May 29, 2024 • 54 mins
In part two, Margaret finishes talking with Kat Abu about the history of community gardening in New York City and elsewhere.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I don't have a clever thing,
so instead I'm drawing attention to the fact that I
don't have my guest today is kinda boo. Hi cat,
How are you, Margaret?
Speaker 3 (00:17):
I'm good. I'm relatively good.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Wild Life updates between when we totally recorded this on
a totally different day, not five minutes ago, yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Six hours. Oh yeah, it's totally different day because it's
coming out on a different day. Anyways, I got laid
off today, but I'm really enjoying hearing about community gardens
and after this, I'm going to get a penia kolata.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Oh yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, if you come to DC, there's this place that
has the best penia kolatas. Like it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
You know, I haven't had it seen at Kilata in
so long, But like you're saying, and I'm like, why
haven't I that's so weird.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Why haven't you. I'm a big fan. When I was
like a bar tender, I was like really into whiskey
and drink all these whiskey bands. And then after I
stopped bartending, I was like, you know what, whiskey's great
and I appreciate it and all this stuff, But what
if I just drink really fun stuff, like really.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Might as well.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I recently just had Cosmopolitans are delightful, apple tinis. Prosecco
goes with everything. Name one food that doesn't taste good
with prossecco.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I can't, I dare you. I simply cannot, Margaret, I
dare you.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I barely drink anymore. Well, it started because I started
living rurally and so I had to drive everywhere. So
I only drink at home because I don't drink and drive.
And rural areas in this country are just designed for
people to drink and drive. There's no way to go
to a bar where I live without driving home after drinking.
It's not Yeah, so if you live in a city
(01:54):
like bars make sense to me in cities, and they
don't make sense to me in the country. And I mean,
the answer is that everyone here just drinks. And but yeah,
I refuse to all that education as a kid actually
worked on me. I'm like the one person that dare
worked for it. That's not true. I did a bunch
of drugs when I was younger.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Sorry, parents, we're living like drinking and driving for that
not not condoning it at all. This is this is
not a pro drinking drunk driving statement, but it's so
much more empathetic to drive drunk in the suburbs, you
know what I mean? Yeah, it's like, I really do.
(02:33):
You didn't have to do this, and people, you know,
you can make as many conspiracies you want about fifteen
minute cities. I live in a neighborhood where I can
walk to everything and it's amazing, and I have transport
and all this shit. Guess what, I don't have to
drive drunk. And I also don't have to go live
in a house that has molding that's going to fall
off within eight months.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Sorry, I hate suburbs so much.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
No, it's okay, because that's actually what we're going to
talk about. First. You all are listening to part two
of a two parter about community gardens, specifically around New York,
although obviously we mostly talked about Detroit last time, because
I love context and where we last left our heroes.
We actually don't have any named heroes, but community gardens exist. Kat,
(03:19):
I don't know if you knew this but overall, do
you know that white Americans act kind of racistly? Wait
what I know? I know it's in data. I wouldn't
believe it if it wasn't in data.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Because what if the data is racist against white people?
Do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
It probably is. I'm white and I've never met anyone
being racist.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, that checks out.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, that's the least truth thing. Well, okay, the first
half of that sentence was right, I am white because
of social anyway. Whatever. Okay, So in the nineteen sixties
and seventies, you've got what's known as white flight, when
white people abandon the cities on moss and redlining and
(04:03):
other explicitly racist property laws allowed white people better opportunities
to leave cities and head for the suburbs throughout the fifties.
Often they relied on welfare to do this, because low
cost mortgages were provided through the GI bill.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
I did not even think about that. Yeah, the true welfare.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Queens, No, them meant farmers, honestly, Like, look, don't get
me wrong, love me some farmers here and there. But
if you are a farmer and then you complain about
welfare of people in the cities, I got nothing nice
to say to you. So cities were getting poor fast,
which sped up the exodus of people who were able
(04:45):
to leave again because of systemic racism. It's mostly white
families that were able to leave. There was also a
social cause. In nineteen fifty eight, the social scientist named
Morton Grodsen's said quote, once the proportions of non whites
exceed the limits of the neighborhood's tolerance for interracial living,
whites move out. Studies in the nineteen eighties and nineteen
(05:07):
nineties showed that black Americans are fine with a fifty
to fifty ethnic composition, but white people, the white people
who were willing who checked the yes, I'm willing to
live inter racially, were mostly only willing to do so
if they were still the majority. So it's like what
we all kind of knew, we now have. Well, you know,
(05:28):
for the past forty years, we've had data showing that
white people are like, yeah, yeah, as long as there's
only a couple people of color around them, chill, you know.
So white people left the cities because suddenly there was
no white people in the cities. Because the people were
the white people were able to leave the cities because
of a combination of welfare and racism, and with less
(05:49):
financial investment in the cities, the cities got poor. By
the early nineteen seventies, there was something like ten thousand
vacant lots in New York City that had become public
property as a result of unpaid property taxes. So those
are just the ones that were abandoned by people who
stop paying taxes entirely. People started taking over and I'm
going to talk about the squad and scene there sometime,
(06:11):
but today is not that day. People started gardening the
lots and it started with a meeting. I think community
organizing meetings have to be the biggest like discrepancy between
how cool the stuff they get done is versus how
boring it is to go to the meetings in all
of history, or I'm too fidgety to sit through them.
(06:35):
I'm not sure. I've been in a lot of meetings
in my life. Often what you plan to do is
very exciting, but it takes a certain kind of thinking
to decide. The meeting itself is exciting. But this meeting.
You shouldn't be afraid of meetings, because this meeting in
nineteen seventy three started a movement that has fed uncountable
millions of people across the globe since it started. Because
(06:55):
at this meeting, they started the Green Gorillas, which in
turn started the modern community garden movement. I haven't have
you ever heard of the Green Gorillas.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
No.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I knew a lot about New York City community gardens
from my time living there in the early aughts, but
I didn't know as much about its origins.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
It sounds like a cute little school club.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I know. They were really wholesome, they like, I mean,
the Green Gorillas. Yeah, And that's the thing, is like
people kind of whitewash a lot of the community garden
history and they only started talking about when, like the
Parks Department gets involved in stuff. But it's like wholesome.
But it is like crime, and wholesome crime is like
my whole vibe sometimes.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
So.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
In nineteen seventy three, a woman named Liz Christy, alongside
others who aren't named because history likes to pick one
person to single them out, called for a meeting but
what to do about a vacant lot in the Lower
East Side of Manhattan. She was tired of watching kids
play in broken glass. She'd already seen three dead bodies
carried out of the lot as people died of exposure
or violence. I actually looked up there's like basically a
(08:02):
squatty museum and Lower East Side, and some of their
photos and exhibition stuff is online and there's a photo
of kids playing in one of these abandoned laws. It
looks like a war zone. There's way more than I
expected as someone who lived in New York in the
early odds. So the neighbors got together and they were like,
(08:25):
we're going to garden this space. And they posted flyers
in multiple languages because again that's the important thing to do,
and they started raising funds for equipment, but mostly they
ended up paying for everything out of their own pockets.
They actually tried to do this properly. They talked to
the city about their plans and they even paid for insurance,
and the city was like, nah, you can't work this
(08:47):
property because you don't own it. And the people were like, hey,
we were asking to be polite, we're going to do
it anyway. And so they hauled out trash, they hauled
in soil, and they split the place into lots for
neighbors to have gardens. They called it the Bowery Houston
Community Farm and Garden, And so the city came rushing
(09:08):
in and was like, all right, if you're going to
do it anyway, well, now we wanted to be proper
and have paperwork. They got a one month, one dollar
a month lease from the city.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
That's like Planet Word over here in DC.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
It's a this museum that's dedicated to like literature and
linguistics and stuff like that, and it was founded by
a second grade teacher. It just it's like one of
the newest museums in the city. And she was a
second grade teacher and then she married I think like
Thomas Bridman and was like, let me use all this
money for something good and created this really cool, like
(09:45):
the most accessible museum I've ever been to that's all
about like how words formed. There's like this giant library
where you can just pick the books off the shelves
and sit there all day. It's pay what you wish.
It's all donations, and it's in this old big schoolhouse
in the middle of DC. And the city gave them
a I think it's ten dollars a year rent for
the next hundred years.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Nice That next hundred years is a big important part
of it, and it's going to come up a lot
because they don't have this, these folks when they're getting
their one dollar a month. That's cool. I really, I'm
really spoiled. I grew up near DC, and so in
my museums are free, and I don't understand the idea
of paying for museums. It's like, I mean, I pay
(10:27):
for it a lot out of my taxes. Like I
should be done paying for it at that point.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Is how I tend to always like explaining to people that, like,
if I'm in Penn Quarter, I just go into the
portrait gallery and hang out with my favorite painting for
ten minutes. Like that's a completely impossible to like comprehend
idea in pretty much everywhere else. Yeah, but yeah, go
to planet where if you're in DC. It's just when
I plug that real quick.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's cool. I honestly love museums and I'm going to go. Yes.
So this park that they started, the first community garden
of this style that was started in New York in
nineteen seventy three. It's still around. It is now over
an acre and it is renamed the Liz Christie garden,
and they was renamed that nineteen eighty five after Liz
(11:15):
died of cancer. Twenty gardeners still work there, maintaining mature
trees and ponds of fish and turtles and shit. But
it's never enough with these hippies, right, they saved one
vacant lot, and now they're trying to save all the
other vacant lots in the city. When will they read
these people? I know, I know. So they started the
Green Gorillas, and sometimes they ask for permission from the city,
(11:37):
but quite famously, they often didn't. If you ever want
to read a one sentence description of their tactics, it's
usually they went around throwing condoms full of tomato seeds
over fences into empty lots.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Awesome, I'm guessing that tied up.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, I assume so too. It's an oversimplification. They usually
used water balloons or Christmas ornaments, which I'll be sleeve
would work better. These are called seed bombs. And now
I'm going to go on a long tangent and talk
about seed bombs because they're fucking cool. Fuck. Yes, seed
bombs are fucking cool. It's written into the script. Most
(12:14):
of the time they're made from compost clay and seeds,
and they're developed. According to everything you'll read about them,
they're developed from an ancient Japanese practice. And if I
see a lot of articles that say in ancient Japanese
practice without sources, I'm going to side eye the shit
out of that. They were rediscovered in nineteen thirty eight
by a Japanese gardener who seems pretty cool, and so
(12:35):
it is a practice that has come out of Japan
and might be ancient. The guy who reinvented them, his
name was Masanobo Fukuoka. And in the West, you've got
these early organic moves, like he's doing this stuff at
the early twentieth century, right, and that's before the organic
mat movement really kicks off. It's during this period where
(12:56):
everyone's like, we want to turn agriculture into industry because
we're really excited about destroying the entire world. And so
one of the Western version of hey, what if we
didn't do that was this Austrian guy who invented biodynamic
farming named Rudolph Steiner, and he's real fucking strange. His
(13:19):
thing is organic farming meets wingnut religious stuff, and it
is considered one of the antecede into the modern organic
farming movement. Have you ever heard of this stuff?
