The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  In the process of getting access to Myrtle Village Green, we started working on other ways to get information about vacant public land. When we started, you had to buy the database for $300 a borough, updated every six months by the Department of City Planning. We really hammered the department because charging for this was illegal. We got tons and tons of people to send in freedom of information requests. Now it’s free.

  We had to do a lot with the data to make it useful. The city thinks of its land in terms of uses and taxes, broadly speaking. But uses are defined in a very market-driven way. So “vacant” encompasses many things. There is no separate layer for city owned land. It’s just “not tax collecting.” So we had to do a couple of things. We had to manually remove all of the existing community gardens based on a community garden survey. We had to pull out all the nonprofit organizations that are getting tax abatements and have vacant land. The original map missed the MTA and other public-private entities, so we added them in as we learned about them. We also had to take out all the gutter spaces—all these spaces that are maybe two inches that run the length of the whole block, and places that don’t have street frontage. We actually looked at each parcel on Google Street View and on Oasis. We had to do a lot of manual cleanup on that first set of data before it made sense. And that got us closer to a better picture of what was going on, on the ground.

  We figured out this map of all the vacant city land that’s not tax collecting. Our cutoff for the size of the space that we include is if you can’t stand in it, it’s not a space. If you can stand in it you might be able to do something. If you can stand in it and put your arms out—she does—it’s a space. You could grow something there.

  I was invited to do something for the Ideas City Festival so I made a couple hundred of the maps with a friend of mine, Julius Samuels, and we handed them out at the festival. A bunch of people signed up for the mailing list and I was kind of like, “Whoa, people really want this.” So we started pasting the maps onto foam board and put out about ten on particular lots that we’d identified.

  Then somebody named Eric Brelsford got in touch with me. He said, “I’m a computer programmer. Do you actually have this data that’s making up this picture? Because if you do, we could put it online.”

  And I said, “Sure.”

  And now Eric and I are the two employees of 596 Acres.

  She smiles and sips on her coffee.

  We turn data into information that people can use. So we are really focused on connecting people with resources and control of land use decisions. We put out a lot of print materials. We do workshops. If there’s a place that’s out of energy and isn’t working, we’ll go and have a meeting there. Getting angry in person is actually much more fulfilling.

  She laughs.

  The meetings bring in new people and we work out whatever fights have been happening on the block. When I host a meeting suddenly everybody’s getting along, everyone is recentered.

  We started with Brooklyn and at this point we’ve mapped all five boroughs of New York City. Staten Island’s information is up but it’s password protected. People in Staten Island who we work with have it. But I feel like putting information on the internet first is creepy and I want to make sure that we can support people in neighborhoods and that we’re getting information to people in neighborhoods first.

  A lot of people don’t have access to the internet. I know it seems like we live on the internet but, you know, that’s you and me.

  The other way to look at our work is that we’re trying to sort of heal the scars of urban renewal.

  In her current project, “Urban Reviewer,” Paula is studying 150 master plans, often called “urban renewal plans,” that were adopted by the city beginning in 1949. Most of the plans were carried out under the leadership of Robert Moses, who amassed colossal political power without ever holding elected office. Famously dubbed “The Power Broker” in Robert Caro’s 1974 biography, Moses served as the head of various public authorities from the 1920s to the 1960s, always taking the power with him by retaining control of development funds. Handling the money for public projects—parks, roads, bridges—allowed Moses to circumvent much of the legislative process. To say that he designed twentieth-century New York is not an overstatement—it’s hard to find a corner of the city free of his influence. Moses did not renovate old buildings—he demolished them. He prioritized private cars over public transportation and pedestrians. And his fingerprints are all over the urban renewal plans Paula is studying. The plans reveal Moses’s brutal, systematic approach: identify “blighted” or “obsolete” neighborhoods, clear them of existing buildings, and bring in new development, public and private. The people who lived in the “blighted” and “obsolete” neighborhoods never made the decision to identify their communities as such; instead, the city’s Committee on Slum Clearance made the designation.

  In many cases, the urban renewal plans were begun but never completed; more specifically, the city often never made it past the slum clearance stage. So Paula is documenting the shocking overlap between the slum clearance sites—the bulldozed businesses and apartments and schools—and the 596 acres she identified in her exhaustive survey of vacant land. It turns out that much of the land that was cleared decades ago—land that was never developed or modernized, as promised—is still lying vacant. Or as Paula puts it:

  Capitalism just didn’t do what it was supposed to do next.

  It’s all about what people can actually do, right? And giving people the ability to build their own neighborhood. This is a very nerdy and direct way to take people’s rights to the city seriously and enforce them as rights. In a truly legal sense. People have the right to create their city. Especially in these spaces that are public spaces.

  I really believe that people’s ability to make decisions about the spaces that they’re in is a kind of security that lets you take the next step in your life. The anxiety of having other forces making decisions for you is untenable.

