bushwick city farms

space type: community farm | neighborhood: bushwick | active since: 2008 | links: website, facebook, twitter

The first thing my sister Laurel told me about Bushwick City Farms was that being a volunteer there went a tremendous way toward assuaging her gentrifier guilt about living in Bed-Stuy. “As soon as I unlock the gate, a dozen kids come running out of the housing projects nearby, asking if they can plant seeds, or paint planter boxes, or just play tag in the space,” she said. “And the parents come by every day to thank us for what we’re doing for the community, and for keeping an eye on their kids.” My experience was the same. The kids are so eager to help that we couldn’t do any of the planting ourselves—they practically grabbed the seeds out of our hands. And when I talked to some of the adults in the area—who were barbecuing on the sidewalk, and insisted on giving me a heaping plate of grilled chicken, sausages, and rice and beans—they reiterated how happy they were about the farm as a safe community space.

kids planting (photo by Alix)

Bushwick City Farms is really one of the most beautiful projects I’ve had the pleasure of profiling. Like Trees Not Trash, they’ve appropriated two abandoned lots (so far), and they’ve filled them with fowl—chickens, ducks, guinea hens, even a turkey—and gardens. They’re growing more than fifty different fruits, vegetables, and plants, and the entire yield is given out to the community. They’ve got a small version of the Free Store outside of one farm, where people can take or leave clothes, small appliances, and other household goods. In the past they’ve offered ESL classes in the farms, and the spaces serve as a gathering place for members of the community, as well as an opportunity for food education—one day we were harvesting and passing out arugula, and we watched many people try the spicy green for the first time.

Jason with a bucket of greens (photo by me)

The project is entirely volunteer run, and nearly everything has been donated. They’re always looking for more helping hands, so head on out to see them if you’d like to participate in this incredible project. But first, read my interview with Vinnie, Jason, Aneta, and Laurel.

planters (photo by Alix)

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?
Vinnie: My wife Masha, the founder, got permission from the owner of the lot on Broadway to use it as a community garden, and she and the original group of volunteers came in and started cleaning the place out. Shortly thereafter, Jason and I got involved, and other people started helping out, and little by little we started building and expanding. The goal was always to produce fresh, organic food for those in the community, and to provide a space that people could come in and enjoy. We also want to provide food education, to bring people back to basics as far as where food comes from, how to grow and produce it responsibly, and how to eat healthy.
Jason: People are so out of touch with where their food comes from, how food is grown, and what types of food you should be eating.

Jason and Laurel (photo by Alix)

brooklyn spaces: What was the lot like when you got here?
Vinnie: It was overgrown by weeds, and it had been used as an illegal dumping site for years, so it was completely full of garbage. It was a year before it started really looking like something.

Outside the Broadway lot (photo by Alix)

brooklyn spaces: What did you start with?
Vinnie: We had chickens and some container gardens. The garden itself went through a kind of a metamorphosis over the first couple of seasons. We didn’t really know what we were doing; a lot of it was a learning process. We didn’t know about the extent of the contamination in the soil, and we had built smaller beds that didn’t have enough depth to them, which were taken apart eventually.

Inside the Broadway lot (photo by me)

brooklyn spaces: What’s the soil contaminated with?
Jason: Everything. A hundred years of building and collapsing and building and collapsing.
Vinnie: Dumping too. The Stockton lot has been both an apartment building and a gas station in the past, and then it was vacant for two or three decades. It’s basically a landfill; there’s no real soil. It’s mostly cement, brick particles, and garbage.
Jason: There was a tent city, and people had been living in there up until like 2009. Apparently there was a crazy fight, some guy bashed someone’s head in with a shovel, and then there was a fire and their huts burned down, so it was vacant when we went in there.

Planting tomatoes in the Stockton lot (photo by Alix)

brooklyn spaces: When was that?
Jason: Earth Day 2011. We’d had our eye on it for a while, and we just decided to go in and start cleaning it out. We spent a long time bagging up trash, raking up the rubble, cleaning it up. We planted some flowers that first day, and then later we built the fence and got some container gardens started. We just started slowly building it up.

container gardens (photo by Alix)

brooklyn spaces: So you didn’t have prior permission to be in the Stockton space the way you did with the one on Broadway?
Vinnie: No, we just went in and did it. Eventually the manager contacted us. He asked us to write a proposal to the owner, and we did that, and we were given permission to stay. Most people, if they’re not using the land, are pretty open to the idea of community gardens. Or at least that’s been our experience so far.

photo by Alix

brooklyn spaces: What was the reaction from the community?
Vinnie: People loved it, the kids especially. They really love the chickens.

photo by Alix

brooklyn spaces: Where did the chickens come from?
Vinnie: The first ones came from the pollo de vido, the live poultry shop on Myrtle. Since then we’ve gotten more from there, and a lot of the birds have been donated. The turkey was left here on Thanksgiving; we never saw who brought it.

guinea hen & chickens (photo by Alix)

brooklyn spaces: And what about all the building materials and things? Where did all that come from?
Vinnie: We get different things from people in the community: grocery stores have donated produce, gardening companies have given us leftover plants, landscaping companies gave us all the woodchips. There’s a company that ships huge stones, and they have these pallets that are only good for one use, so we get all of our wood from them.

building planter boxes (photo by me)

brooklyn spaces: What all do you have growing now?
Vinnie: Oh, there’s so much. We have spinach, kale, all kinds of lettuce, radishes, carrots, tomatoes…
Jason: Cucumbers, green beans, cilantro, basil, mint, eggplants, a fig tree…
Vinnie: Roses, apple trees…
Jason: Pear trees, peach trees, nectarines, plums, peppers, elephant ears—just tons and tons of stuff.