Speaker 4 (13:27):
No?
Speaker 3 (13:27):
But I love things that sound insane, and this sounds insane.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah. There's like stuff like, in order to grow certain food,
you'll like take an animal manure and put it into
a horn of an animal and then you'll bury it
for like a month under the right phase of the moon,
and then you dig it up and then you use
that as fertilizer. Yes, and it's kind of cool, honestly,
Like I can't actually hate it. I just stayed on
(13:53):
a biodynamic farm in Finland when I was anyway whatever.
But it's like it's also like not always great in
a lot of ways, and it's like not particularly scientific.
So the Japanese antecedent to the organic farming movement seems
cooler overall and has had a little bit more staining power.
(14:15):
Japan seemed pretty head in terms of alternative agriculture. Masanobu
was an early advocate of stuff that's becoming more popular today,
like no till farming and organic farming. He called his
method and do nothing farming, and basically he was like,
what if we don't do any work, doesn't that seem
like a better way to live, and I can't argue
(14:35):
with him. He was a scientist who had a religious
experience that made him be like, I think Western agriculture
is no good, which is true. At first, he kind
of tried to go like a little bit too far.
He was like, well, what if I just don't even
prune the tree? And then he was like, oh shit,
insects are fucking it up and all the things and
doesn't make his good fruit, and so he has to
do like a little bit of cultivation. But he did
(14:56):
a lot of no till farming of rice and barley.
His most famous book is called The One Straw Revolution,
and it doesn't work necessarily for feeding people at scale,
but it is a really interesting concept. He traveled around
the world with his life.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Wait, I want to hear about those So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Enough about no till farming, yet I'm like starting to
learn more about that stuff, even just through my own
gardening and things like that. Basically, like people are more
and more starting to say, like instead of having like
these carefully cultivated plots where you only plant the one
plant and then you have to like water it constantly,
if you use like the right kind of cover crop
and all these things. Things can take care of themselves
(15:35):
a little bit more and then like you can do
a lot of stuff without tilling. I don't know enough
about it yet. Cool, but yeah, he I don't know.
It's interesting. I fell down a rabbit hole about it,
and I've like read about it a whole bunch before,
but I like don't feel like I'm an expert at
at any any level. And so with his life, he
(15:57):
traveled around the world trying to do cool shit, like
you vegetate deserts that were expanding and things like that,
and he just like did that. He went on to
do it until he died at the age of ninety
five in two thousand and eight. He's enough of like
a interesting and wing nutty guy that I'm like waiting
to find out that he's like some terrible you know,
there's like something going on, but I I'm not aware
(16:18):
of it yet. And he was into seed bombs. You
throw him everywhere you see what grows up on its own.
The classic seedball is five parts clay to one part seeds.
You dry it out and then you toss it somewhere
and then the seeds may or may not stick. When
I was a baby activist, gorilla gardening was all the
(16:39):
rage and all the big protests would regularly have like
seed bomb workshops the day before so people could toss
seeds into abandoned lots along the march routes.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Wait, oh my god, I just realized, like the gorilla
garden in New York, that's not gorilla, like the animal.
I was like, that's a green gorilla.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I was like, that's so cute. It's like green gorilla
is like an elementary school club. Okay, nevermind, Sorry, so embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
All good. So these days you can buy seed bombs
and stores or like on Etsy or whatever, and honestly,
I'm not mad about that because as long as you remember,
you can make them yourself. On my fortieth birthday, my
family came out to my property and we had a
big bag of seed bombs that they had bought of
like wildflowers, and we just like stood on my porch
and through seed bombs as far as we could. It's
(17:26):
a very nice way to spend an afternoon and just
for fun. And by that I mean because I want
people to make their own seed bombs, although don't do
it exactly this way because it involves a little bit
of glittering. I'm going to read from the Green Gorillas
fact sheet that they circulated about how to make the
seed bombs that they made. You take an ornament, you
take pelletized time release fertilizer, peat moss, crumbs, tissue, and seeds.
(17:50):
You start with the seeds in the fertilizer, then you
add wet peat moss, and then you stop it up
with tissue, and then quote choose a lot that has
a fence and is legally inaccessible. Calculate in advance how
many grenades will be needed to cover the area. Check
carefully before throwing, observe all normal safety precautions. Suggested throwing
techniques are for Christmas ornaments and underhand throw. For water balloons,
(18:13):
use an overhand throw. And then they have a list
at the bottom of suggested seeds based on the season,
mostly flowers, sometimes grass or soybeans. And they just went
around and flour bombed New York.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Awesome.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
The Green Gorillas coined the term gorilla gardening. Gorilla gardening
is one of the clearest and most beautiful examples of
direct action. It's a protest tactic that highlights a problem,
but does so by directly addressing that problem. Basically, gorilla
gardening is when people, without asking permission, go out and
plant gardens. Sometimes these are carefully constructed and maintained gardens,
(18:49):
whether for beauty or food or both. Sometimes you apparently
throw a condom full of seeds over a fence. Don't
do that, by a way, unless you find biodegradable condoms, which.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
I say, what if there are biodegradeab all condoms, in.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Which case, probably don't trust them for reproductive health. I
don't know. They'd be kind of cool if people figure
that out. It's also an example of a protest tactic
that is easily recuperated. When I was younger and living
in the Netherlands, I knew all these graph kids and
they consciously refused to do murals and like graffiti art
(19:24):
because the city was using legal graft style murals to
attract tourists and gentrify the city. So the kids only
tagged because it didn't raise property values and it didn't
lead to the displacement of squatters and low income homeowners
and residents. Basically, they were like, we're going to fight
gentrification by fucking up the city. Visually. But I went
back eight years later and those same folks, who I
(19:45):
could no longer call kids at this point, were doing
beautiful street art. They were still squatters and anarchists, but
they had changed their perspective on this issue. I asked
one guy what changed, and he shrugged and he was like, ah,
I grew up. I wanted to make something pretty. And
that's just a tension that is going to exist whenever
(20:07):
people take direct action to beautify their environments. But what
isn't attention is the tension of running an anti capitalist
podcast sponsored by capitalist products. I feel no tension whatsoever,
she said, while lying.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Everyone knows Margaret loves ads. She's always saying I love ads,
are my favorite thing in the world. They call her
Margaret ad lover killjoy.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I know, and I'm always trying to interject them now
into regular conversation. I'll be like talking to my friends
and I'll be like, but you know who else watched
this TV show? Here's some ads, And then they stare
at me because I know, yeah, and I don't read
the ads, so they just stare at me, and as
I wait a little while and we're back. So it's complicated,
(21:06):
but I am one hundred percent pro gorilla gardening. It's
just not without complicated knock on effects like community gardening itself.
In nineteen seventy three, the Green Gorillas got their start,
the gardeners expanded like wild and the Green Gorillas were
working eighty four gardens by nineteen seventy five. They intentionally
went around and taught everyone how to do what they
were doing and helped new gardens do surveys and get plants.
(21:30):
By nineteen eighty six, they had two hundred and fifty volunteers.
By nineteen ninety one, they were working four hundred and
fifty gardens out of the about seven hundred gardens total
in the city. It wasn't all just peaceful and non destructive.
Bolt cutters were as much a part of their Arsenal's
paperwork was those kind of this thing, we're in retrospect
because all this is very above board, and the Parks
(21:52):
Department runs it now, and so everyone's like wacky, like
they threw some seeds around and doesn't like to talk
about like the crime and property destruction part of it,
as if they're ashamed of that was. I think it's
part of what made it cool in nineteen seventy eight,
the Parks Department started to step in more formally, seeing
(22:13):
how popular all this shit was. And I don't want
to necessarily say that the people at the Parks Department
were being opportunistic or that their goal was recuperation, because
I think that all of these people were looking for
ways to try and make it last, right. You know,
when you have a squatted space, you're waiting for the
cops to come and take it from you. And so
they wanted to work with the city. But of course
(22:37):
the Parks Department's involvement has in some ways sheltered and
in some ways imperiled many of these gardens. The Green
Gorillas were anxious to get formal recognition so that the
gardens could survive bureaucracy, and it sort of worked. In
nineteen seventy eight, this Parks Department started its Green Thumb program,
originally called Operation Green Thumb. And there's no space between
(22:58):
green and Thumb, but there is between operation and green
and that annoys me.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
You wanted it to be one ward, No.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
I probably want a space between all of it, honestly, But.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
If it's all one word, all ower case, that's tallicized
MM hmm yeah, okay, letter underlined. Uh then it's just
pussy and bio but about gardens. Yeah, and I hope that.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
One day someone's going to hear this five years from now,
no fucking clue what that reference was, and.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Just especially someone who's like thirteen right now, and they like,
they're like, I don't even know what twitter is.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, iesssics if they only that sounds a basic I know.
Most community gardens that go legit go through Green Thumb.
The Green Thumb license agreement with these gardens is quote
terminable at will by the Commissioner in his or her discretion,
at any time upon sixty days written notice. And the
(23:55):
licensee shall have no recourse of any nature whatsoever by
reason of such termination.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
And this is about the gardens that feed people. Okay,
So these things they want to sound like super villains.
I know, I know they're like, Hey, this thing that's
been around for thirty years that everyone is like, yeah,
if we want to turn into a music venue, we'll
get into that later. It was an example where they're like,
(24:20):
what have we just turned into a music venue?
Speaker 2 (24:22):
And fuck you? You know, enter our first real villain of
the week. Mayor Rudy Giuliani. What a villain. I know,
I kept thinking he's dead. I know he's not.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
He's shilling some like shitty coffee right now. And also
he peed on a hot mic he did, mike. Yeah,
like he was in a zoom call and he still
let his microphone on when he went to go pee,
and you can hear him pete.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
He's a winner.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
He's so hot, you know, as he's as in.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
He's literally melting and the flush is coming off.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's really brave of
him to be a sentient wax figure.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
I'm surprised that centient wax figures need to be urinate. Honestly.
That's probably the reason he did it, is there's too
many rumors that he was a sentient wax figure.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Yeah, and so like he didn't actually even piss.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, it was like it was a setup play to
sound effect.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, he hired someone else that he hired a task grab,
a person to come in.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I mean a lot of people hire people about pe.
