Les communautés de migrants et le rôle des jardins communautaires à New York

This story is part of our series on community gardens. There are hundreds of community gardens in the New York City area and we’re telling some of their stories. We’ll end the series on Sept. 8 with a live broadcast from Hattie Carthan Community Garden in Bed-Stuy on WNYC. Listen on 93.9 FM or wnyc.org.

Just after sunset on a recent Saturday a handful of migrants settled into chairs on a sidewalk abutting a community garden in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and prepared for movie night.

The night’s selection was a 2012 film, “War Witch,” about a 12-year-old girl in an unnamed African country who is forced to become a child soldier. Both the garden space and the film connected with the audience in a special way.

“We love the garden because we can cook our traditional foods, and after a long day of getting rejected from job after job and just struggling, it’s nice to sit with our brothers and watch a movie, and eat,” said Oumar Barry, 27, a migrant from Mauritania, in Northwest Africa, speaking in French through an interpreter. “And it reminds us of home.”

Barry’s been staying at a city-run respite center across the street for nearly two months, along with hundreds of other migrants, most struggling to find their footing in the city. Their experience has been somewhat eased by volunteers at Bushwick City Farm, who have used the garden to help feed and entertain the migrants, provided them with prayer mats and portable toilets, and found neighborhood residents who were willing to let the newcomers shower in their nearby homes.

“I think the unwritten history in the making of this country right now, as the economy is sending so many people into a desperate position, whether they’ve lived here their whole lives or whether they got here last week like some of these men, is people helping other people,” said Sergio Tupac Uzurin, a member of the Mutual Aid Collective who has volunteered at the garden.

Bushwick City Farm may be an outlier in its full-throated commitment to addressing the migrant crisis in New York City, but it shares something with many other community gardens across the five boroughs: They’re public places where private citizens have to jointly decide the best use of a precious resource.

This tradition of collectivism goes back to at least the 1970s, when some New York City neighborhoods were pocked with vacant lots, typically the result of urban neglect. Enroute to becoming the green oases and urban jewels many are today, community gardens had to overcome significant political hurdles and existential threats, not the least being the vehement opposition from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

From rubble to community gardens

Much of the history of the city’s community gardens has been archived by the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, a storefront institution located on Avenue C in the East Village.

Standing inside the museum, activist Bill di Paola pointed at a black and white photo on the wall where two children walked through an obliterated urban landscape. The photo, titled “Lot That Became El Jardin Del Paraiso,” was shot in the East Village in 1976 by Marlis Momber.

“And you can just see this desolate piece of land looks like a war zone,” said di Paola, the cofounder of the museum as well as the local environmental group Times Up!, which organized the Critical Mass bike rides in years past. “And now this is a beautiful community garden.”

Di Paola stepped out of the museum and walked over to a nearby garden, La Plaza Cultural. The garden is a popular community gathering place, hosting concerts in its amphitheater. But crammed within its 0.64 acres are numerous other features, he said, including a rainwater harvesting system, a composting program and an area specifically meant for medicinal plants.

“There are so many of those things in this one garden,” he said, all of which required collective deliberation from the community.

This spirit of communal action animated many of the gardens that popped up in previously abandoned spaces across the city, beginning in the 1970s.

“What’s important to me about community gardens is that they’re places where neighborhood people are actively coming together to make decisions together and having to decide on governance approaches,” said Bryce DuBois, a visiting assistant professor at College of the Holy Cross who has studied community gardens. “I think even having to have those complicated conversations are real opportunities for neighborhoods to convene and then perhaps also fight other things like housing displacement.”

“And that’s definitely utopian,” he said.

‘The era of communism is over’

In the late 1990s, community gardens encountered a new hurdle in the form of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He announced that he would auction off 114 of the properties to the highest bidder.

“This is a free market economy,” Giuliani said in January 1999 during his weekly radio show. “The era of communism is over.”

Giuliani claimed the city needed the revenues from land sales and that developers needed real estate on which to build additional housing. Nonetheless, the announcement prompted a massive public outcry, one that lasted for months and prompted numerous demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience.

Supporters of gardens argued that communities had nurtured them for years after private developers had abandoned them. At some rallies, demonstrators came dressed as fruits and vegetables. One incident, organized by a group called Jiminy Cricket, involved the release of 10,000 live crickets inside the auditorium at One Police Plaza where an auction was planned, prompting unsuspecting members of the public to scream and jump up on chairs. The group’s spokesperson called the act “nature’s revenge against greed.”

“There was this surge, this voice that just had to be heard,” said Lynn Kelly, the executive director of the New York Restoration Project who at the time was a 20-something working in city government.

Five years before the protests, Kelly had moved to Brooklyn.

Growing up on Staten Island, she said, “there were plenty of gardens, plenty of great parks. I had access to it all. I knew though, very early on that other people did not have the same kind of access.”

A cultural awakening

Kelly connected the outcry over community gardens to the cultural awakening taking place in music in the 90s, through local artists like the Notorious B.I.G., who were turning their life experiences into popular culture.

“All the New York based artists for hip-hop were also emerging and voicing in their lyrics the experiences of their communities, many of the same communities that were protesting in front of City Hall, about lack of green space,” said Kelly.

The protests paid off. Giuliani relented, after a last-minute, $4.2 million donation from two groups, the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project, started by singer and actress Bette Midler.

“She said, ‘We can’t let these gardens be sold off,’” said Kelly.

The effort salvaged more than a hundred community gardens. But although today many of the gardens are in contract with the city through the GreenThumb program, many others remain bootstrap operations, dependent on their volunteers. And DuBois said they continue to encounter other threats, including real estate operators “leveraging the existence of community gardens and green spaces as a form of green gentrification.”

James McDonagh, a videographer who has arranged the film screenings at Bushwick City Farm, said the gardens are a space where anarchist beliefs can be put into place, including, “that everyone deserves shelter, food, a roof over their head, clothing and whatever is necessary to make that happen, it needs to be done.”

As the migrants around him quietly took in War Witch, McDonagh gestured to the bus where the movie screen was mounted.

“There’s a slogan on the bus, which is now obscured,” said McDonagh, “but it says, ‘Don’t just dream of utopias, build them.”