New York City is home to hundreds of community gardens, spread throughout the five boroughs. But rewind 50 years and the landscape was much different. The city was in the throes of an economic crisis, and instead of gardens, trash-strewn vacant lots that often served as havens for crime and drug activity were the norm in many neighborhoods.
Donald Loggins was part of an army of people who went to battle against urban decay in the 1970s. He helped to start the first city-sanctioned community garden, the Liz Christy Garden (originally named the Bowery-Houston Community Farm and Garden), located on the northeast corner of Bowery and Houston Street in Manhattan.
The Liz Christy Garden on the northeast corner of Bowery and Houston Street in Manhattan.
Today, the garden is a lush urban oasis with meandering paths, a variety of plants, flowers and trees, as well as a pond teeming with fish and turtles. But, Loggins paints a much different picture of what the space looked like when he first encountered it. With the garden marking its 50th anniversary, Loggins reflected on its storied history with George Bodarky of WNYC’s Community Partnerships Desk.
Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and content.
Donald Loggins, who helped start the Liz Christy Garden.
George Bodarky: Donald, paint a picture for me of what this space looked like in the 1970s when you first laid eyes on it.
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.
Before the garden, the lot was strewn with about 3 feet of garbage, according to Loggins. "There were refrigerators here, tires, trash, industrial work, all sorts of just horrible stuff."
So you were a college student at the time?
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.
Talk to me a little bit more about how this space was utilized, even when it was trash-strewn, because people did come in here, right?
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.
You cleaned the park up, but then what was the thought process on how you were going to go forward and design a park as a bunch of college students in New York City in the 1970s?
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.
Pre-garden cleanup in 1973.
Liz Christy didn't stop with this garden. Really what happened here was the start of the modern community garden movement in New York City, right?
Absolutely. At the very beginning, the Green Guerillas and this garden were one and the same. The Green Guerillas were a group that, in the beginning, were going around to vacant lots, throwing seed grenades, those were condoms or balloons filled with fertilizer, water, and some seeds, because there were some lots we couldn't get to because they had barbed wire fences around them or whatever, and it really worked well.
So you all would toss these seed grenades into vacant lots in an attempt to beautify them?
Yes. We started here in the Lower East Side. We worked up in the Bronx and in Queens. The only borough we never got to was Staten Island.
What was that like to be lobbing these seed grenades into vacant lots? I mean, talk to me about that operation.
It was fun. About a half a dozen of us would go in a car, find a place, get out of the car, throw them over the fences and run like hell.
The city gave you a lease for this property in 1974, right? A year after you started working on it?
Originally, it was owned by Housing Preservation and Development. They got upset that we were using their property without their permission. We got the press involved and they sort of backed down and said, "OK, you can't use it without our permission, so we're gonna give you our permission — here's the lease, a dollar a year." And we said, fine, we'll take it.
Are you still paying that dollar a year?
No, we got transferred to the parks department. We don't have to pay anything.
We all know that property in New York City is valuable and space is at premium. How is the garden still here 50 years later?
We fought for it. Any time a developer came and wanted to do something here, we mobilized and said, you know, this is ridiculous ... we got so much community support.
What does it mean to you to be still in this garden 50 years later?
It's an unbelievable place and, and we've done some nice stuff. After 9/11, we stayed open all night cause people couldn't be in their houses. Some people came here and just wanted to sit and talk. Also, when there's been a power outage, we've opened the gate at night and let people in to sit since they don't have air conditioning. I can't believe we started something that we only thought would last a year or two, and 50 years later, we're still here.
A banner for the garden's 50th anniversary.
