Pubdate: Wed, 22 Jun 2016
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2016 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Sarah Maslin Nir

LOCKED OUT OVER MARIJUANA, GARDENERS WATCH BROOKLYN OASIS WITHER

There are rabbits with silken pelts and guinea pigs with curly hair, 
a flock of chickens, crops of eggplant, corn, apples and even a 
banana tree - all thriving in one of the grittiest neighborhoods in 
New York City.

James McCrae and a group of volunteers have spent two decades 
cultivating this once-barren stretch of Glenmore Avenue in East New 
York, Brooklyn, making it one of the city's most resplendent 
community gardens, raising a grassy lawn to replace broken pavement 
and planting herbs for cooking. Shady benches sit under flowering 
bowers inside the garden, where the gardeners used to sit, reaching 
up occasionally to pluck wine grapes overhead. But today, they spend 
their days hunkered on folding chairs on the sidewalk outside the 
gates, watching the flowers wither and the blueberries rot.

On May 31 the city padlocked the garden, Green Gem, as a response to 
inspectors' discovery of a startling crop: marijuana plants. The 
gardeners insist they were unaware of the illicit plants, sowed, they 
say, by a single volunteer gardener, whom they have since ejected. 
The gardeners say they are being unfairly punished.

"My stuff is dying, food is dying," said Mr. McCrae, 60, who works as 
a hospital custodian. "I lost three trees of cherries, a tree of 
blueberries, a tree of apricot, a strawberry field. This was a 
junkyard before we got started. Nobody walked down these streets 
because they were afraid of guns and rats running out of this yard."

The garden was so bountiful, he said, he has lived off what is left 
of the corn, collards and eggs that he does not give away. Local day 
care centers used the garden every day as a grassy playground, and 
neighbors held birthday parties for toddlers beside the koi pond he 
dug by hand.

"I don't have time to grow marijuana," he said. "I have too much to lose."

Green Gem is one of about 600 community gardens in New York City that 
are part of the GreenThumb program, administered by the parks 
department. Volunteers like Mr. McCrae enter into agreements with the 
city to serve as stewards of the parks. They are responsible for 
tasks like planting and harvesting, weeding and pruning, but their 
licenses are conditional: They must follow the rules.

On surprise visits in 2014 and 2015, inspectors found that Green Gem, 
which Mr. McCrae, the son of farmers from South Carolina, started 23 
years ago, had a number of violations. Those included keeping 
roosters, which are not permitted in New York City, and running an 
electrical cord from a building into the park.

But the most egregious violation was discovered in 2014 where it had 
been hidden underneath a rain barrel: a two-foot-tall marijuana 
plant, according to Bill LoSasso, the director of the GreenThumb 
program. The plant was destroyed, and Mr. McCrae and the volunteer 
gardeners who work with him were put on notice, he said. But in 
summer 2015, two more marijuana plants were discovered, seedlings, 
the gardeners said, growing inside coffee cups.

The repeat violations led the city to move to close the garden, which 
was locked in the spring after formal proceedings had ended and its 
license was revoked, the parks department said; the move was reported 
by the Brownsville-East New York Patch website. No one was charged in 
connection with the growing of the marijuana plants, and the 
gardeners declined to reveal the name of the person they say grew them.

"When people become licensees of these community gardens they are 
taking on important leadership roles in their communities, they are 
role models of their community," Mr. LoSasso said. "I think it goes 
without saying that growing marijuana in a community garden on public 
space is not acting in the best needs of this community, or any community."

For the moment, the garden stands in limbo. Yet the neighborhood 
gardeners, most of them men of Puerto Rican descent like Gabriel 
Maldonado, 65, who used to tend to it seven days a week and built 
wooden toy cars from recycled pallets and old wheelchair parts, still 
show up every day. On an afternoon this month, Mr. Maldonado stood on 
the sidewalk, his fingers hooked through the wire gate, peering 
anxiously at wilting rose bushes and the accumulating litter he could 
not tidy up.

"It hurts," Mr. Maldonado said. "It looks like a jungle. It never 
looks like this."

The parks department said garden licenses were rarely revoked. The 
last time was in 2010, when the management of a garden in 
Brownsville, Brooklyn, was turned over to another group because 
administrators had failed to keep the garden open on a regular basis, 
according to Sam Biederman, a spokesman for the department. "We are 
not in the business of closing down gardens," he said. "Only if 
something truly egregious happens does something like this happen."

As for Green Gem, the goal is to reopen the garden under new 
operators, a decision that will be made after the parks department 
meets with community members. Some longtime gardeners and neighbors 
speculated that the garden's closing was simply a land grab at a time 
when the neighborhood is poised for rapid development because of a 
recent rezoning and the city's plan to invest heavily in East New 
York. The parks department rejected such rumors: The garden will 
remain a garden, Mr. Biederman said.

But it is highly unlikely that control of the garden will ever be 
returned to Mr. McCrae, who is known locally as Mr. James, and the 
garden, as "Mr. James's Garden." "The breeze that this garden gives 
off - ooh!" said Jazzy Johnson, 38, a neighbor. "You leave your 
problems outside, you leave your problems down the block. I really, 
really pray he gets his garden back. It's the community's."

Mr. McCrae said he was planning to sue the city to regain the right 
to run the garden. "These are my diamonds, these flowers, these 
trees," he said. "Now all I get to do is walk up and down on the 
sidewalk saying to myself, 'This is the world we live in.'"

As the garden's future is decided, the rabbits and the chickens have 
been moved to a narrow vacant lot behind Green Gem. The space was 
lent by a neighbor to the gardenless gardeners, who still show up 
every day. When they arrived three weeks ago, the scrap of land was 
also a junkyard. Now eggplant is growing.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom