The Green Guerrillas: 50 Years of Community Gardens in New York City

jorge fuentelsaz

New York, April 29. The New York neighborhood of Lower Manhattan was in 1973 a depressed and forgotten area where garbage was piled up in lots of collapsed buildings for which no construction company bet a penny.

In this degraded environment, the Green Guerrillas were born, a group of friends created by the late Liz Christy, whose efforts made possible the birth of the first community garden in New York, which bears her name, and a movement in defense of these green spaces that lasts until today.

That first victory of the Green Guerrillas is now 50 years old

“We started in 1973, this whole area was full of garbage, vehicle parts and televisions,” Don Loggins tells Efe sitting on a bench in the community garden, which today stands as a small oasis on the corner between Bowery streets. and Houston.

THE BIRTH OF THE GREEN GUERRILLAS

Don, who was 22 50 years ago, remembers that it all started one day when Christy, who lived in the area, was out for a walk and saw a boy inside the lot “playing with a refrigerator like it was a boat.” “.

“Then Christy told the mom that she had to clean it up so her kids would have a place to play and the mom said, ‘I have five kids, I don’t have time,’ and asked Lindsey why she and her friends didn’t do it.” friends, and that’s how it started,” explains Don.

Christy called Don and others and they got to work: in almost two months they had taken out the trash and junk, and in another two months they had fixed up the land and started planting.

“There was drug trafficking, this was a depressed neighborhood (…) We asked the traffickers to leave because there were children there, but they came back, and once four or five of us took our pitchforks and chased them to the subway. and they never came back,” he says.

But the project of the young activist did not end there. Soon after, he managed to get the attention of the local press to write about the new garden, which was called the Bowery until a year after Christy’s death in 1985, and was able to convince the authorities to rent the space to them for a fee. symbolic of one dollar a year.

When his feat became known, “he began to receive calls from people from all New York counties, the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island asking for advice” on how to maintain and create community gardens. The Green Gerrillas (“Green Guerillas” in English), had been born.

THE EXPANSION OF THE MOVEMENT

The movement grew like wildfire and dozens of gardens open to their communities began to sprout in the city, where they could and can plant vegetables, prepare organic fertilizer, meet, celebrate weddings or light a barbecue.

The city supported many of them and, according to the New York City Mayor’s Office, assistance is now being offered to more than 550 green spaces like the one created by Christy and her Green Guerrillas.

Precisely, their main mission was to recover abandoned areas to hand them over to the neighbors and their main weapon was the “seed grenades” with which to “bombard” empty lots and for the manufacture of which they distributed documents with instructions.

The grenades were small inflatable balloons, like glass Christmas balls, that were filled with seeds, water and fertilizer and launched into empty areas protected by fences that made them inaccessible.

THE NEW GUERRILLAS OF THE BIG APPLE

Times have changed, even the bombs that the current guerrillas make are not the same. This year, from their website they promote the planting of sunflower seeds in “empty or abandoned lots, tree wells, sidewalks or areas that are not cared for.”

“Now the movement is more professionalized,” Sarah McCollum, the current executive director of the Green Guerrillas, tells EFE, where two people work full-time.

They serve 300 community gardens in the city and each year carry out between 90 and 100 projects to help repair planting areas, make compost bins, fix roads or rebuild protective fences.

In addition, they have programs aimed at young people between the ages of 14 and 21 to raise awareness about the importance of these green spaces and they also keep burning the political torch that Christy lit with her advocacy work and pressure before the authorities to favor the development of these spaces.

“Initially the challenge was to create gardens, now it’s more about ensuring that the spaces around the garden remain protected, so that they are preserved for posterity,” he says.

Loggins acknowledges that she has long since given up her activism, but she still goes to the garden she helped plant with Christy, where she likes to guide groups of young people who often see cherries, tomatoes, plums or grapes on their plants for the first time.

His favorite tree is a sequoia that stands upright at one edge of the long garden, which grew out of the ruins half a century ago and which Loggins proudly describes as the tallest in New York. EFE

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