  So the spaces we work with are rather important because they’re for people that are in a neighborhood at a particular moment whether they’ve been there for thirty years or three months. They can acknowledge that they’re all there together and make decisions even if it’s about this bounded space. And it builds a political force with the people in the neighborhood across class, across race, all kinds of religious lines. It really is a way of taking control and reducing some of that anxiety and some of that anger that people feel.

  At one site, someone had offered to set up a composting toilet, solar panels, electricity, and Wi-Fi, and they went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and ultimately they nixed the toilet because they were like, “We don’t want people pooping here.” They liked the solar panels and they liked the electricity. They want to show movies and they want to play music. But they nixed the Wi-Fi because they were like, “This is not that kind of space. We talk to each other here.”

  All of the spaces where we’ve worked are constantly being created. They’re always public and that means that the process is always beginning again, every single time people are encountering themselves in that space. If that’s not the way it works the space stagnates.

  6.

  Shatia Strother does not stagnate in her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment—the woman and her home are abuzz:

  So I was going to visit my great-grandmother—saying hi, keeping tabs on her. And as I was leaving, I passed the lot next to her house—it was a vacant lot with no real purpose. And something made me do a double take because something was out of place. And I realized that there was a sign. So I looked and it was a map that had been posted by 596 Acres.

  Shatia is unpacking bags filled with vestiges from her long day: laptop, mail, groceries, spillover from her son’s backpack. Sean is eight and they came home together not ten minutes ago; as they were walking down the block, the boy’s voice echoed with questions to ask, anecdotes to relay, facts to share (mostly about bugs), and dinn
er requests to make. Shatia managed to get her son, her dry cleaning, her bike, and her bags up the stoop of the brownstone where they live on the second floor. Shoni—stepfather to Sean, husband to Shatia—will not be home from work for several hours.

  I remember when I was a kid, maybe ten, and one summer the lot was opened and a lady started an arts program under this pavilion that she had built for the kids on the block. I don’t know if it was lack of funding or lack of interest but she was only able to do it maybe two or three weekends over the course of one summer and then it was shut down. When I saw the 596 Acres poster that memory came back and I thought someone was trying to redo the workshops, or revamp the lot, or do something else. But when I really looked at the poster, I realized it was an organization trying to get other people to do things. So I was like alright, that’s cool, and I contacted Paula, said, “Hey, I saw the sign. I’ve lived in this neighborhood almost my entire life. I want to do something.”

  Paula put me in contact with another girl, Kristin, who was a transplant to Brooklyn, and she said, “You guys are both interested. You should link up.”

  And that’s sort of the beginning of the garden story.

  Shatia interrupts herself to check on Sean who is in the bathroom, supposedly getting ready for a bath. His high-pitched voice, yet to stop, is made indistinct by the running water, which has now been going for several minutes. Shatia gets up and opens the bathroom door to discover that her son forgot to put the stopper in the tub—all that water gone—and he’s fiddling with a notebook instead of getting undressed. He is resisting the familiar sequence of events. She enforces this sequence with a totalitarian glare, which carries authority beyond her twenty-eight years, and holds it for several seconds.

  You’re pushing me.

  As soon as Shatia steps out of the bathroom, the door closes behind her. It squeaks meekly, echoing her son’s retreat.

  Shatia finds a bottle of wine, already open, and fills two large glasses. She gives one to me, and motions toward the couch; she takes a chair on the other side of the coffee table. The apartment is cluttered with stacks of paper and textbooks and laundry and life. Sean finally stops the bathwater and his mom shakes her head. She has big, bouncy hair that matches the brightness of her smile and her energy in conversation, even after a long day. She talks of her past, pinpointing events that changed her life:

  I’d been working in the fashion industry for about seven years. It was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a designer and I wanted to be famous and I was going to make these beautiful clothes and everyone was going to know my name and it was going to be awesome. As I got older I realized I wasn’t that shallow. I actually woke up one day and realized: holy shit, you thought you were this shallow and you’re not. But I still did it because I made really good money. And at a certain point I realized it wasn’t enough because my job consumed so much of my time. It was becoming a thing that didn’t leave room for the things that I loved. It didn’t leave room for me to be instrumental in bettering my neighborhood.

  As time went on I got more jaded. I was working for this company and I remember being in this meeting where my boss was trying to decide whether or not she should report the results of lead testing on these belts from a Chinese factory. She looked at the cost to do the recall and it was too much so she decided to sell them and let the chips fall where they may. And if anyone got sick, she would settle potential lawsuits. So we’re just going to cross our fingers and hope no one gets sick. Hope that nobody’s kid chews on their belt. And I remember sitting in this meeting thinking fuck that! This is crazy! What kind of world am I living in? I cannot possibly work in a place like this and contribute to this type of carelessness when on the side I’m talking about being all for my people and justice for all and fight the good fight. You can’t do that. It’s not okay. That’s one of the biggest contradictions you could possibly commit. That was the turning point. So I decided to leave.

  I had talked about wanting to go back to school and applied to NYU for their masters in sociology program. Unfortunately none of my fashion design credits transferred.

