Eat the City(27)
Another time, a friend who went to the same elementary school as Willie comes by to lay down seeds. “He’s a good singer,” says Willie. Turns out the man used to sing with James Brown, before he went on to a career as a restaurant cook. “I don’t want to leave him to work alone,” says Kenny Fox, as he follows Willie’s instructions precisely for dropping down seedlings weighted by the surrounding clumps of soil, piling on the fertilizer, and pouring in water.
Many afternoons, Bubie Rizzo, an American Neapolitan with one bluish eye and one brown one, comes by the garden. Bubie will sit back in the chair, sprawl out in his white linen pants, squint up at the sky, and intone, “Weather’s changing.” In truth, he is less interested in growing vegetables than in accounts in the New York Post of the imprisonment of various mob bosses, as he talks with Willie about their mutual friends “from the East Side,” their code for their former Mafia associates.
Willie’s past here is as alive as the vegetables he grows.
But Harlem is different now. It starts with the kinds of condominiums recently constructed next door to Willie, sleek, serene dwellings finished with milled oak, zebra wood, and stone, with such amenities as a roof terrace with an outdoor fireplace—overlooking Willie’s garden, which has become an asset that real estate agents mention to sell new apartments. Middle-class and well-off people of all races have moved into sandblasted and refurbished brownstones. Less obvious is who is not on the street: in the past decade, the city has experienced an exodus of working-class African Americans, who can no longer afford to live in the place where they grew up. All over the city, people are missing. It’s now possible to pass whole densely built Harlem blocks where it’s hard to imagine the devastated city that not so long ago supplied plenty of room for southern migrants to grow vegetables.
DOWNTOWN, in the high-ceilinged offices of GreenThumb, decorated with mismatched 1970s officeware and posters from garden campaigns, rows of filing cabinets are filled with notes on gardens now defunct, and labeled: “MANHATTAN CANCELED.” “BRONX CANCELED.” “BROOKLYN CANCELED.” The gardens have left reams of paper in the city bureaucracy, as well as neighborhoods transformed.
When Willie first moved into his current garden, there was room for the sun to shine in. There were vacant lots to the east and the south, and to the west, a short building and a tiny park. He named the place Our Little Green Acre, in homage to the actual acre he’d tilled before—which became a housing development with a ground-floor Chase bank and a Starbucks. But a few years ago, construction began on three sides of Willie’s new garden all at once. As each new floor rose up, it blocked more sunlight and splattered Willie’s parsley, eggplants, and collards with cement. Willie was undismayed. His garden had official Parks status, so the developer would have to offer something in exchange for a permit to drive a crane over the tomato plants to carry steel beams to the upper floors. Maybe that season you could taste in his vegetables the building materials, the insufficient light—the rise, again, of real estate.
Willie bargained hard, and two of the developers ended up contributing to an iron fence at the front, a toolshed at the back, a little patio paved with interlocking bricks, a sprinkler system, and a setup for a barbecue. The next season, after the housing crash, as all the construction around him halted, Willie simply planted again.
“Nobody figured I could do this,” says Willie of his ability to keep plants alive in the city over so many years. He’s seventy-three years old now; he’s been gardening in the city for more than half his life. He pauses, and surveys his land. His eyes move from eggplants and tomatoes to the new twelve-story building, and the strip of shade it made on his collards. “I’ll be able to grow something, I know that,” says Willie. By now, he knows that the most desolate of urban landscapes can be made into fertile ground.
MEAT
AS LIGHT BREAKS over a dark line of trees in the distant reaches of Queens and the heat of the day begins its rise, Tom Mylan reaches into the back of a red Sierra GMC pickup, heaves out a dead pig, and throws it over his shoulder. Struggling under its 220-pound weight, he pitches it forward onto a plastic-covered plywood banquet table, where it lands with an unnerving thud. The pig is a Tamworth-Saddleback cross, long and lean, descendant of the native pig stock of northern Europe, but raised right here in Queens, on the grounds of New York City’s largest working farm. Tom Mylan is a Brooklyn butcher with blue eyes and a white apron, who has been hailed as a “rock star butcher” by the New York Times since he began cutting up whole animals for a Williamsburg shop.
Tom had first encountered the animal he is about to roast as a piglet right here at the forty-seven-acre Queens County Farm Museum. He toured the rocky, woodsy edge of the farm where the piglet was fenced in, and the animal smelled the meat on his butcher’s boots and burrowed in with its hard snout. Tom slapped its side as you would a dog’s and felt its rough, bristly, orange and black coat as the hog bit his toes and then followed him around the property, nipping at him. Here where the pig nibbled Tom, now Tom will eat the pig.
Surrounded by corn stalks and grapevines, Tom builds an aboveground fire pit, seven-by-four-foot square with cinderblocks for walls. In the center of the pit, he starts a fire with charcoal briquettes supplemented by hardwood logs. The barbecue heating, Tom tends the pig curled fetally on the table. He scores its thick skin with a box cutter so the fat can render and the meat can absorb his marinade of guajillo chiles, garlic, olive oil, lime juice, salt, pepper, and cumin. With a cleaver and a little hand saw, he cracks the chine bone—so the animal can splay out butterflied, fore and hind legs extended, empty, eviscerated belly exposed. With chicken wire and the help of a farmhand, Tom attaches the pig to a custom-made steel rack, and balances the whole rack-with-pig on the cinderblock walls over the fire.