Wet, wet, wet June

The rain this month has to be setting some kind of record. This bed in the Phoenix Garden is completely flooded out. Most community gardens built on old building sites have super fast drainage — all the rubble underneath. But because this bed is the low point in the garden, and because it’s near the truck gate and the soil is compacted, Betty Spencer, the gardener here, practically would have done better planting rice.

City Hall Hearing Wednesday, 6/24

This is promising — the NYC Community Garden Coalition and their allies are taking a positive step, even though the flyer is worded reactively.

Highland Park

Highland Park is the nearest large park to where I live – about a 10 minute bike ride. Of course, that’s a bike ride down a particularly bleak stretch of Bushwick Avenue, where the Jackie Robinson Parkway disgorges, and the businesses are all auto-related — gas stations, car lots, repair shops — interspersed with large MTA complexes. From Bushwick Avenue it’s a hair-raising turn onto Highland Avenue, against car drivers who are already in a throughway mindset.

But when I finally get there, Highland Park is a always a huge relief. To be sure, it’s a bit down-on-the heels, especially compared to similar parks in wealthy neighborhoods. But the ball fields and basketball fields are usually in full use; families are picnicking; lovers are strolling.

Ridgewood Reservoir is basically contiguous to Highland — I can’t determine if it’s technically part of the park or not. There’s a struggle happening on whether to turn it into ballfields or preserve it in it’s now feral state. Apparently, it’s one of the few birch forests on Long Island and is something of a de facto bird sanctuary. Save Ridgewood Reservoir is a terrific activist blog that is well written, well researched, and very, very passionate. I don’t know where I come down on the basic issue. When I was there last evening around 7:00, there were dozens of people jogging, walking, and biking around the reservoir perimeter path. All the adjoining ball fields were in full use. Clearly there’s a demand for more playing fields during peak weekend and evening hours. Most of the area is fenced off to the public, perhaps for good safety and conservation reasons, but still, it’s fenced off. And the surrounding forest and wetlands are extremely degraded – lots of invasive weed species like ailanthus and phragmites. If it’s going to be a true sanctuary, it will take investment. Ultimately, this is not really a matter of leaving it alone.

Bushwick Open Studios

I went to a couple Bushwick Open Studio sites this weekend. First of all, I have to commend Arts in Bushwick for an astounding job organizing it — they pulled together more than 200 open studios and events. They describe it as self-organized, but the best community organizing is always that. It’s about catalyzing, framing, and then standing back.

The event that I appreciated most was a panel discussion about land use tensions, featuring Oona Chatterjee from Make the Road New York, Luis Acosta from El Puente, Councilperson Diana Reyna, Laura (Cline?) Braslow from Arts in Bushwick, and a great guy from from Neighbors for Good Growth. The central issue that emerged for me from the panel discussion was the issue of illegal conversion of industrial space by landlords building out fake studios that are really apartments. The open studios could almost be a series of point in cases — I was in several buildings that were clearly designed to be industrial, and I’m pretty sure zoned industrial — I’d have to do some research to say that definitively for any particular one. But in almost all the cases, the interiors felt like a hive of studio apartments. Tiny spaces, hardly any with visible art making. Diana Reyna said she actually had a document that showed the areas in East Williamsburg where the city will not be enforcing zoning laws against illegal conversion. The effect is the loss of well-paying blue collar jobs, which is big problem for working class and immigrant communities.

The big disappointment for me was an open studio billed as “Bushwick Indoor Farms” which turned out to be a demonstration of hydroponics. Big, big yawn. Again, the apartment was real nice — in a building that clearly should be used industrially.

The most moving work for me was the work of Karin Stothart, displayed at a space called Celestial Suitcase on Jefferson Street. On display by Stothart were two delicate drawings of mouth to mouth resuscitation on old, delicately embroidered fine linen handkerchiefs and a series of three small, fabricated pillows with a drawing of the head of a woman with progessively larger bloodstains over the area of her mouth (death by consumption?).

Boxwood

I planted boxwood behind the benches in the front garden. Boxwood is another one of those adult plants that I’ve never worked with. It’s formal, a bit expensive, and long-lived. When I was an intern at the Strybing Arboretum Garden of Fragrance, it was one of the plants that I tended. I always wondered why it was planted there, but now, more than 20 years later, I was finally able to smell it. Boxwood has a subtle, toasty warm aroma. You need to be grown up to detect it, much less appreciate it.

What a difference it made.

Before

After