Usually it's a different yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
And you know that's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah. So I'm not sure whether that was a sex
work reference or a smoking weed reference. But I made
it either way. So if you google America's mayor, you
get fucking Rudy Giuliani. I, however, much prefer mister Potato man,
who had tried to clean up Detroit by cracking down
on corruption and monopoly, to Rudy Juliani.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
We should make him America's mare again.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
I agree. What was his name again, Pingree? I remember
it was his first name.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Okay, it was something kind of silly.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
I know, it was like brazen, but it wasn't. And
it's like, yeah, it was like.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
A like a white guy name, but like he could
be like kind of a fun character and historical movie.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Anyways, Yeah, I like him more. Rudy Giuliani is like
the inverse of this man. Rudy Giuliani wanted to clean
up New York City by opening it for business and
has been investigated for corruption and profiteering, the kind of
thing that you know, Pingree spent his life fighting against.
Giuliani was elected in nineteen ninety three. He too was
(26:33):
a Republican, just the modern version where you suck. He
too was raised working class. His father was an Italian
mafia man. This is the broken Windows mare. If you
brutally crack down on minor infractions like graffiti, turnstile jumping, loitering,
et cetera. Somehow that stops all the murder and robbery
(26:55):
and shit. I lived in New York City during his reign,
and I had friends spent three days in jail for
like hopping turnstiles or getting caught with a joint on them.
The idea is that if someone sees a broken window,
they figure it's not a place where the law is enforced,
so you can kind of do whatever you want. I
mostly I used to hop turnstyles all the time, and
it was like fucking crazy adrenaline rush because I was like,
(27:17):
if I get caught, I'm gonna spend three days in
jail just to save like a dollar fifty or whatever.
I wasn't. I wasn't the smartest person when I was younger,
like cost benefit analysis, poor whatever. I also believe that
it's lush every day. It would keep you young.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
I mean, you said your fortieth birthday something earlier, and
I was like, I had no idea you were forty.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, okay, so and adrenaline russia day keeps aging away.
That's in some cases, Yeah, maybe you're just special. There's
this whole thing where people talk about how like punk
Stone age, But I think it's because we stay dressed subcultural. Now.
It is true that during his reign, crime went down
(28:04):
significantly in New York, but so did crime in all
the major cities nationwide. When this policy ended in twenty fourteen,
there was no statistically significant effect on major crime. Broken
window theory is a crackdown on loitering, not on property
that you leave derelict. Rudy Giuliani fucking hated the community
(28:24):
gardens because he wanted development. Most of the community gardens
were on city owned property, and he wanted to buldoze
the green space to build housing.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
None of that is surprising religion. Being like I hate
planned is like okay.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, no, no totally, Like he's just a bastard. He
just sucks.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, I would actually love a bastard's episode about him.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Who would be good for that.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I'll make a note, h.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Sometimes articles will talk about how he wanted to buldoze
these gardens to build low income housing. This is a lie.
It's even a lie to say that he claimed he
wanted it. He was really blunt in nineteen ninety nine
and in January on like a radio show. He said,
this is a free market economy. The era of communism
is over, and by that he I mean one like,
(29:13):
you know, the Soviet Union had collapsed. But I think
he's also specifically being like this era of these community
gardens just doing communism like whatever. In January nineteen ninety nine,
one hundred and fourteen gardens were put up for auction
by this city with the intention of selling the land
to developers. And when they would sell it to the
(29:34):
land to developers, it was not to build low income housing.
It was eighty percent market rate housing and twenty percent
moderate income housing. I saw this myself a few years
later while I was living in a squad in the Bronx,
and it was the squad was run by an Indigenous
run nonprofit had been around since I think the mid eighties.
We are in a tenement building surrounded by project buildings.
(29:56):
The city wanted to bulldoze the building to put in
market rate housing that would have a few low income
units as available as well, which would massively increase the
overall cost of living in the area. So they wanted
to gentrify that area by bulldozing a squat to build
quote unquote low income housing, most of which was market rate,
and then in two thousand and four they burned the
(30:16):
squat down to get the squatters out because we kept
tying them up in the courts, and once it was
burned down then there was no thing to fight about
legally anymore. But that's a different story that I don't have.
I was just there. I don't know. I haven't looked
up the details a very long time. Fuck those twenty
years ago, I feel old. Whatever. So one hundred and
(30:40):
fourteen community gardens were put up for auction without doing
a round of community input, like they're supposed to fucking
do lip service to, you know, when they pretend like
they care what the community has to say, so they
like community meetings and everyone can wait to say they're
like bit to city council and then get ignored. You know. Yeah,
they didn't bother even doing that.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
That's so rude, I know.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
But the movement stepped the fuck up during that auction,
and we we win this one. You could say, I'm
gonna make a pop culture reference, Sophie. You could say
that the community was the wind beneath the movement's wings.
It's a Betty Middler joke, totally modern pop culture. That's
(31:21):
what I'm doing here.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Hello, dear listener, Yes, I heard it too, and fear not,
Margaret has been informed of the correct pronunciation of Bette
Midler's name. No need to come after her on the internet.
Enjoy the rest of the episode.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Goodbye, that's your reference.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I was like, is Margaret gonna like name drop Arianna Grande?
Speaker 2 (31:50):
What's happening? No? No, I'm gonna name drop someone who
hasn't been relevant to anyone besides like an old person
sometimes getting confused by modern activist language and saying the
wrong thing and then having everyone get mad, but is
still a good person. Betty Midler wrote a song called
the Wind Beneath My Wings or Your Wings or whatever.
The fuck. I don't know. She's a singer, she's great.
(32:12):
I don't know if she's great as a singer or not.
It's not my cup of tea, but she fucking saved
the day along with some other people. She had been
a New York City activist for decades. At that point,
she was heavily involved a supporting game end during the
AIDS crisis. In nineteen ninety five, she founded the New
York Restoration Project a trust which went to that auction
(32:32):
and bought sixty of the one hundred and fourteen community
gardens and put them into a trust. And a trust
is a way more secure thing than the green Thumb
program with like the month a month leases and shit
like that. I think Middler herself put millions of dollars
into that. Another fifty two were purchased by another trust.
(32:53):
The total cost of buying a one hundred and twelve
out of one hundred and fourteen was like four point
two million or something. That people raised, and these are
probably still the most legally protected community gardens in New
York City, the ones that are in these trusts.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
That makes me very happy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I know Juliani, though, would not be deterred, so he
put another six hundred up for auction, and I lose
track of the ins and outs of each garden at
this point. Many of them ended up bulldozed, many of
them ended up being saved, and a lot of that
saving wasn't just rich philanthropists, which is don't get me wrong,
(33:34):
thank you, Betty Midler. One group that was involved in
that fight was a Puerto Rican direct action and squatters
group called Charis, which is an acronym for the first
initials of its founders. They squatted a place with some
former Black Panthers in nineteen seventy nine, and then they
left it in exchange for being given a different building. Basically,
the city was like, oh, fuck, not that one here.
(33:56):
Do you want this empty schoolhouse instead? And they're like, yes,
we'll take this empty school whose which they built into
the Elboheo Community Center, which means the Hut. It is
a five story former public school. That community center they
ran as a community center. They taught classes, they lent
out bicycles, they offered meeting space. A ton of local
(34:20):
theater companies practiced in that space for years. In nineteen
ninety eight, a Giuliani supporter bought it for three point
one five million dollars and then didn't do anything with it,
and it is still empty as of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
I'm gonna throw it.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
However, during the auction, a group called Jiminy Cricket released
ten thousand live crickets into the auditorium at the police Place.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Awesome, Okay, that's great.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah. And Charis fought for community gardens. One of the
founders was this guy named Armando per who was born
in Puerto Rico, moved to New York when he was younger.
If you want to hear a whole bunch of really
amazing stuff that Puerto Rican New York New Aurekans that
I think they would call themselves got up to. We
did a four parter our first four part about the
(35:14):
Young Lord's movement that did amazing things. Armando Perez was
murdered in nineteen ninety nine in a murder that people
tend to assume was a political hit because of his
fight against development. It's also possible that he was killed
by some folks who are dealing drugs that he confronted
about dealing drugs, which apparently would have been in character
(35:34):
for him too. The most telling line in the New
York Times article about his death is quote, because mister
Perez had been drinking, the police did not initially treat
his death as a homicide. Fuck, yeah, is this bad? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (35:53):
It's just bad. Also means cops, I have no numbers
on this, but like, there have to be a sick
in a number of people when homicides happen that are
drunk on both sides.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Right, Yeah, I would I would presume a majority of
people who kill and or are killed in fights. Yeah,
I assume alcohol is involved in an awful lot of
these things, right, Yeah, And so for it was like
months before they found anyone and started like the police
(36:23):
found anyone and started like reporting on it at all.
And I think that they like went and tracked some
people down because of people starting to be like, y'all
put a hit on him, And it's possible that that happened.
It's also possible that he was confronting. He apparently was
known for trying to convince people that they should not
be dealing drugs on the project building where his wife lived.
(36:47):
But La Plaza Cultural de Amando Perez is one community
garden that's still around in the East Village and it's
named after him. Charis first started that garden in nineteen
seventy six. It wasn't named after him. To start, it
was like all the groups coming together to start that garden.
You had the green gorilla seed bombing it for them,
and Charis was like really into geodesic domes. This is
(37:10):
some seventy shit that you probably had to be there, right.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
I fell into like a rabbit hole about geodesic domes yesterday.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Oh amazing.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
There's like a whole thing of like there's like a
I was on the off grid living Stubreddit and there's
like a whole thing just about like various things you
can do with geodesic domes. I didn't know they went
back that far.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Buckminster Fuller showed, who's the guy who like popularized them,
showed up personally to help them build one on this
garden when it was not legal, and when was that
nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
I thought these were like a thing that started in
like the night. That's crazy.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
No, see yah, some hippie shit. Yeah, that's so sick. Yeah, no,
it's it's it's cool. And like I remember actually during
Occupy there was some I was part of Occupy Santa
Cruz and those people who are like really into geodesic domes.
There's so they like built one as they like place
in the occupation and stuff. It was cool. I like
don't get it, but I think it's cool when people
(38:08):
have liked their thing, and I just get really excited
for them, you know, Yeah, and I want to hear
more about it. Yeah, the fights to defend all these
community gardens in the nineties and the early aughts were creative,
theatrical and confrontational, which was the style at the time.
It's kind of the stuff that built into I'm sure
(38:28):
there are other things that built into it, but it
built into the alter anti globalization movement of the late
nineties and early aughts, which set up a ton of
the protest culture around the world that we still have today.
All of the like horizontal direct action, like theatrical protest
movement stuff that's been going on all over the world.
(38:49):
A lot of that comes from the anti globe era stuff,
and this stuff immediately preceded that and then tied into it.
