time’s up

oriana on 31 Jan ’11

neighborhood: williamsburg | space type: community space, skillshare | active since: 1987 | links: website, wikipedia, facebook, twitter

Time’s Up is an all-volunteer, nonprofit environmental advocacy group. They do about 200 themed group bike rides a year, dozens of campaigns, and close to 300 workshops annually. They have been hugely instrumental in increasing bike-riding all over New York City (including helping to start the pedicab industry), and have done great work with community gardens, greenways, reclaiming public space, animal advocacy, deforestation, fracking, and more. They’ve been written about everywhere, from the New York Times to the Indypendent, from the Brooklyn Paper to the L Magazine.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

I took my sister with me to this interview, and, embarrassingly, we didn’t bike. (In our defense, it was snowing like crazy.) But everyone was kind andwelcoming anyway, and we took a tour of the incredible space, and also got to talk to Bill, Time’s Up’s founder, and Steve, a longtime volunteer.

These days, Time’s Up is most known for its focus on biking. According to Steve, “Time’s Up is an environmental group, and biking is very environmentally sound. The mission of the group is to increase cycling to help the environment.” Among a slew of other campaigns, they participate in the mass bike movement Critical Mass, work for auto-free streets and parks, create and maintain ghost bike memorials, offer legal aid for arrested cyclists, and recently began a “Love Your Lane” campaign, designed to make cyclists feel rewarded for bicycling, rather than persecuted or harassed. Their latest action has been to build pedal-powered generators for the ongoing #OccupyWallStreet movement.

To donate to this or any of their amazing work, click the “donate” button on any page of their site. But first, check out my Q&A with Bill, Time’s Up’s founder!

Read More about time’s up

trees not trash

oriana on 20 Jan ’11

photos by Maximus Comissar

neighborhood: East Williamsburg / Bushwick | space type: community space; guerilla garden | active since: 2004 | link: website, facebook

Who says a space has to be enclosed by four walls, or even have a roof? Trees Not Trash is a guerilla gardening group run by Kate and Cory, a wife and husband team, who are two of the nicest, most dedicated people I’ve ever met. Over the past seven years they’ve appropriated four abandoned outdoor spaces, working to turn plots of land that were hideously overgrown or dense with years of garbage into lovely community gardens and urban oases.

They’ve also requested and received over two thousand trees from the NYC Parks Department, which have been planted throughout Bushwick, and they’ve further beautified neighborhood blocks with dozens of planters that they made from found tires and wood. Kate and Cory involve volunteers throughout the community, including hipsters, of course, but also many neighborhood children, to whom they teach the fundamentals of gardening, often sending the kids home with fresh herbs and vegetables.


brooklyn spaces: Give me a run-down of the spaces.
Kate: There’s four: the little garden by the Morgan Ave L train stop, the big community garden on Bogart, the Jefferson Street garden, and the new one at the Bushwick Library.

brooklyn spaces: What inspired you to start this project?
Kate: We’d been working with the city to get trees put in for awhile, and we’d been thinking about the abandoned lot on McKibben Street. Then someone contacted me and said, “Hey, I rescued these four evergreen shrubs. Can you help me plant them?” I was like, “Yes! We need to do this garden now.” So we climbed over the fence and just started pulling weeds and digging up the soil. It was dirty, dirty, nasty work. The weeds there were taller than most people. We went in there with machetes and did the jungle thing.

brooklyn spaces: Were you worried about getting in trouble?
Kate: I made the assumption that everybody was going to be in support of what I was doing. I figured it would be very difficult to tell somebody not to clean up garbage and plant trees and flowers. I just wanted to improve the neighborhood I was living in. I think that’s one of the things guerilla gardening is all about.

brooklyn spaces: Was it hard to get people in the neighborhood involved?
Kate: We had this incredible group of people who would dedicate their entire Sunday to getting really disgusting and dirty. Even on days when we were going to be touching twenty-year-old garbage, everybody was like, “Yeah, I want to do that!” This is where you live, you know? It was like-minded people coming together and doing something,

brooklyn spaces: How about local kids?
Kate: The Jefferson Street garden became their hangout. All of the kids adopted a tree, and they totally made that garden their own. It’s their stomping ground. Every Sunday at 1:00, there’s kids banging on our door, wanting to plant and stuff, saying, “When are we gardening today?” We grow food there, which was huge for them, because none of them had ever grown food before.

