squirrels.

Vegetables are Willie’s currency. He carries them to the doctor’s office to give out to receptionists and nurses. “I never have to wait for an appointment,” he says. He takes them to the guys at the corner deli and can always count on a cheese sandwich stuffed with his own tomatoes. When his neighbors throw a party while Willie’s still out working the turnips, they come by to pick up stevia and mint to make mojitos and invite him to join them. Willie used to bring vegetables to the 101-year-old doyenne of his Harlem neighborhood, who wrote him a letter of support when the garden was threatened with development. “She’s a lady,” he said.

Willie delivers to his mother, his sister, his banker son, his hotel manager daughter. His brother drives up from Raleigh, North Carolina, each summer and takes home three dozen half-ripe Harlem tomatoes packed in tissue paper, swearing that they’re sweeter than the ones down south.

Preparing for a special delivery, Willie gets out a pocketknife and slashes great stalks of mint to stuff into a clean, clear plastic bag, and ties a fistful of basil with a rubber band. He chops some stevia, twist ties the stems, and puts the bouquet in a plastic water bottle filled with greenish Miracle-Gro-infused water—“a preservative,” he says—as though it’s something from the florist. He keeps handwritten customer lists on scraps of paper, with cell phone numbers to call so people come to the garden when the vegetables are ripe.

One day, a man comes walking by with a top hat, sunglasses, and greased-back long, wavy hair, sipping from a brown bag imperfectly concealing a can of beer. “I ran the bar,” says George Walker, introducing himself as a colleague of Willie’s from Top Club. “I helped him plant, too. We’re Geminis together. We spread the soil together.”