And it just makes me happy that it like when
I find these like lineages that then carry all over
the world. There's an article about this particular fight written
by Civil Eats in twenty twenty two. Quote. At the
(39:13):
height of the protests, as a city was preparing to
bulldoze the East Village's Esperanza Garden, organizers built a structure
shaped like a cookie, a small tree, frog, and a
cultural symbol of Puerto Rico, with enough room for five people,
so we slept in it every night, said Bill de Payola,
a longtime community organizer amid a court battle to prevent
(39:33):
the auctioning of gardens. He recalls how the city bulldozed
the land in two thousand and one with the help
of the police, forcing out one hundred protesters. And so
they did all of this, like civil disobedience and all
these things to try and protect these While they were
also working in the courts, the green guerrillas would like
dress up as vegetables and raid city hall. Folks kept
(39:54):
starting new gardens. One of the best articles about all
of this was written by an anarchist journalist named Brad
Will who was and it was written in I want
to say these articles written in two thousand and one
and two thousand and six. Brad Will was murdered by
the Mexican government while covering the teachers uprising in Ohaka
in two thousand and six. He filmed his own death,
he wrote down at the Fifth Street squat, which I
(40:16):
think is where he was living at the time. We
cleared out the adjacent lot of rubble, drunk carts, piss, bottles,
and rot. We started a green space. The neighborhood kids
ran wild between the fragile beds. The nuns from the
Cambrini old folks Home came across the street to praise
our goodly green emergence. The year before they had been
lobbying for our viction like because so basically, the nuns
(40:37):
didn't like the squad and then they opened a garden
and now the nuns are like, hey, these squaders are cool.
He went and taught Earth First blockade techniques to the
gardeners at the Chico Mendez Mural Garden and they set
up barricades and they named it Fort Chico. It was
eventually bulldozed. Activists were doing things like chaining themselves across
the street. And it was like all of these techniques
(40:58):
that have been developed and forced defence and by Earth
First brought into community garden defense in the middle of
one of the densest cities in the country. And it,
I don't know, makes me happy. Because in two thousand
and two the movement one again, sort of four hundred
(41:19):
or five hundred gardens depending on your source were transferred
into the Green Thumb program, while one hundred and fifty
were developed. And I have no clean and clever transition
from this sentence into an ad and yet I'm doing
it anyway, because now here's ads and we're back. So
(41:50):
basically what happened is right. So these four hundred five
hundred gardens are now part of that Green Thumb program,
and this is the one where it's like a month
a month lease where they can get fucked over at
any time. But it still was the like they were
about to all be destroyed. And now they're like, oh,
it's like safe until we specifically come up with reasons
why we want the land, you know. Yeah, And the
(42:15):
Green Thumb gardens are precarious. Disaster capitalism, for example, took
out a Coney Island community garden. It had been running
for years and having green space actually mitigated some of
the worst flooding from Hurricane Sandy in twenty twelve. That
it destroyed a whole bunch of that area well, and
it buried the storm buried it Undersand I wonder if
(42:37):
they knew that when they named it Sandy. Anyway, the storm,
the community came together immediately and restored the garden, and
then the mayor was like, yeah, but what if we
put a music venue here? And the gardeners watched their
work bulldozed in twenty thirteen. The death cycle of the
(42:57):
community garden is the cycle of gentrification. An area gets
poor and is neglected and often winds up trashed. Community
residents clean up that trash and beautify the neighborhood, which
invites new wealthier residents, which displaces people who cleaned up
the neighborhood. Eventually, the property is too valuable to leave vacant,
and the people who move there because of gardens are
(43:18):
no longer there. This is the cycle we see. Like,
you know, artists move to a place because it's affordable,
and then richer artists move there, and then all the
artists have to leave and whatever, you know, to quote
Robert Gottlieb, writing for the MIT Press, quote in a
neoliberal age, private property, Trump's community benefits once private owners
(43:39):
and sometimes public entities decide that the land value has improved,
often due to the community gardens, and that development can proceed.
Gardens are plowed under, even when developments are then postponed,
with the former gardens sometimes reverting to public land, and
of course recuperation comes for us. All there's now a
(44:01):
real estate company that I'm not going to name that.
In twenty fourteen, trademarked the term agrihoods for agricultural neighborhoods,
and then I need you to unsay that. Thank you,
thank you, thank you, yep. For the low cost of
half a million bucks or five million bucks, in the
right neighborhood, you can buy a house around a centrally
planned farm with composting in solar panels. Isn't that exciting?
Speaker 3 (44:24):
You can just do that, you know, you could just
do that with I was saying five million dollars.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
The next sentence in my script is, honey, I used
to live in a solar powered cabin with composting toilets.
That cost me about five thousand dollars. And it annoys
me because the idea of an agrihood is a good one.
It is closer to the way that humans develop to live.
(44:52):
And there are like people trying to do this but good.
There's a nonprofit that runs an agricultural neighborhood in Detroit
where the meati the in home value is under twenty
five thousand dollars and is run by a guy born
and raised in the neighborhood whose grandmother lived in that neighborhood.
People living there share tools and can harvest whatever they
want from the farm once a week, and that's like
(45:15):
the tech billionaires get all the stuff that we should
all just have, that we develop as ways to live
despite being poor, and then they're like, oh, we want
all that stuff. It seems classy and interesting, like all
the fucking boho chic stuff, which whatever I mean it.
I'm not above like making farmhouse style furniture because you
can make it out of two by four us. But
I guess I am above paying ten thousand dollars for
(45:36):
farmhouse style furniture. Yeah, that sounds right, ten thousand dollars.
Furniture should be old as shit and really interesting in
card with ornate, weird scenes. That's my one day. I'm
going to start an interior design show and no one
will listen to it, but I'll be happy.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
I think it'll be a really great counterweight to Chip
and Joanna Gains. Yeah that is Oh wait, sorry I
got I'm like I got.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
The response trans later. Yeah. Please. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
And it will be original, that's the thing. It'll be
original and goth.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
It won't be the people that do all of the
barn doors.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, it will be the same house over and over
and over again. There won't be barn doors. A big
clock and a sign that says, yeah, basically gray floors.
Gray floors.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah yeah, but they were all you said gray not great.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Okay, yeah, it was like great gray floors not great.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
Yeah yeah yeah, because a great floor system, but it
shouldn't be gray. You can get a nice It's.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
This Magpie, really Magpie really knows how to pick like
a faucet fixture and like cool mirrors and like, I
don't know, don't you have like a swan fawcet fixture
or something fantom?
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, all my sinks. I put in black Swans as
the fawcet fixtures, including the like weird basement bathroom that's
covered in graffiti that when people come over, I like
hand them paint markers until them to because I you
know whatever. Anyway, Yeah, I really like interior decorating.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, I'm redecorating right now with Facebook Marketplace, and it's
hell improved my space so well that.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Is the only good thing left about Facebook, or maybe
it was the only good thing ever.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
Yeah, Like I don't use Facebook at all. I actually
had to create an account to use Facebook Marketplace. Yeah,
that's all I use it for is Facebook Marketplace. I
got this bang and chair, this ikea like prolong chair
or whatever for you know, good price. Just picked it
up from a roll that was moving, and now it's
my cat's favorite for best friend.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Yeah. Yeah, that is you can have nice stuff by
doing things with people instead of whatever. I'm supposed to
tie this into a.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
People that can afford it by it and then you know,
you give it to someone else instead of throwing it out.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah. And so as of last year, there's still five
hundred and fifty community gardens in New York City, seven
hundred school gardens, seven hundred gardens on public housing, and
one hundred gardens in the land trusts. And that's fucking cool.
And that is because of the work that people did
for years, but especially in the late nineties and the
early odds. It's the people who dressed up like tomatoes
(48:16):
and ran into city Hall, the people who released crickets,
the people who locked down to things, the people who
wrote hit songs that you all don't appreciate and then
donated money. And the gardens still exist and they still
do essential work. For example, rather than shut down during
COVID despite being ordered to, gardeners formed the Bronx Community
(48:36):
Farm Hubs to grow and donate food to places that
needed it. They gave away forty three thousand pounds of
food in twenty twenty, then one hundred and sixty two
thousand pounds of food, and twenty twenty one then they
also just started feeding people, but then Green Thumb shut
them down for that because they were like, couldn't social
distance properly or whatever, even though it's all outside and
(48:57):
they regularly donate to community fridges. Also, I know, it's
just like I love these legacy projects that are still
around because of the work that people did. These gardens
help compost the city's waste. The governor recently cut all
the compost programs funding, but a private, anonymous donation kept
(49:19):
it going. I assume, as Betty Midler, the nonprofit Grow
NYC runs fifty two food drop offs and composts eight
point three million pounds of organic waste every year. And
I don't know there's You could also tie this story
back to Detroit, where their entire urban farms that grew
up after white flight and the oil crisis left the
(49:41):
city derelict. And one day we'll talk about them too,
but we're not going to talk about today because today
we're out of script. I'm at the end of it,
because I did the thing that I was going to
do and now it's the end of this episode.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
And that's what I loved hearing aboutmmunity gardens. I learned
a lot, and I think that there's be more of them,
and I'm going to try to figure out ways to
actively get involved in one nearby me.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Hell yeah, yeah, no. I if I lived in the
city at this point, I would absolutely be looking for
this kind of thing because it's fucking cool and it's
you know, they're not always like a lot of them
are open to the public and that you can like
go and walk around like being the pretty ones or whatever,
but like you know, they're often people working specific plots
(50:30):
and you can't necessarily just like immediately start having one.
But they're worth defending and being involved with. But what
else is worth being involved with is your content. In
the plugs section of the episode.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
You can find my YouTube channel and my TikTok online
it's kat m aboo abu like a monkey in Aladdin.
I also have other social media. You can find it
on a link tree because there are so many and
they have different names. Additionally, I just got laid off
from media matters. I'm good, but I have a lot
(51:06):
of really great colleagues that are looking for work and
if we have funds for them in the future, I'll
make sure to keep you all updated on that. So
please keep an eye out and follow them and hire
them if you have a job that's open.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Hell yeah, And I'm on a bunch of things. You
can follow me on Instagram Marder Kiljoy. You can follow
me on ex at Magpie Killjoy and oh god, I
just said X and ironically.
Speaker 3 (51:33):
Yeah, I was like, wow, that was really impressive. I
don't know, it's an impressive derogatory.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
No, it's yeah, brains wormed me so. But more importantly,
I have a book coming out this fall in September
twenty fourth from Feminist Press. It's called The Sapling Cage
and it's a young adult book about transwitch who saves
the world from a magical enclosure of the commons. It
does not don't worry, it does not say a magical
(51:59):
inclues the comments anywhere in the book. I'm it's more
fun than that. And it is being kickstartered in June
of twenty twenty four. And if you look up The
Sapling Cage Margaret Kiljoy or whatever. I'm sure you can
figure out how to find the kickstarter page and you
can sign up there to get information about when that
kickstarter lunches so you can get copies of it. And
(52:22):
I'm really excited about it's the best book I've ever written,
and I have written a good number of books, and
so that's saying something. Well, I don't know. I mean,
all my books could be trash, but I think they're good.
