How NYC’s 1st community garden got started
In the very, very beginning, it was about 3 feet of garbage’
By George Bodarky
The Gothamist
Apr 20, 2023
Excerpt:
Donald Loggins: In the very, very beginning, it was about three feet of garbage. There were refrigerators here, tires, trash, industrial work, all sorts of just horrible stuff. And what happened was Liz Christy lived a couple of blocks away. She was walking by one day and she saw a child playing in an old refrigerator pretending it’s a boat. She tells the mother, “Why don’t you clean it up so your children have someplace nice to play?” And the mother said, “I have several children and I don’t have the time to do that. You’re all college students, why don’t you get your friends to clean it up?” and Liz said, “OK.” It took us about a year to throw all the trash away, but we did it. And the rest is pretty much history.
Liz was a friend of mine. We were all college students at the time. We had the summer off, so we had plenty of time. The hardest part was getting all the trash out.
Not only did people come in here, two homeless people died here. One winter, they froze to death. There was a lot of drug dealing here.
Liz was an artist for one thing, and she knew graphics and design. First, she wanted the paths to meander. She didn’t want it like a city street where you walk through quickly and don’t notice it. And then the plant issue was interesting. We didn’t know what to grow here. None of us were horticulturalists by background, so we got donations of plants and we tried different things and whatever didn’t take, we got rid of.