brooklyn spaces: What kind of events do you have in the spaces?
Kate: At the library garden we’re working on doing a reading series, where it’s really beautiful and shady. We’ve really made a little oasis there, at that terrible intersection. Bushwick and Seigel is so oppressive. It’s hot, tons of traffic, no respite from anything, and with projects all around. Which is actually cool, because as we’re working, people from the projects can see what we’re doing, that this revolting little space that was strewn with garbage and filled with rats is now turning into this oasis, and they can go and sit in it. At the community garden, we’ve had garden parties where dressing up is required, and we play badminton and things. We make big pitchers of Pimm’s cocktails, using stuff from the garden, like cucumbers and lavender. We actually got married in that garden.

brooklyn spaces: Did you set out to be a guerilla gardener?
Kate: No, I didn’t really have any idea of it being guerilla gardening when I started. It was selfish as well as community-minded. I really wanted trees, and I wanted other people to want trees. But I never really had a plan, like, “I’m going to wear a bandanna and do this in the dead of night.” It just became that way.

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Like this? Read about other community spaces: Bushwick City Farms, #OccupyWallStreet art show, Trinity Project, Time’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Body Actualized Center, No-Space

the brooklyn free store

oriana on 3 Jan ’11

neighborhood: bed-stuy | space type: community space | active: 2009–2011 | links: facebook, twitter, tumblr

update: I am really sad to add an update on the closing of this terrific space. In March of 2011, the Brooklyn Free Store—along with the apartment building next door—were burned down. Arson is strongly suspected. The New York Times has an article about the blaze, and kind souls wishing to can donate to the group’s efforts to rebuild.

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Started by a diverse group of anarchists and activists, the Brooklyn Free Store is an alternative to capitalism. In an abandoned Bed-Stuy lot, the group has assembled a cornucopia of cast-offs, including clothes, books, jewelry, furniture, tools, toys, and more, all gifted by the community. The Free Store is never closed, so anyone can take or leave anything, anytime.

The Brooklyn Free Store at its grand opening, 8/09/10, photo by Alex Maubrey

The Free Store also hosts events, including movie screenings, music performances, and skillshares, which always feature dumpstered snacks for all. The space got a lot of media attention in the few months it’s been active, including articles in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, The Awl, and the Brooklyn Paper.

Due to the results of recent unkind weather, the Free Store has been taking steps to make the space more permanent. They’ve held several “roof-raising” days, and the new structure looks amazing.

photo by Erica Sackin

Q&A with Laurel, one of the founding members of the Free Store

brooklyn spaces: What made you guys start this project?
Laurel: I think everyone had different and overlapping motives. The Free Store is about environmental issues because it reduces waste. It’s about mutual aid and building community because everything is free and the store is open to anyone and everyone. It’s about anti-capitalism because there’s no money involved. It’s about anarchism because no one is in charge. This may sound like a contradiction, but it’s also about leadership, because everyone is invited to take on any aspect of the project—we don’t seek a world without leaders, we seek a world full of leaders.

brooklyn spaces: What made you want to get involved?
Laurel: To me the Free Store is a proactive positive solution to some of the things I dislike about our society. It’s a participatory example of one alternative to capitalism, a gift economy. We shy away from terms like “donation” or “barter” or “trade”; a gift economy means giving what you have to give, and taking whatever you want or need. On paper this may seem problematic, because the assumption is that people are greedy and will just take and take, but as we’ve seen over the last few months with this project, that’s not the case at all. There’s never a lack of new items in the space.

brooklyn spaces: What has been the response from the community?
Laurel: Better than we could have imagined! This is an anarchist project, so we didn’t want to be “in charge.” And the neighbors immediately embraced the Free Store as their own. People come and tidy up, take out the trash, decide what should be put where and what should be discarded. I often hear people saying that the neighborhood feels much better now that the free store is here. Even the guy who technically owns the land has been by to say what a great thing we’re doing.

brooklyn spaces: So does the space run itself?
Laurel: For the most part it does. For the day-to-day maintenance, my friends and I don’t have to do much of anything, unless we feel like it. But for larger issues, we do sometimes need to step in. When the “roof” (which was just a tarp) collapsed during the blizzard, it was clear that there was a major problem that was bigger than an individual could or would fix. So we got a group together to come in and build a permanent structure out of wood from pallets that were gifted to us by Home Depot. More than a dozen of us came out in the freezing snow for the “roof raising,” and several more people we didn’t even know came in off the street to help, motivated only by their common belief in the project, which was a really empowering thing. This whole project has been extremely educational and personally fulfilling, watching my philosophies come to life, and it gives me great hope for humanity and the future.

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Like this? Read about more activist spaces: No-Space, #OccupyWallStreet art show, Time’s Up, Trinity Project, Trees Not Trash, Books Through Bars, Boswyck Farms, Bushwick City Farms, Film Biz Recycling