And Sophie, you got anything like, is there any new
podcasts coming out from her network?
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah, we got two relatively new podcasts. One is Better Offline,
hosted by ed Zitron. It's a weekly sometimes twice weekly
podcast about the tech world and why it's so fucked
up and how it impacts everybody's lives. The other is
a podcast hosted by my best friend Jamie Loftist called
(52:58):
Sixteenth Minute of Fame weekly podcast.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
It looks back at some.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Of the Internet's main characters and how their viral moments
affected their lives and our lives. So, if you haven't
listened already, we have two really great episodes that just
just came out recently about the dress that was white
and gold. Sorry, and about the Boston slide.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Cop Oft slid down the slide.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
And went off walk and then it went as all
over the internet and it's a really great episode and
it's super interesting to check that out.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Yeah, I listened to both those podcasts. I like everything
cool Zone Media does. I know that, and you know
that I'm not chilling because when I have to say ads,
I look like someone just hit me in the face.
But I actually like all cool Zone Media's content. And
better offline is Angry Tech podcast and nothing that Jamie
(53:55):
Loftis records as bad and this one's particularly good. So
next week you can hear more Cool People Who Did
Cool Stuff by listening to it. That's all I got.
Speaker 3 (54:08):
Yay Yay.
Speaker 1 (54:15):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1 (54:22):
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I don't have a clever thing,
so instead I'm drawing attention to the fact that I
don't have my guest today is kinda boo. Hi cat,
How are you, Margaret?
Speaker 3 (00:17):
I'm good. I'm relatively good.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Wild Life updates between when we totally recorded this on
a totally different day, not five minutes ago, yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Six hours. Oh yeah, it's totally different day because it's
coming out on a different day. Anyways, I got laid
off today, but I'm really enjoying hearing about community gardens
and after this, I'm going to get a penia kolata.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Oh yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, if you come to DC, there's this place that
has the best penia kolatas. Like it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
You know, I haven't had it seen at Kilata in
so long, But like you're saying, and I'm like, why
haven't I that's so weird.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Why haven't you. I'm a big fan. When I was
like a bar tender, I was like really into whiskey
and drink all these whiskey bands. And then after I
stopped bartending, I was like, you know what, whiskey's great
and I appreciate it and all this stuff, But what
if I just drink really fun stuff, like really.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Might as well.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I recently just had Cosmopolitans are delightful, apple tinis. Prosecco
goes with everything. Name one food that doesn't taste good
with prossecco.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I can't, I dare you. I simply cannot, Margaret, I
dare you.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I barely drink anymore. Well, it started because I started
living rurally and so I had to drive everywhere. So
I only drink at home because I don't drink and drive.
And rural areas in this country are just designed for
people to drink and drive. There's no way to go
to a bar where I live without driving home after drinking.
It's not Yeah, so if you live in a city
(01:54):
like bars make sense to me in cities, and they
don't make sense to me in the country. And I mean,
the answer is that everyone here just drinks. And but yeah,
I refuse to all that education as a kid actually
worked on me. I'm like the one person that dare
worked for it. That's not true. I did a bunch
of drugs when I was younger.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Sorry, parents, we're living like drinking and driving for that
not not condoning it at all. This is this is
not a pro drinking drunk driving statement, but it's so
much more empathetic to drive drunk in the suburbs, you
know what I mean? Yeah, it's like, I really do.
(02:33):
You didn't have to do this, and people, you know,
you can make as many conspiracies you want about fifteen
minute cities. I live in a neighborhood where I can
walk to everything and it's amazing, and I have transport
and all this shit. Guess what, I don't have to
drive drunk. And I also don't have to go live
in a house that has molding that's going to fall
off within eight months.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Sorry, I hate suburbs so much.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
No, it's okay, because that's actually what we're going to
talk about. First. You all are listening to part two
of a two parter about community gardens, specifically around New York,
although obviously we mostly talked about Detroit last time, because
I love context and where we last left our heroes.
We actually don't have any named heroes, but community gardens exist. Kat,
(03:19):
I don't know if you knew this but overall, do
you know that white Americans act kind of racistly? Wait
what I know? I know it's in data. I wouldn't
believe it if it wasn't in data.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Because what if the data is racist against white people?
Do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
It probably is. I'm white and I've never met anyone
being racist.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, that checks out.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, that's the least truth thing. Well, okay, the first
half of that sentence was right, I am white because
of social anyway. Whatever. Okay, So in the nineteen sixties
and seventies, you've got what's known as white flight, when
white people abandon the cities on moss and redlining and
(04:03):
other explicitly racist property laws allowed white people better opportunities
to leave cities and head for the suburbs throughout the fifties.
Often they relied on welfare to do this, because low
cost mortgages were provided through the GI bill.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
I did not even think about that. Yeah, the true welfare.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Queens, No, them meant farmers, honestly, Like, look, don't get
me wrong, love me some farmers here and there. But
if you are a farmer and then you complain about
welfare of people in the cities, I got nothing nice
to say to you. So cities were getting poor fast,
which sped up the exodus of people who were able
(04:45):
to leave again because of systemic racism. It's mostly white
families that were able to leave. There was also a
social cause. In nineteen fifty eight, the social scientist named
Morton Grodsen's said quote, once the proportions of non whites
exceed the limits of the neighborhood's tolerance for interracial living,
whites move out. Studies in the nineteen eighties and nineteen
(05:07):
nineties showed that black Americans are fine with a fifty
to fifty ethnic composition, but white people, the white people
who were willing who checked the yes, I'm willing to
live inter racially, were mostly only willing to do so
if they were still the majority. So it's like what
we all kind of knew, we now have. Well, you know,
(05:28):
for the past forty years, we've had data showing that
white people are like, yeah, yeah, as long as there's
only a couple people of color around them, chill, you know.
So white people left the cities because suddenly there was
no white people in the cities. Because the people were
the white people were able to leave the cities because
of a combination of welfare and racism, and with less
(05:49):
financial investment in the cities, the cities got poor. By
the early nineteen seventies, there was something like ten thousand
vacant lots in New York City that had become public
property as a result of unpaid property taxes. So those
are just the ones that were abandoned by people who
stop paying taxes entirely. People started taking over and I'm
going to talk about the squad and scene there sometime,
(06:11):
but today is not that day. People started gardening the
lots and it started with a meeting. I think community
organizing meetings have to be the biggest like discrepancy between
how cool the stuff they get done is versus how
boring it is to go to the meetings in all
of history, or I'm too fidgety to sit through them.
(06:35):
I'm not sure. I've been in a lot of meetings
in my life. Often what you plan to do is
very exciting, but it takes a certain kind of thinking
to decide. The meeting itself is exciting. But this meeting.
You shouldn't be afraid of meetings, because this meeting in
nineteen seventy three started a movement that has fed uncountable
millions of people across the globe since it started. Because
(06:55):
at this meeting, they started the Green Gorillas, which in
turn started the modern community garden movement. I haven't have
you ever heard of the Green Gorillas.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
No.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I knew a lot about New York City community gardens
from my time living there in the early aughts, but
I didn't know as much about its origins.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
It sounds like a cute little school club.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I know. They were really wholesome, they like, I mean,
the Green Gorillas. Yeah, And that's the thing, is like
people kind of whitewash a lot of the community garden
history and they only started talking about when, like the
Parks Department gets involved in stuff. But it's like wholesome.
But it is like crime, and wholesome crime is like
my whole vibe sometimes.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
So.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
In nineteen seventy three, a woman named Liz Christy, alongside
others who aren't named because history likes to pick one
person to single them out, called for a meeting but
what to do about a vacant lot in the Lower
East Side of Manhattan. She was tired of watching kids
play in broken glass. She'd already seen three dead bodies
carried out of the lot as people died of exposure
or violence. I actually looked up there's like basically a
(08:02):
squatty museum and Lower East Side, and some of their
photos and exhibition stuff is online and there's a photo
of kids playing in one of these abandoned laws. It
looks like a war zone. There's way more than I
expected as someone who lived in New York in the
early odds. So the neighbors got together and they were like,
(08:25):
we're going to garden this space. And they posted flyers
in multiple languages because again that's the important thing to do,
and they started raising funds for equipment, but mostly they
ended up paying for everything out of their own pockets.
They actually tried to do this properly. They talked to
the city about their plans and they even paid for insurance,
and the city was like, nah, you can't work this
(08:47):
property because you don't own it. And the people were like, hey,
we were asking to be polite, we're going to do
it anyway. And so they hauled out trash, they hauled
in soil, and they split the place into lots for
neighbors to have gardens. They called it the Bowery Houston
Community Farm and Garden, And so the city came rushing
(09:08):
in and was like, all right, if you're going to
do it anyway, well, now we wanted to be proper
and have paperwork. They got a one month, one dollar
a month lease from the city.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
That's like Planet Word over here in DC.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
It's a this museum that's dedicated to like literature and
linguistics and stuff like that, and it was founded by
a second grade teacher. It just it's like one of
the newest museums in the city. And she was a
second grade teacher and then she married I think like
Thomas Bridman and was like, let me use all this
money for something good and created this really cool, like
(09:45):
the most accessible museum I've ever been to that's all
about like how words formed. There's like this giant library
where you can just pick the books off the shelves
and sit there all day. It's pay what you wish.
It's all donations, and it's in this old big schoolhouse
in the middle of DC. And the city gave them
a I think it's ten dollars a year rent for
the next hundred years.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Nice That next hundred years is a big important part
of it, and it's going to come up a lot
because they don't have this, these folks when they're getting
their one dollar a month. That's cool. I really, I'm
really spoiled. I grew up near DC, and so in
my museums are free, and I don't understand the idea
of paying for museums. It's like, I mean, I pay
(10:27):
for it a lot out of my taxes. Like I
should be done paying for it at that point.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Is how I tend to always like explaining to people that, like,
if I'm in Penn Quarter, I just go into the
portrait gallery and hang out with my favorite painting for
ten minutes. Like that's a completely impossible to like comprehend
idea in pretty much everywhere else. Yeah, but yeah, go
to planet where if you're in DC. It's just when
I plug that real quick.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's cool. I honestly love museums and I'm going to go. Yes.
