Feb 11, 2022
The Boardwalk Community Garden in Coney Island, which was demolished in 2013. (Photo courtesy of Yury Opendik)
Editor’s Note: Community Gardens are more than landscaping amenities, they provide a range of benefits from helping us protect communities from natural disasters, providing stormwater management, giving marginalized communities access to fresh produce, and so much more, all at virtually no cost to taxpayers. So, why is it that we’re trying to take community gardens away from neighborhoods? Shouldn’t we be supporting community development via these ‘Critical Environmental Areas’?
Designating community gardens as ‘Critical Environmental Areas’ could give neighborhoods a seat at the table when developers move in.
Along Coney Island’s boardwalk, a community garden once brimmed with vegetables and edible flowers rustling in the salty breeze. Almost entirely run by immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, the garden provided food, medicine, and solace to the Brooklyn neighborhood. “It was a really big, beautiful space for the community,” said Yury Opendik, a Coney Island resident who tended to the garden in the late 2000s. Opendik built a gazebo out of wood pallets in the garden, which he’d visit most evenings. “It brought a lot of peace into my life.”
The Garden of Eden in the Bronx. (Photo credit: Greta Moran)
The garden helped protect the community during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, absorbing and slowing the deadly storm’s floodwaters. In the aftermath of the storm, Opendik and the other residents came together to rebuild the garden after it had been buried in sand. But this didn’t last long: It turned out that former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz was eyeing the land for a music venue, and the city council and local planning commission approved a plan to develop the plot in 2013.
Late one December night that same year, the city sent construction workers to bulldoze the plot of land, without notifying the people camping there, hoping to block the garden’s destruction. Opendik and the others gardeners gathered in the morning to watch as the garden they had been nurturing for years was turned to rubble. “It was heart-wrenching,” he recalls.
This was far from an isolated incident. New York City’s Parks Department provides licenses through its GreenThumb program to over 550 volunteer-run gardens. But the majority of the gardens were built on city-owned land and the licenses offer scant protections from the ever-present risk of development. Currently, the Elizabeth Street Garden—a community sculpture garden in Manhattan—is slated to be destroyed as part of a controversial rezoning plan. In East Harlem, the Pleasant Village Community Garden, founded 44 years ago, is set to lose its back garden, where residents grow food for a local market and pantry.
“I’ve often said, ‘You bulldoze a community garden, you bulldoze a community,’” said Raymond Figueroa, Jr., a Bronx-based community organizer and president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition, which fought to save the Coney Island garden for two years. “Community gardens are more than landscaping amenities; they’re significant vehicles for community development, sustainability, and productivity in a way that is self-determining.”
And yet, garden land tenure in NYC is “very precarious,” adds Figueroa, who spends a lot of his time strategizing around this issue with a handful of other garden organizers.
A few years back, Figueroa had a lightbulb moment. After combing through “volumes and volumes of technical manuals and policy” in search of ways to protect New York’s community gardens, he came across what he was looking for: a designation known as Critical Environmental Areas (CEAs). It provides heightened regulatory protection under the state’s Environmental Quality Review Act, potentially triggering a full environmental review and greater public input in decisions impacting the land at stake.
Raymond Figueroa, Jr. at the Brooks Park Community Garden in the Bronx, part of the Bronx Community Farm Hubs. (Photo credit: Greta Moran)
Figueroa noted that community gardens appeared to meet the CEA criteria under state law. They offer “a benefit to human health, a natural setting, agricultural, social, cultural, historic, recreational, or educational values, or ecological or hydrological values that may be negatively affected by disturbances.”
He met with lawyers at the nonprofit legal group Earthjustice about the designation and they joined forces to petition city agencies toe that urge community gardens be designated as CEAs. As an instructor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Figueroa worked with then graduate student Samuel Pressman to quantify the ecological services of community gardens, from regulating the temperature with leafy plants and trees to reducing methane by composting food waste, in a report that informed the petition.
“Despite the critical values that community gardens provide—at virtually no cost to taxpayers—these gardens remain vulnerable to destruction,” states the petition, which was originally filed last year. While the idea was slow to gain traction with city officials at the time, the petitioners are hopeful the Mayor Eric Adams—who put a Food Policy Transition Team in place shortly after being elected and has expressed support of urban agriculture in the past—will be more receptive.
Expected to be re-submitted in the coming months, the hundred-page petition makes the novel case for why the city’s community gardens, which feed people fresh fruits and vegetables, while reducing flooding and offering shade on hot days, should have the same legal safeguards as other important natural areas, such as the wetland estuary Jamaica Bay, where the fragile ecosystem enhanced has been protection from development.
“A city-owned garden can be sold at any time,” said Alexis Andiman, a senior attorney with Earthjustice. She pointed to GreenThumb’s license agreement for community gardens, which states that it is “terminable at will by the Commissioner in his or her discretion at any time, upon sixty (60) days written notice, and Licensee shall have no recourse of any nature whatsoever by reason of such termination.”
After a community garden is razed for development, it’s usually permanently lost. While this new designation won’t entirely prevent this, it will give the gardens–which were designated as vacant lots until 2020—another layer of protection. “This approach has never been done in an urban environment,” said Figueroa. “There have never been community gardens designated as Critical Environmental Areas.”