  She laughs.

  They accepted me with a partial scholarship. So that’s where I’m at right now. This is my first year. I’m loving it. It’s hard work. It’s exhausting. I have a fifteen-page paper that’s due tomorrow morning and I still have six more pages to go. Once he goes to bed—motioning over her shoulder, rolling her eyes—I’ll be doing that all night. And I love it. Because I’m doing something that has a purpose now.

  Shatia thinks about social work as a field capable of bringing gardening skills and food policy awareness to targeted neighborhoods. A few months ago she took a job with the Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corporation. Included in the organization’s purview is a range of programs to create more access to healthy food in Brooklyn: renovating a food pantry, adding a demonstration kitchen, hosting free cooking lessons.

  It’s the first time I’ve had a dream job. I get to work in my neighborhood. And my work is directly involved in improving my neighborhood. The biggest thing that attracted me to the position is that I would be at the forefront to new programs. I would be instrumental in developing new ideas and solutions in my neighborhood.

  My family has been here for five generations. My great-grandmother was born in North Carolina and moved to Brooklyn in her early twenties. She had a few jobs. She was a line cook for a restaurant at one point. Eventually she was able to buy a brownstone here in Bed-Stuy. She ran an underground club in her basement. And her brother, my great uncle, ran the band. It was like a little speakeasy.

  Her daughter, my grandmother, grew up in that house and still lives there. She’ll be eighty-nine this year. My dad and his brother grew up in that house, too. And then me and my siblings grew up in that house. My son is the first generation that hasn’t grown up there. But he still has a connection to it because we live three blocks away.

  She motions out the window and takes a drink from her glass.

  Hopefully it will continue if my son decides to stay here when he’s an adult. So that’s one, two, three, four, five generations of us in Bed-Stuy.

  My great-grandmother bought it, I think, for $80,000 in the ’50s. Right now I think the value is $665,000. I mean it’s in complete disrepair. It’s falling apart and shit. But we still own it, it’s still in the family.

  And now there’s a garden next to it because I saw the 596 Acres poster.

  That’s a lot that was vacant since the ’70s. When I was a kid I remember that lot being empty and us running around in it. My dad played there—when he was cutting and smoking weed with his friends that was the lot they went to. And now it’s been turned into a community asset so my son doesn’t have that same relationship to it.

  She laughs.

  First we had to find out who owned the lot. Turns out HPD owned it—the Housing Preservation Department of New York City. We had to secure a license agreement with them, saying that they would allow us to use the space during whatever interim before a developer came in. We had to sign all these agreements and prove that there were interested people in the project and that we had outreach in the community. And at that point it was just a waiting game for the keys, which took a while. So I decided to rent some bolt cutters and cut the lock and just start working in there while we were waiting. They’d already told us we had the space, and it was taking them a while to send us the finished paperwork. So I was like, “Fuck this, let’s just cut the lock open, we already know we have it. What are they going to do? Relock it?” So that’s pretty much how it happened. I wanted to get started. This is something I’m really excited about.

  We decided we wanted to create a gardening space to be open to the community. We didn’t want to turn it into this garden club that was always locked. That was a huge, sensitive topic to me: the amount of entitlement that goes into people starting projects, saying this is for us, and the community at large is not always welcomed. That coupled with the fact t
hat we have a lot of newcomers in the neighborhood who aren’t necessarily engaging with the culture of the neighborhood. So I really wanted to make sure that we were open and transparent and a community asset, and not this elitist group of gardeners who wanted to hang out in this space and not include everybody.

  One of the biggest ways to do that was nonverbal: we open the garden when the sun comes up and we lock it when the sun goes down and whoever walks by or is interested in being in the garden can be in the garden. There’s rules about no smoking or no kids unattended or no illegal activity. But anything else and this is your space.

  We gathered a whole bunch of donated seeds from events and workshops. So aside from a few private beds anything that grows in the garden you’re able to harvest without permission, without oversight, without guidance. Here, we have extra garlic—take it. We have extra tomatoes—take them. And then we started conducting workshops, and incorporating education into the space. Now we partner with a couple of schools. Our way of showing people that we are an open community asset is by making everyone feel like they’re getting something out of it.

  I’m not getting paid whatsoever. Sometimes when you’re in the heat of frustration and you have garden members who aren’t pulling their weight or you’re frustrated with a specific project, I’m always like, “I should get paid for this shit!”

  She laughs.

  But then I realized that I don’t want that. It really comes out when I’m angry or frustrated about something that I’m passionate about. Other than that, I do it for the love of it. And I do it because, honestly, I want to see more people of color having leadership roles in our neighborhood and the wider community. I feel like it’s something that is lacking. Because I’m involved in the food justice community and every workshop I go to, everything I’m involved in, it’s always majority white women. That is consistently the majority. I went to a cooking workshop last week and it was right at the projects at Fulton and Malcolm X. I went in with an open mind, potentially to pull in some partners with the work that I do.