So this park that they started, the first community garden
of this style that was started in New York in
nineteen seventy three. It's still around. It is now over
an acre and it is renamed the Liz Christie garden,
and they was renamed that nineteen eighty five after Liz
(11:15):
died of cancer. Twenty gardeners still work there, maintaining mature
trees and ponds of fish and turtles and shit. But
it's never enough with these hippies, right, they saved one
vacant lot, and now they're trying to save all the
other vacant lots in the city. When will they read
these people? I know, I know. So they started the
Green Gorillas, and sometimes they ask for permission from the city,
(11:37):
but quite famously, they often didn't. If you ever want
to read a one sentence description of their tactics, it's
usually they went around throwing condoms full of tomato seeds
over fences into empty lots.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Awesome, I'm guessing that tied up.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, I assume so too. It's an oversimplification. They usually
used water balloons or Christmas ornaments, which I'll be sleeve
would work better. These are called seed bombs. And now
I'm going to go on a long tangent and talk
about seed bombs because they're fucking cool. Fuck. Yes, seed
bombs are fucking cool. It's written into the script. Most
(12:14):
of the time they're made from compost clay and seeds,
and they're developed. According to everything you'll read about them,
they're developed from an ancient Japanese practice. And if I
see a lot of articles that say in ancient Japanese
practice without sources, I'm going to side eye the shit
out of that. They were rediscovered in nineteen thirty eight
by a Japanese gardener who seems pretty cool, and so
(12:35):
it is a practice that has come out of Japan
and might be ancient. The guy who reinvented them, his
name was Masanobo Fukuoka. And in the West, you've got
these early organic moves, like he's doing this stuff at
the early twentieth century, right, and that's before the organic
mat movement really kicks off. It's during this period where
(12:56):
everyone's like, we want to turn agriculture into industry because
we're really excited about destroying the entire world. And so
one of the Western version of hey, what if we
didn't do that was this Austrian guy who invented biodynamic
farming named Rudolph Steiner, and he's real fucking strange. His
(13:19):
thing is organic farming meets wingnut religious stuff, and it
is considered one of the antecede into the modern organic
farming movement. Have you ever heard of this stuff?
Speaker 4 (13:27):
No?
Speaker 3 (13:27):
But I love things that sound insane, and this sounds insane.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah. There's like stuff like, in order to grow certain food,
you'll like take an animal manure and put it into
a horn of an animal and then you'll bury it
for like a month under the right phase of the moon,
and then you dig it up and then you use
that as fertilizer. Yes, and it's kind of cool, honestly,
Like I can't actually hate it. I just stayed on
(13:53):
a biodynamic farm in Finland when I was anyway whatever.
But it's like it's also like not always great in
a lot of ways, and it's like not particularly scientific.
So the Japanese antecedent to the organic farming movement seems
cooler overall and has had a little bit more staining power.
(14:15):
Japan seemed pretty head in terms of alternative agriculture. Masanobu
was an early advocate of stuff that's becoming more popular today,
like no till farming and organic farming. He called his
method and do nothing farming, and basically he was like,
what if we don't do any work, doesn't that seem
like a better way to live, and I can't argue
(14:35):
with him. He was a scientist who had a religious
experience that made him be like, I think Western agriculture
is no good, which is true. At first, he kind
of tried to go like a little bit too far.
He was like, well, what if I just don't even
prune the tree? And then he was like, oh shit,
insects are fucking it up and all the things and
doesn't make his good fruit, and so he has to
do like a little bit of cultivation. But he did
(14:56):
a lot of no till farming of rice and barley.
His most famous book is called The One Straw Revolution,
and it doesn't work necessarily for feeding people at scale,
but it is a really interesting concept. He traveled around
the world with his life.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Wait, I want to hear about those So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Enough about no till farming, yet I'm like starting to
learn more about that stuff, even just through my own
gardening and things like that. Basically, like people are more
and more starting to say, like instead of having like
these carefully cultivated plots where you only plant the one
plant and then you have to like water it constantly,
if you use like the right kind of cover crop
and all these things. Things can take care of themselves
(15:35):
a little bit more and then like you can do
a lot of stuff without tilling. I don't know enough
about it yet. Cool, but yeah, he I don't know.
It's interesting. I fell down a rabbit hole about it,
and I've like read about it a whole bunch before,
but I like don't feel like I'm an expert at
at any any level. And so with his life, he
(15:57):
traveled around the world trying to do cool shit, like
you vegetate deserts that were expanding and things like that,
and he just like did that. He went on to
do it until he died at the age of ninety
five in two thousand and eight. He's enough of like
a interesting and wing nutty guy that I'm like waiting
to find out that he's like some terrible you know,
there's like something going on, but I I'm not aware
(16:18):
of it yet. And he was into seed bombs. You
throw him everywhere you see what grows up on its own.
The classic seedball is five parts clay to one part seeds.
You dry it out and then you toss it somewhere
and then the seeds may or may not stick. When
I was a baby activist, gorilla gardening was all the
(16:39):
rage and all the big protests would regularly have like
seed bomb workshops the day before so people could toss
seeds into abandoned lots along the march routes.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Wait, oh my god, I just realized, like the gorilla
garden in New York, that's not gorilla, like the animal.
I was like, that's a green gorilla.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I was like, that's so cute. It's like green gorilla
is like an elementary school club. Okay, nevermind, Sorry, so embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
All good. So these days you can buy seed bombs
and stores or like on Etsy or whatever, and honestly,
I'm not mad about that because as long as you remember,
you can make them yourself. On my fortieth birthday, my
family came out to my property and we had a
big bag of seed bombs that they had bought of
like wildflowers, and we just like stood on my porch
and through seed bombs as far as we could. It's
(17:26):
a very nice way to spend an afternoon and just
for fun. And by that I mean because I want
people to make their own seed bombs, although don't do
it exactly this way because it involves a little bit
of glittering. I'm going to read from the Green Gorillas
fact sheet that they circulated about how to make the
seed bombs that they made. You take an ornament, you
take pelletized time release fertilizer, peat moss, crumbs, tissue, and seeds.
(17:50):
You start with the seeds in the fertilizer, then you
add wet peat moss, and then you stop it up
with tissue, and then quote choose a lot that has
a fence and is legally inaccessible. Calculate in advance how
many grenades will be needed to cover the area. Check
carefully before throwing, observe all normal safety precautions. Suggested throwing
techniques are for Christmas ornaments and underhand throw. For water balloons,
(18:13):
use an overhand throw. And then they have a list
at the bottom of suggested seeds based on the season,
mostly flowers, sometimes grass or soybeans. And they just went
around and flour bombed New York.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Awesome.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
The Green Gorillas coined the term gorilla gardening. Gorilla gardening
is one of the clearest and most beautiful examples of
direct action. It's a protest tactic that highlights a problem,
but does so by directly addressing that problem. Basically, gorilla
gardening is when people, without asking permission, go out and
plant gardens. Sometimes these are carefully constructed and maintained gardens,
(18:49):
whether for beauty or food or both. Sometimes you apparently
throw a condom full of seeds over a fence. Don't
do that, by a way, unless you find biodegradable condoms, which.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
I say, what if there are biodegradeab all condoms, in.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Which case, probably don't trust them for reproductive health. I
don't know. They'd be kind of cool if people figure
that out. It's also an example of a protest tactic
that is easily recuperated. When I was younger and living
in the Netherlands, I knew all these graph kids and
they consciously refused to do murals and like graffiti art
(19:24):
because the city was using legal graft style murals to
attract tourists and gentrify the city. So the kids only
tagged because it didn't raise property values and it didn't
lead to the displacement of squatters and low income homeowners
and residents. Basically, they were like, we're going to fight
gentrification by fucking up the city. Visually. But I went
back eight years later and those same folks, who I
(19:45):
could no longer call kids at this point, were doing
beautiful street art. They were still squatters and anarchists, but
they had changed their perspective on this issue. I asked
one guy what changed, and he shrugged and he was like, ah,
I grew up. I wanted to make something pretty. And
that's just a tension that is going to exist whenever
(20:07):
people take direct action to beautify their environments. But what
isn't attention is the tension of running an anti capitalist
podcast sponsored by capitalist products. I feel no tension whatsoever,
she said, while lying.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Everyone knows Margaret loves ads. She's always saying I love ads,
are my favorite thing in the world. They call her
Margaret ad lover killjoy.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I know, and I'm always trying to interject them now
into regular conversation. I'll be like talking to my friends
and I'll be like, but you know who else watched
this TV show? Here's some ads, And then they stare
at me because I know, yeah, and I don't read
the ads, so they just stare at me, and as
I wait a little while and we're back. So it's complicated,
(21:06):
but I am one hundred percent pro gorilla gardening. It's
just not without complicated knock on effects like community gardening itself.
In nineteen seventy three, the Green Gorillas got their start,
the gardeners expanded like wild and the Green Gorillas were
working eighty four gardens by nineteen seventy five. They intentionally
went around and taught everyone how to do what they
were doing and helped new gardens do surveys and get plants.
(21:30):
By nineteen eighty six, they had two hundred and fifty volunteers.
By nineteen ninety one, they were working four hundred and
fifty gardens out of the about seven hundred gardens total
in the city. It wasn't all just peaceful and non destructive.
Bolt cutters were as much a part of their Arsenal's
paperwork was those kind of this thing, we're in retrospect
because all this is very above board, and the Parks
(21:52):
Department runs it now, and so everyone's like wacky, like
they threw some seeds around and doesn't like to talk
about like the crime and property destruction part of it,
as if they're ashamed of that was. I think it's
part of what made it cool in nineteen seventy eight,
the Parks Department started to step in more formally, seeing
(22:13):
how popular all this shit was. And I don't want
to necessarily say that the people at the Parks Department
were being opportunistic or that their goal was recuperation, because
I think that all of these people were looking for
ways to try and make it last, right. You know,
when you have a squatted space, you're waiting for the
cops to come and take it from you. And so
they wanted to work with the city. But of course
(22:37):
the Parks Department's involvement has in some ways sheltered and
in some ways imperiled many of these gardens. The Green
Gorillas were anxious to get formal recognition so that the
gardens could survive bureaucracy, and it sort of worked. In
nineteen seventy eight, this Parks Department started its Green Thumb program,
originally called Operation Green Thumb. And there's no space between
(22:58):
green and Thumb, but there is between operation and green
and that annoys me.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
You wanted it to be one ward, No.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
I probably want a space between all of it, honestly, But.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
If it's all one word, all ower case, that's tallicized
MM hmm yeah, okay, letter underlined. Uh then it's just
pussy and bio but about gardens. Yeah, and I hope that.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
One day someone's going to hear this five years from now,
no fucking clue what that reference was, and.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Just especially someone who's like thirteen right now, and they like,
they're like, I don't even know what twitter is.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, iesssics if they only that sounds a basic I know.
Most community gardens that go legit go through Green Thumb.
The Green Thumb license agreement with these gardens is quote
terminable at will by the Commissioner in his or her discretion,
at any time upon sixty days written notice. And the
(23:55):
licensee shall have no recourse of any nature whatsoever by
reason of such termination.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
And this is about the gardens that feed people. Okay,
So these things they want to sound like super villains.
I know, I know they're like, Hey, this thing that's
been around for thirty years that everyone is like, yeah,
if we want to turn into a music venue, we'll
get into that later. It was an example where they're like,
(24:20):
what have we just turned into a music venue?
