N.Y.’s Slices of Heaven in Trouble Despite Deal

For more than 15 years, Carmen Pabon has done something others might find inconceivable: She’s been an urban gardener in the heart of New York City, lovingly tending a plot of vacant city land on Manhattan’s blighted Lower East Side.

Laboring on a street of rundown buildings, some of them torched by arsonists in the 1970s, she and other gardeners like her across the city have spent years planting flowers, raising vegetables and reaping a new sense of community.

“We have always worked hard to keep this garden very special,” said Pabon, 76. “This has always been the kind of garden where old people and young people can come and relax; we have made it a place of real beauty in the city.”

Unfortunately for Pabon, her garden has also boomed in real estate value. Amid New York’s stunning economic recovery, the plot she works on is now thought to be worth $260,000 or more. City officials who once gave up on such land want to get their money’s worth from it, and earlier this year Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani endorsed plans to auction off 114 community gardens.

Deal Saves 114 Lots

To New York’s environmental activists, it was a declaration of war: Protesters dressed up as vegetables, fruits and flowers began marching on City Hall, taunting the mayor with kazoos and acts of civil disobedience. At one point, 75 were arrested inside the building. Yet Giuliani refused to cancel last week’s auction, and in the end it was a different kind of green--cold cash--that saved the gardens from almost certain destruction.

In an eleventh-hour deal, actress Bette Midler and two environmental groups pooled their resources to buy the 114 lots for $4.2 million. Under the arrangement, the gardens will be turned over to neighborhood groups for care and maintenance.

Beyond demonstrations and celebrity firepower, the tussle over New York’s community gardens shows how the city’s economic boom has become a double-edged sword: a force that can threaten a neighborhood’s sense of community even as it boosts real estate values.

Indeed, the demand for new housing is insatiable throughout the city. In some parts of Manhattan, small two-bedroom condominiums begin at $600,000; a new three-bedroom apartment can rent for $7,000 or more. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that some city officials would push to develop their vacant lots.

Despite the last-minute deal to save 114 community gardens, the fight to preserve neighborhood open space is not over by a long shot. There are 630 other green spots throughout New York whose fate is still undecided.

“These gardens are too valuable to lose, because the city has an obligation to provide green space for people beyond the crown jewels of places like Central Park,” said Richard Kassell, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which was one of several organizations suing the city over its plans to hold the auction.

Back in the arson-plagued 1970s, when New York flirted with municipal bankruptcy, City Hall gave an enthusiastic, albeit temporary, green light for activists to create these gardens. Almost immediately, the so-called Green Thumb Movement helped revive ravaged areas from the Bronx to Staten Island.

Today, many of these gardens have become neighborhood landmarks. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the spots are visited by swarms of young students, many of whom see vegetables growing for the first time in these urban oases. But it was clear their days were numbered, as pressures mounted to build more expensive housing throughout the city. Soon, developers were clamoring for the right to buy vacant sites and build on them.

For Giuliani, the issue was simple: Community gardeners were working on city-owned land, with the city’s permission. They had no rights to these gardens, but taxpayers had a right to expect that City Hall would maximize local revenue by selling off choice, underutilized land to the highest bidders.

‘Era of Communism Is Over’

As community leaders began demonstrating against Giuliani’s planned auction, the mayor dismissed them, saying, “The era of communism is over.” But altruism is still alive in the Big Apple, and as the deadline neared, the Trust for Public Land, an environmental preservation group, offered $3 million to buy 63 lots. Then Midler’s organization, the New York Restoration Project, offered to buy the remaining 51 for $1.2 million.

At City Hall, Giuliani called the deal “a win-win situation for all New Yorkers,” and activists cheered the happy ending. But they cautioned that the fight could start again, with the fate of other neighborhood gardens up in the air.

“If these gardens disappear, it’s not just an aesthetic question, it’s a real deprivation for people in New York’s neighborhoods,” said Roberta Greene, a spokeswoman for Midler’s group. “For many, it’s the only access to open space they have. How do you put a dollar value on that?”