NEW YORK — Cars pass by quickly and the streets are loud just outside the walls of the Liz Christy Community Garden.
“I feel like this is everyone’s garden and I’m just one of the caretakers,” Donald Loggins said.
Inside the fence of New York City's first public garden, Loggins, the only remaining original member of the founding group, reflects on how much the neighborhood has changed in the last 48 years.
What You Need To Know
- Liz Christy, the founder of the garden that bears her name, was the driving force for making the patch of earth covered in garbage into something beautiful
- Community gardens are an opportunity for neighborhood residents to come together and create something that they can use and share
“When we started here, there were a lot of low-rise buildings, a lot of drug dealing, a lot of crime. This particular space was filled four, five feet high with trash, old refrigerators, old cars. People would just dump their garbage here," Loggins remembered as we walked around the garden.
Loggins stopped to point out his favorite flower and name a few plants for me.
Dating back to 1973, this garden has an interesting founding story.
"Liz Christy was the one who started the whole movement," Loggins said. "There was a child playing here in an old refrigerator, making believe it was a boat, and Liz said to the mother, ‘You know, why don’t you clean up this space so your child has a decent place to play?’”
“And the mother said, ‘I work two jobs, I have four kids. Why don’t you and your friends do it?’ And Liz went back to us and said, ‘How about cleaning up the space and we’ll see if we can make it into a garden?’” Loggins continued.
Loggins was a neighbor of Christy's. They lived just around the corner on Mott Street. In those days, abandoned lots full of trash were on every corner. Despite the fact that Loggins walked past a patch almost every day, he had never even considered turning the space into something more.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’m in college. I’ve got plenty of free time, let me do something," Loggins laughed. "It took us months to clean out the garbage. And then the city came in and gave us a hard time for a little bit. They said that this was their property and we had no business cleaning or planting on it. Liz called up the Daily News, of all people, got the press here, and the city backed off and we got the first lease in the city for a community garden.”
And they did save it — not just once, but multiple times as the city and other Manhattan developers came after the property, hoping to "pave paradise" and put up a high rise. The rest was history.
“I think this was sort of the impetus for changing the neighborhood. Over the years, the neighborhood has changed completely," Loggins commented, gazing around at the Whole Foods across the street. He remembers a very different community. Loggins believes the garden played a huge role in drawing new families, young professionals, and a diverse cultures to the area, all seeking a chance to live next to the new community green space.
“That was Liz’s idea from the beginning. You want to tailor the community garden to what people are looking for. The key to making a community garden succeed is addressing what the people in the neighborhood want,” Loggins said. “People saw what she was doing here and started other community gardens throughout the city sort of using this as a template.”
There's no rush inside the garden oasis. The paths — built with repurposed bricks from the original buildings on the plot — are winding on purpose, so even quick-walking New Yorkers cannot simply scramble through.
“People like to come to a place where they can relax, where they can enjoy the flowers, the plants. It’s just a place to come in and sit without having the pressures of the streets and other things," Loggins said. "I think it's an oasis basically. People come here and want to relax and enjoy themselves and basically get away from all the crazy noise of the streets."
Now in his sixties, Loggins, a member of the oldest community garden, is helping to start up the newest community garden in Brooklyn. The progress they've made from one city block to gardens dotting all five boroughs still marvels Loggins.
"When we started this thing, nobody had any idea how much it would take off," Loggins said. “I mean, we thought, one green space, on one block, in one neighborhood.”
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