Gardening Takes Root on City Rooftops
Bob Gordon has lived all over California and always had a big yard for a garden. Then, seven years ago, he and wife Betty became resident managers of an apartment building in West Hollywood. No yard.
Gordon explored the three-story building up to the roof, where he discovered a large tar-paper expanse lying fallow. For fire safety, there was a water supply up there.
“I’ve been farming on the roof ever since,” he says. “It’s my first rooftop garden, but it works fine. I use containers up to 15 gallons.
“I grow the rather common things like radishes, peppers, herbs and lettuce. I get so many tomatoes I usually have to compel our tenants to help me eat them.”
Gordon doesn’t think of himself as a pioneer; all he did was make practical use of some dead space. Nevertheless, he represents the sprouting of a movement in city gardening.
Unlike New York City, where residents grow tomatoes on their apartment roofs from Central Park West to Brooklyn, Los Angeles is characterized by the single-family home with back yard. But homeowners as well as apartment dwellers are discovering the advantages of rooftop agriculture, which can be done on any scale.
Ezra Klebanoff, whose mid-Wilshire back yard is a mass of flowers and vegetables, was looking for more space in a spot with unblocked sunshine when he discovered the garage roof. Now he climbs an extension ladder to tend leeks, cantaloupes and eggplants growing in planters lining the edge.
“It gets total sunshine all year,” he says.
“It was the only spot left,” says his wife, Anita, whose English flower garden is a neighborhood showpiece.
Jeff Tucker of Ocean Park landscaped his small yard with flowering and tropical plants, but still wanted vegetables. He installed wooden decking on his flat roof to make a surface for barrel planters filled with tomatoes, melons, squashes, lettuce and carrots.
It offers a double advantage, says Tucker: “I enjoy the extra space and it has a wonderful view to the ocean so it’s nice being up there.”
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Besides the pleasures of fresh vegetables, in the waste-not want-not ‘90s the notion of utilizing wasted space for growing vegetables has an ethical sheen.
“The terms of living in a city are changing,” says Peter Berg, director of San Francisco’s Planet Drum Foundation. Rooftop gardening is only one characteristic of the profile he describes as the “new urban pioneer.”
Such people, says Berg, co-author of “A Green City Program for the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond,” are likely to retrofit their homes to save energy, cut down on driving, keep a bucket in the shower to recycle the warm-up water. “And they definitely are growing some food on a continuous basis.”
Rooftop gardeners are being encouraged by Berg and other architects, planners and horticulturists who make up the growing green-city movement.
“The roof is a perfect place for growing food,” says Los Angeles environmental consultant Bob Walter. “It’s private, it’s close and it’s sunny.”
Walter is editor, along with Lois Arkin and Richard Crenshaw, of “Sustainable Cities,” a 1992 compilation of essays on ecological living in an urban environment.
He finds roof gardening especially appealing--not only for food production and the environmental advantage of covering asphalt and tar-paper with a blanket of oxygen-breathing foliage but also for the beauty of gardens in the sky.
“The usual rooftop is a forsaken place with some air-conditioning units and heating vents,” he says. “The very act of transforming it--of getting up high and having that view--can give the person a sense of centering and peace.”
The cover of “Sustainable Cities” is illustrated with three futuristic city skylines, all designed to integrate buildings and gardens.
Walter thinks rooftop gardens should be as natural to future buildings as underground garages, noting that garden space could be a selling point for apartments or condominiums.
“The closer we are to the food supply the less energy it takes to transport it,” he says. He envisions a “classy market like the Beverly Center’s Irvine Ranch Market” with a camera panning its rooftop gardens and a video monitor in the produce department showing “the produce you are buying came from upstairs--that’s how fresh it is.”
That’s for the future. Although various think tanks (such as Manhattan’s Gaia Institute) are sketching plans for lightweight soil and incubator greenhouses that would permit large-scale rooftop agribusiness, they are still on the drawing board.
As a transition step, says Berg, the Green City Project in San Francisco is creating one model of urban gardening. This week in the downtown low-income Tenderloin District, a resident-owned hotel will dedicate a rooftop garden with food and decorative plants growing in planter boxes placed on decking. The sponsors hope other Tenderloin hotels will follow.
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In West Hollywood, Bob Gordon’s garden is a maze of containers and pastel windmills. Watering can in hand, he leads a tour of his 16-by 14-foot rooftop plot.
“This is garden-variety basil and this is purple-ruffled basil,” he says. “I have a fig tree that is bearing, a pomegranate that is bearing, an avocado that is not and a loquat that is not--probably too young.”
He grows tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, radishes, arugula, herbs, lettuce, chard and cucumbers.
“We had an omelet for breakfast and almost everything in it was home-grown,” he says, although all his efforts are not successful. “I haven’t had much luck with zucchini in pots and no luck at all with tomatillos for green salsa.”
Gordon, 72, a mathematician who designs computer software, grew up in Los Angeles and has been an urban farmer all his life.
“Apart from the fact that the vegetables are better than anything in the store,” he says, “I get therapeutic value from gardening. I’ve spent most of my life sitting at a desk.”
The roof suits him fine. “It’s a hostile climate up here--it gets very hot and the wind blows.” But he has a panoramic view of the city skyline. “It’s most beautiful at dusk when the lights start to come on.”