photo by Alix

brooklyn spaces: And all the food gets donated to the community?
Jason: Yeah. Sundays at 2 o’clock we do distribution, we give out the eggs from the chickens and whatever we’re harvesting that week. The food is given out on an as-needed basis, but we don’t check credentials or anything. We trust people to need what they take and take what they need.

garden behind the chicken coop (photo by me)

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved in keeping this going?
Jason: There’s a core group of about ten volunteers who come to work here almost every day, but if you include all the kids in the neighborhood and everyone who stops by to help out when they can, we probably have more than fifty people.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Vinnie: Probably by the end of the summer we’ll be thinking about expansion, going into other lots, getting schools involved, doing more educational programs.

photo by Alix

brooklyn spaces: What’s the most rewarding part of this for you?
Aneta: I like that people get really excited about it. People are so thrilled, like, “Wow, I’ve never seen a live chicken before!” That’s really fascinating and rewarding. People are happy, really happy to see this.
Vinnie: It reminds a lot of people of where they’re from, so it’s really nice to see their reactions. And the kids just love it. It’s really great to work with the kids.
Jason: For a kid to see something go from seed to harvest is unbelievable, that’s so cool. And they’re more likely to want to eat what they’ve planted, so we’re planting seeds in a lot of different ways.
Laurel: I think the community-building is my favorite part. Providing a space to bring people together and to meet their neighbors. It’s a diverse neighborhood, and I think it’s great to challenge boundaries and remember that people are people.

photo by Alix

Like this? Read about more community spaces: Time’s Up, Body Actualized CenterBoswyck Farms, Books Through Bars, No-SpaceTrinity Project#OccupyWallStreet art show

books through bars

neighborhood: red hook | space type: nonprofit | active since: 1996 | links: website, facebook

Books Through Bars is a all-volunteer collective started by the Nightcrawlers Anarchist Black Cross, and the group’s single goal is to donate free books to the incarcerated. Prisoners write in with requests, and three nights a week, during packing sessions, volunteers scour the bulging shelves of donated books to fill those requests. The group attracts a diverse variety of volunteers—from hipsters to activists to teachers—all of whom are united under the belief that literacy and access to reading material is a human right. Currently housed in the basement of Freebird Books, BTB has been in several previous donated spaces, including a NYCANH building and ABC No Rio before that. Their only cost is postage, and they hold lots of events, like movie screenings, game nights, and music and art shows, to raise funds to cover that expense.

Last summer I volunteered at BTB about once a week. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience, with a consistent, tangible feeling of accomplishment every time you find a book that you know is just what a particular person is looking for. So go help out this terrific organization! Donate some books, volunteer at a packing session, or have fun at an event. But first, check out my interview with collective members Joe and Danny.

brooklyn spaces: How do the prisoners find out about the organization?
Joe: Word of mouth spreads really easily. People in prison are kind of starved for companionship, you know?

brooklyn spaces: Do you get a lot of strange letters?
Danny: Some of the strangest are not from prisoners but from prison officials. We recently had Freud for Beginners rejected by the state of California because it “depicts nudity in such a way as to create the appearance that sexual conduct is imminent.”

brooklyn spaces: Do you get a lot of return letters from the prisoners? Do people write back to say thanks for the books?
Joe: Yeah, we get thank you letters all the time. I often write letters to people that I slip into the books. There was someone I wrote to—I’m a Satanist, and so is he, and I sent him all these Satanic books. And as a thank you, he sent me an ink imprint of his hand with the Sigil of Baphomet on it, and it had flecks of his blood, saliva, and semen. It’s framed and hanging on my wall.
Danny: I have one of his drawings on my wall too.
Joe: Another guy I developed a correspondence with, I ended up calling the prison for him to get him medical treatment he’s been denied, and I’ve even spoken to his mother. He got out recently, and he called to thank me for everything I did. I think it’s really unfortunate for the incarcerated when the human element gets lost.

brooklyn spaces: What are the most common types of books requested?
Danny: A lot of African American history, Spanish dictionaries, educational stuff, like math and science.

brooklyn spaces: I remember one letter asking for books on fixing cars, and I thought that was so heartbreaking. I’m sure the prisoners probably have no access to cars.
Joe: The ones that make me cry are the ones that are barely legible, where you can tell this person has a child’s reading level, and it’ll be like, “Please send books on dinosaurs.” Like putting this person in a cage is doing the world so much fucking good, right? These folks have no access to real literature. I do a debate program in Rikers with the youth, which was started by a Books Through Bars member, and I’ve seen the libraries there. There’s basically shitty pulp and the bible, and that’s it. And this is New York, I can only imagine how bad it is elsewhere.

brooklyn spaces: I know BTB wasn’t always in Brooklyn, but do you think Brooklyn has influenced the space in any way? Do you feel like being in Brooklyn is a good fit?
Danny: It wasn’t Brooklyn for the sake of Brooklyn. After we left the NYCAH space, we had two options, and both happened to be in Brooklyn.
Joe: There’s a lot of gentrifying scum and hipsters around Brooklyn, and I guess that’s why it’s good to have this here, because the wealthy and liberal-leaning youth are all about Brooklyn. As someone who’s from Brooklyn—one of the last people from Brooklyn who’s in Brooklyn—it makes me a little angry, but hopefully if this article gets out and people read it, the privileged scum who see fit to displace the members of my community might come down to volunteer, or, better yet, give us some of their parents’ fucking money.

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Like this? Read about more activism: #OccupyWallStreet art showBushwick City Farms, The IlluminatorBrooklyn Free Store, Trees Not Trash, Time’s Up

time’s up

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

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 showTrinity ProjectTime’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Body Actualized Center, No-Space