Speaker 2 (24:22):
And fuck you? You know, enter our first real villain of
the week. Mayor Rudy Giuliani. What a villain. I know,
I kept thinking he's dead. I know he's not.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
He's shilling some like shitty coffee right now. And also
he peed on a hot mic he did, mike. Yeah,
like he was in a zoom call and he still
let his microphone on when he went to go pee,
and you can hear him pete.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
He's a winner.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
He's so hot, you know, as he's as in.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
He's literally melting and the flush is coming off.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's really brave of
him to be a sentient wax figure.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
I'm surprised that centient wax figures need to be urinate. Honestly.
That's probably the reason he did it, is there's too
many rumors that he was a sentient wax figure.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Yeah, and so like he didn't actually even piss.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, it was like it was a setup play to
sound effect.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, he hired someone else that he hired a task grab,
a person to come in.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I mean a lot of people hire people about pe.
Usually it's a different yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
And you know that's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah. So I'm not sure whether that was a sex
work reference or a smoking weed reference. But I made
it either way. So if you google America's mayor, you
get fucking Rudy Giuliani. I, however, much prefer mister Potato man,
who had tried to clean up Detroit by cracking down
on corruption and monopoly, to Rudy Juliani.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
We should make him America's mare again.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
I agree. What was his name again, Pingree? I remember
it was his first name.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Okay, it was something kind of silly.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
I know, it was like brazen, but it wasn't. And
it's like, yeah, it was like.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
A like a white guy name, but like he could
be like kind of a fun character and historical movie.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Anyways, Yeah, I like him more. Rudy Giuliani is like
the inverse of this man. Rudy Giuliani wanted to clean
up New York City by opening it for business and
has been investigated for corruption and profiteering, the kind of
thing that you know, Pingree spent his life fighting against.
Giuliani was elected in nineteen ninety three. He too was
(26:33):
a Republican, just the modern version where you suck. He
too was raised working class. His father was an Italian
mafia man. This is the broken Windows mare. If you
brutally crack down on minor infractions like graffiti, turnstile jumping, loitering,
et cetera. Somehow that stops all the murder and robbery
(26:55):
and shit. I lived in New York City during his reign,
and I had friends spent three days in jail for
like hopping turnstiles or getting caught with a joint on them.
The idea is that if someone sees a broken window,
they figure it's not a place where the law is enforced,
so you can kind of do whatever you want. I
mostly I used to hop turnstyles all the time, and
it was like fucking crazy adrenaline rush because I was like,
(27:17):
if I get caught, I'm gonna spend three days in
jail just to save like a dollar fifty or whatever.
I wasn't. I wasn't the smartest person when I was younger,
like cost benefit analysis, poor whatever. I also believe that
it's lush every day. It would keep you young.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
I mean, you said your fortieth birthday something earlier, and
I was like, I had no idea you were forty.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, okay, so and adrenaline russia day keeps aging away.
That's in some cases, Yeah, maybe you're just special. There's
this whole thing where people talk about how like punk
Stone age, But I think it's because we stay dressed subcultural. Now.
It is true that during his reign, crime went down
(28:04):
significantly in New York, but so did crime in all
the major cities nationwide. When this policy ended in twenty fourteen,
there was no statistically significant effect on major crime. Broken
window theory is a crackdown on loitering, not on property
that you leave derelict. Rudy Giuliani fucking hated the community
(28:24):
gardens because he wanted development. Most of the community gardens
were on city owned property, and he wanted to buldoze
the green space to build housing.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
None of that is surprising religion. Being like I hate
planned is like okay.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, no, no totally, Like he's just a bastard. He
just sucks.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, I would actually love a bastard's episode about him.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Who would be good for that.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I'll make a note, h.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Sometimes articles will talk about how he wanted to buldoze
these gardens to build low income housing. This is a lie.
It's even a lie to say that he claimed he
wanted it. He was really blunt in nineteen ninety nine
and in January on like a radio show. He said,
this is a free market economy. The era of communism
is over, and by that he I mean one like,
(29:13):
you know, the Soviet Union had collapsed. But I think
he's also specifically being like this era of these community
gardens just doing communism like whatever. In January nineteen ninety nine,
one hundred and fourteen gardens were put up for auction
by this city with the intention of selling the land
to developers. And when they would sell it to the
(29:34):
land to developers, it was not to build low income housing.
It was eighty percent market rate housing and twenty percent
moderate income housing. I saw this myself a few years
later while I was living in a squad in the Bronx,
and it was the squad was run by an Indigenous
run nonprofit had been around since I think the mid eighties.
We are in a tenement building surrounded by project buildings.
(29:56):
The city wanted to bulldoze the building to put in
market rate housing that would have a few low income
units as available as well, which would massively increase the
overall cost of living in the area. So they wanted
to gentrify that area by bulldozing a squat to build
quote unquote low income housing, most of which was market rate,
and then in two thousand and four they burned the
(30:16):
squat down to get the squatters out because we kept
tying them up in the courts, and once it was
burned down then there was no thing to fight about
legally anymore. But that's a different story that I don't have.
I was just there. I don't know. I haven't looked
up the details a very long time. Fuck those twenty
years ago, I feel old. Whatever. So one hundred and
(30:40):
fourteen community gardens were put up for auction without doing
a round of community input, like they're supposed to fucking
do lip service to, you know, when they pretend like
they care what the community has to say, so they
like community meetings and everyone can wait to say they're
like bit to city council and then get ignored. You know. Yeah,
they didn't bother even doing that.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
That's so rude, I know.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
But the movement stepped the fuck up during that auction,
and we we win this one. You could say, I'm
gonna make a pop culture reference, Sophie. You could say
that the community was the wind beneath the movement's wings.
It's a Betty Middler joke, totally modern pop culture. That's
(31:21):
what I'm doing here.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Hello, dear listener, Yes, I heard it too, and fear not,
Margaret has been informed of the correct pronunciation of Bette
Midler's name. No need to come after her on the internet.
Enjoy the rest of the episode.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Goodbye, that's your reference.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I was like, is Margaret gonna like name drop Arianna Grande?
Speaker 2 (31:50):
What's happening? No? No, I'm gonna name drop someone who
hasn't been relevant to anyone besides like an old person
sometimes getting confused by modern activist language and saying the
wrong thing and then having everyone get mad, but is
still a good person. Betty Midler wrote a song called
the Wind Beneath My Wings or Your Wings or whatever.
The fuck. I don't know. She's a singer, she's great.
(32:12):
I don't know if she's great as a singer or not.
It's not my cup of tea, but she fucking saved
the day along with some other people. She had been
a New York City activist for decades. At that point,
she was heavily involved a supporting game end during the
AIDS crisis. In nineteen ninety five, she founded the New
York Restoration Project a trust which went to that auction
(32:32):
and bought sixty of the one hundred and fourteen community
gardens and put them into a trust. And a trust
is a way more secure thing than the green Thumb
program with like the month a month leases and shit
like that. I think Middler herself put millions of dollars
into that. Another fifty two were purchased by another trust.
(32:53):
The total cost of buying a one hundred and twelve
out of one hundred and fourteen was like four point
two million or something. That people raised, and these are
probably still the most legally protected community gardens in New
York City, the ones that are in these trusts.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
That makes me very happy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I know Juliani, though, would not be deterred, so he
put another six hundred up for auction, and I lose
track of the ins and outs of each garden at
this point. Many of them ended up bulldozed, many of
them ended up being saved, and a lot of that
saving wasn't just rich philanthropists, which is don't get me wrong,
(33:34):
thank you, Betty Midler. One group that was involved in
that fight was a Puerto Rican direct action and squatters
group called Charis, which is an acronym for the first
initials of its founders. They squatted a place with some
former Black Panthers in nineteen seventy nine, and then they
left it in exchange for being given a different building. Basically,
the city was like, oh, fuck, not that one here.
(33:56):
Do you want this empty schoolhouse instead? And they're like, yes,
we'll take this empty school whose which they built into
the Elboheo Community Center, which means the Hut. It is
a five story former public school. That community center they
ran as a community center. They taught classes, they lent
out bicycles, they offered meeting space. A ton of local
(34:20):
theater companies practiced in that space for years. In nineteen
ninety eight, a Giuliani supporter bought it for three point
one five million dollars and then didn't do anything with it,
and it is still empty as of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
I'm gonna throw it.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
However, during the auction, a group called Jiminy Cricket released
ten thousand live crickets into the auditorium at the police Place.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Awesome, Okay, that's great.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah. And Charis fought for community gardens. One of the
founders was this guy named Armando per who was born
in Puerto Rico, moved to New York when he was younger.
If you want to hear a whole bunch of really
amazing stuff that Puerto Rican New York New Aurekans that
I think they would call themselves got up to. We
did a four parter our first four part about the
(35:14):
Young Lord's movement that did amazing things. Armando Perez was
murdered in nineteen ninety nine in a murder that people
tend to assume was a political hit because of his
fight against development. It's also possible that he was killed
by some folks who are dealing drugs that he confronted
about dealing drugs, which apparently would have been in character
(35:34):
for him too. The most telling line in the New
York Times article about his death is quote, because mister
Perez had been drinking, the police did not initially treat
his death as a homicide. Fuck, yeah, is this bad? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (35:53):
It's just bad. Also means cops, I have no numbers
on this, but like, there have to be a sick
in a number of people when homicides happen that are
drunk on both sides.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Right, Yeah, I would I would presume a majority of
people who kill and or are killed in fights. Yeah,
I assume alcohol is involved in an awful lot of
these things, right, Yeah, And so for it was like
months before they found anyone and started like the police
(36:23):
found anyone and started like reporting on it at all.
And I think that they like went and tracked some
people down because of people starting to be like, y'all
put a hit on him, And it's possible that that happened.
It's also possible that he was confronting. He apparently was
known for trying to convince people that they should not
be dealing drugs on the project building where his wife lived.
(36:47):
But La Plaza Cultural de Amando Perez is one community
garden that's still around in the East Village and it's
named after him. Charis first started that garden in nineteen
seventy six. It wasn't named after him. To start, it
was like all the groups coming together to start that garden.
You had the green gorilla seed bombing it for them,
and Charis was like really into geodesic domes. This is
(37:10):
some seventy shit that you probably had to be there, right.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
I fell into like a rabbit hole about geodesic domes yesterday.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Oh amazing.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
There's like a whole thing of like there's like a
I was on the off grid living Stubreddit and there's
like a whole thing just about like various things you
can do with geodesic domes. I didn't know they went
back that far.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Buckminster Fuller showed, who's the guy who like popularized them,
showed up personally to help them build one on this
garden when it was not legal, and when was that
nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
I thought these were like a thing that started in
like the night. That's crazy.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
No, see yah, some hippie shit. Yeah, that's so sick. Yeah, no,
it's it's it's cool. And like I remember actually during
Occupy there was some I was part of Occupy Santa
Cruz and those people who are like really into geodesic domes.
