Eat the City(86)

During the time I was reporting this book, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, and keeping chickens in the backyard became a minor national pastime. Beekeeping was legalized in New York City and a spate of wineries and breweries and new butcher shops specializing in humanely raised meat opened up around town. Little Brooklyn companies now make enough pickles and preserves to fill entire shops.

People are experimenting in urban agriculture in ways few imagined when I began writing. A Manhattan-based firm called BrightFarms specializes in building greenhouse farms on the roofs of supermarkets. In the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, Gotham Greens has built a hydroponic greenhouse on top of an old bowling alley. On the 40,000-square-foot roof of the old Standard Motor building in Queens, Ben Flanner grows hundreds of thousands of organic plants in neat rooftop beds. A former marketing manager at eTrade, he now kneels in the dandelion greens, before the geometric grays of Midtown Manhattan, working a mix of lightweight soil and compost created from local coffee chaff and cocoa husks and leftover fruit pulp from juice bars—“developing the terroir,” Ben likes to call it. He starts at five-thirty a.m., and he is sometimes tired enough to fall asleep with his head on the bar when he goes out at night. He gets by on less than $30,000 a year and his ability to survive is, for him, the test of the farming experiment: “If my bank account gets down to zero, I know something’s got to change.”

Universities have produced urban utopians who look into the future and want the city to feed itself. Each day New York City receives dozens of tons of food from trucks and ships and airplanes by the best estimate of the Port Authority—an amount that would be near impossible to produce locally. But analysts make more modest calculations: If you take the city’s 5,701 flat, strong, large rooftops, you’d have 3,079 acres to plant vegetables. If you take 10 percent of the city’s backyards and farm them modestly, you could feed about 72,000 people. If you build a thirty-story high-rise vertical farm on a whole city block, 50,000 people could eat each year. This last comes from Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University medical ecologist who believes cities must become self-sufficient. “I think a city is the equivalent of a parasite,” he says. “A big, giant parasite that’s living off of this landscape, and as the parasite’s needs increase, and the landscape remains the same, it creates huge problems for this parasite to maintain itself,” he says. “So how can you turn a parasite into a symbiont, that’s the big question.”

Over the time I was writing, I saw Willie Morgan settle into his new, permanent garden, after years of tending unwanted land. I followed David Selig as he savored his bees’ odd honey and unlocked one small mystery of city life. I watched Tom Mylan open a butcher shop and then move beyond it, as he developed the ambition to tear down the whole rotten, soul-sucking system of factory farmed meat. I saw that food can change people. It can change places, too.

Writing this book revealed to me a rich and complicated city that I didn’t know existed. New York had a brilliant agricultural past, which it cast away, then an even more brilliant manufacturing past, which it also cast away. For generations, planners have sought to move food production out of the city, but people have persisted in tending, growing, fermenting, butchering, and manufacturing basic foods to eat and share and sell—because they need to and because they want to. People think that New York City is not a place for growing things, but it turns out to be absolutely a place for growing things. It is a place where people practice alchemy, taking the stress and hardship of city life and turning it into something nourishing.

The city, with its size, heft, and momentum, can seem to obliterate individual stories and the collective past. Yet just as personalities are built by layers of experiences, so the city is built on the memories and knowledge of those who live here. The guy at the deli used to raise goats in Yemen. A woman across the street hopes to open a winery. The taxi driver plans to go back to Haiti and keep bees. A colleague at work catches crabs for her mother’s Trinidadian curry. Delivery trucks from the meat markets barrel through Midtown. The bar down the street offers beer made up the block. This all adds up to our collective experience. We build wineries, breweries, vegetable farms, beehives, sugar refineries, butcheries, and fishing piers, and the city reflects the needs we work to fulfill. People find ways to impose their hunger, their desires and dreams on the cityscape, seeking fulfillment from what they find nearby.

“Have some,” says Jorge Torres, another day in his garden, standing by his sugarcane plant. And he slashes into the stalk, carves out a pretty piece, and I taste the sweet juice produced in the soil of this city.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Thanks first of all to the people of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, who made food and drink with me, who trusted me with their stories, and who in many cases became my friends.

Special thanks to David and Kate Morrison, who showed me that things could grow in New York City, and to Dave Vogel, who helped me to imagine writing about it. This book would not exist without them.

Only one name appears on the front cover—but many, many people contribute to a book. Jane Ziegelman invited me to her home for a crash course in historical research, jumpstarting my search through old newspapers, magazines, and archives. John Waldman discussed with me the fates of fish and oceans. Just after dawn one morning, John Lipscomb steered me down the Hudson and through the oily waters of Newtown Creek, and Mitch Waxman shared observations about its beauty and horror. Edie Stone gave me her cell phone number and for years, answered questions whenever I called, and also generously opened up her files at GreenThumb. John Ameroso engaged in extended explanations of urban garden history, pH, and other matters of soil. K. Jacob Ruppert graciously invited me to Louisiana to page through his family collection of records; Gale Robinson did the same on Central Park West; and Harry W. Havemeyer on the Upper East Side. Ellen Pehek helped me to discover the natural world of city parks. Daniel Bowman Simon shared ideas and old newspaper clippings about urban agriculture. Yoni Brook gave me the rundown on city slaughterhouses. Buildings wizard Tony Robins helped me make geographic sense of the historical city.