There's so they like built one as they like place
in the occupation and stuff. It was cool. I like
don't get it, but I think it's cool when people
(38:08):
have liked their thing, and I just get really excited
for them, you know, Yeah, and I want to hear
more about it. Yeah, the fights to defend all these
community gardens in the nineties and the early aughts were creative,
theatrical and confrontational, which was the style at the time.
It's kind of the stuff that built into I'm sure
(38:28):
there are other things that built into it, but it
built into the alter anti globalization movement of the late
nineties and early aughts, which set up a ton of
the protest culture around the world that we still have today.
All of the like horizontal direct action, like theatrical protest
movement stuff that's been going on all over the world.
(38:49):
A lot of that comes from the anti globe era stuff,
and this stuff immediately preceded that and then tied into it.
And it just makes me happy that it like when
I find these like lineages that then carry all over
the world. There's an article about this particular fight written
by Civil Eats in twenty twenty two. Quote. At the
(39:13):
height of the protests, as a city was preparing to
bulldoze the East Village's Esperanza Garden, organizers built a structure
shaped like a cookie, a small tree, frog, and a
cultural symbol of Puerto Rico, with enough room for five people,
so we slept in it every night, said Bill de Payola,
a longtime community organizer amid a court battle to prevent
(39:33):
the auctioning of gardens. He recalls how the city bulldozed
the land in two thousand and one with the help
of the police, forcing out one hundred protesters. And so
they did all of this, like civil disobedience and all
these things to try and protect these While they were
also working in the courts, the green guerrillas would like
dress up as vegetables and raid city hall. Folks kept
(39:54):
starting new gardens. One of the best articles about all
of this was written by an anarchist journalist named Brad
Will who was and it was written in I want
to say these articles written in two thousand and one
and two thousand and six. Brad Will was murdered by
the Mexican government while covering the teachers uprising in Ohaka
in two thousand and six. He filmed his own death,
he wrote down at the Fifth Street squat, which I
(40:16):
think is where he was living at the time. We
cleared out the adjacent lot of rubble, drunk carts, piss, bottles,
and rot. We started a green space. The neighborhood kids
ran wild between the fragile beds. The nuns from the
Cambrini old folks Home came across the street to praise
our goodly green emergence. The year before they had been
lobbying for our viction like because so basically, the nuns
(40:37):
didn't like the squad and then they opened a garden
and now the nuns are like, hey, these squaders are cool.
He went and taught Earth First blockade techniques to the
gardeners at the Chico Mendez Mural Garden and they set
up barricades and they named it Fort Chico. It was
eventually bulldozed. Activists were doing things like chaining themselves across
the street. And it was like all of these techniques
(40:58):
that have been developed and forced defence and by Earth
First brought into community garden defense in the middle of
one of the densest cities in the country. And it,
I don't know, makes me happy. Because in two thousand
and two the movement one again, sort of four hundred
(41:19):
or five hundred gardens depending on your source were transferred
into the Green Thumb program, while one hundred and fifty
were developed. And I have no clean and clever transition
from this sentence into an ad and yet I'm doing
it anyway, because now here's ads and we're back. So
(41:50):
basically what happened is right. So these four hundred five
hundred gardens are now part of that Green Thumb program,
and this is the one where it's like a month
a month lease where they can get fucked over at
any time. But it still was the like they were
about to all be destroyed. And now they're like, oh,
it's like safe until we specifically come up with reasons
why we want the land, you know. Yeah, And the
(42:15):
Green Thumb gardens are precarious. Disaster capitalism, for example, took
out a Coney Island community garden. It had been running
for years and having green space actually mitigated some of
the worst flooding from Hurricane Sandy in twenty twelve. That
it destroyed a whole bunch of that area well, and
it buried the storm buried it Undersand I wonder if
(42:37):
they knew that when they named it Sandy. Anyway, the storm,
the community came together immediately and restored the garden, and
then the mayor was like, yeah, but what if we
put a music venue here? And the gardeners watched their
work bulldozed in twenty thirteen. The death cycle of the
(42:57):
community garden is the cycle of gentrification. An area gets
poor and is neglected and often winds up trashed. Community
residents clean up that trash and beautify the neighborhood, which
invites new wealthier residents, which displaces people who cleaned up
the neighborhood. Eventually, the property is too valuable to leave vacant,
and the people who move there because of gardens are
(43:18):
no longer there. This is the cycle we see. Like,
you know, artists move to a place because it's affordable,
and then richer artists move there, and then all the
artists have to leave and whatever, you know, to quote
Robert Gottlieb, writing for the MIT Press, quote in a
neoliberal age, private property, Trump's community benefits once private owners
(43:39):
and sometimes public entities decide that the land value has improved,
often due to the community gardens, and that development can proceed.
Gardens are plowed under, even when developments are then postponed,
with the former gardens sometimes reverting to public land, and
of course recuperation comes for us. All there's now a
(44:01):
real estate company that I'm not going to name that.
In twenty fourteen, trademarked the term agrihoods for agricultural neighborhoods,
and then I need you to unsay that. Thank you,
thank you, thank you, yep. For the low cost of
half a million bucks or five million bucks, in the
right neighborhood, you can buy a house around a centrally
planned farm with composting in solar panels. Isn't that exciting?
Speaker 3 (44:24):
You can just do that, you know, you could just
do that with I was saying five million dollars.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
The next sentence in my script is, honey, I used
to live in a solar powered cabin with composting toilets.
That cost me about five thousand dollars. And it annoys
me because the idea of an agrihood is a good one.
It is closer to the way that humans develop to live.
(44:52):
And there are like people trying to do this but good.
There's a nonprofit that runs an agricultural neighborhood in Detroit
where the meati the in home value is under twenty
five thousand dollars and is run by a guy born
and raised in the neighborhood whose grandmother lived in that neighborhood.
People living there share tools and can harvest whatever they
want from the farm once a week, and that's like
(45:15):
the tech billionaires get all the stuff that we should
all just have, that we develop as ways to live
despite being poor, and then they're like, oh, we want
all that stuff. It seems classy and interesting, like all
the fucking boho chic stuff, which whatever I mean it.
I'm not above like making farmhouse style furniture because you
can make it out of two by four us. But
I guess I am above paying ten thousand dollars for
(45:36):
farmhouse style furniture. Yeah, that sounds right, ten thousand dollars.
Furniture should be old as shit and really interesting in
card with ornate, weird scenes. That's my one day. I'm
going to start an interior design show and no one
will listen to it, but I'll be happy.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
I think it'll be a really great counterweight to Chip
and Joanna Gains. Yeah that is Oh wait, sorry I
got I'm like I got.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
The response trans later. Yeah. Please. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
And it will be original, that's the thing. It'll be
original and goth.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
It won't be the people that do all of the
barn doors.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, it will be the same house over and over
and over again. There won't be barn doors. A big
clock and a sign that says, yeah, basically gray floors.
Gray floors.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah yeah, but they were all you said gray not great.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Okay, yeah, it was like great gray floors not great.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
Yeah yeah yeah, because a great floor system, but it
shouldn't be gray. You can get a nice It's.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
This Magpie, really Magpie really knows how to pick like
a faucet fixture and like cool mirrors and like, I
don't know, don't you have like a swan fawcet fixture
or something fantom?
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, all my sinks. I put in black Swans as
the fawcet fixtures, including the like weird basement bathroom that's
covered in graffiti that when people come over, I like
hand them paint markers until them to because I you
know whatever. Anyway, Yeah, I really like interior decorating.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, I'm redecorating right now with Facebook Marketplace, and it's
hell improved my space so well that.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Is the only good thing left about Facebook, or maybe
it was the only good thing ever.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
Yeah, Like I don't use Facebook at all. I actually
had to create an account to use Facebook Marketplace. Yeah,
that's all I use it for is Facebook Marketplace. I
got this bang and chair, this ikea like prolong chair
or whatever for you know, good price. Just picked it
up from a roll that was moving, and now it's
my cat's favorite for best friend.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Yeah. Yeah, that is you can have nice stuff by
doing things with people instead of whatever. I'm supposed to
tie this into a.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
People that can afford it by it and then you know,
you give it to someone else instead of throwing it out.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah. And so as of last year, there's still five
hundred and fifty community gardens in New York City, seven
hundred school gardens, seven hundred gardens on public housing, and
one hundred gardens in the land trusts. And that's fucking cool.
And that is because of the work that people did
for years, but especially in the late nineties and the
early odds. It's the people who dressed up like tomatoes
(48:16):
and ran into city Hall, the people who released crickets,
the people who locked down to things, the people who
wrote hit songs that you all don't appreciate and then
donated money. And the gardens still exist and they still
do essential work. For example, rather than shut down during
COVID despite being ordered to, gardeners formed the Bronx Community
(48:36):
Farm Hubs to grow and donate food to places that
needed it. They gave away forty three thousand pounds of
food in twenty twenty, then one hundred and sixty two
thousand pounds of food, and twenty twenty one then they
also just started feeding people, but then Green Thumb shut
them down for that because they were like, couldn't social
distance properly or whatever, even though it's all outside and
(48:57):
they regularly donate to community fridges. Also, I know, it's
just like I love these legacy projects that are still
around because of the work that people did. These gardens
help compost the city's waste. The governor recently cut all
the compost programs funding, but a private, anonymous donation kept
(49:19):
it going. I assume, as Betty Midler, the nonprofit Grow
NYC runs fifty two food drop offs and composts eight
point three million pounds of organic waste every year. And
I don't know there's You could also tie this story
back to Detroit, where their entire urban farms that grew
up after white flight and the oil crisis left the
(49:41):
city derelict. And one day we'll talk about them too,
but we're not going to talk about today because today
we're out of script. I'm at the end of it,
because I did the thing that I was going to
do and now it's the end of this episode.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
And that's what I loved hearing aboutmmunity gardens. I learned
a lot, and I think that there's be more of them,
and I'm going to try to figure out ways to
actively get involved in one nearby me.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Hell yeah, yeah, no. I if I lived in the
city at this point, I would absolutely be looking for
this kind of thing because it's fucking cool and it's
you know, they're not always like a lot of them
are open to the public and that you can like
go and walk around like being the pretty ones or whatever,
but like you know, they're often people working specific plots
(50:30):
and you can't necessarily just like immediately start having one.
But they're worth defending and being involved with. But what
else is worth being involved with is your content. In
the plugs section of the episode.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
You can find my YouTube channel and my TikTok online
it's kat m aboo abu like a monkey in Aladdin.
I also have other social media. You can find it
on a link tree because there are so many and
they have different names. Additionally, I just got laid off
from media matters. I'm good, but I have a lot
(51:06):
of really great colleagues that are looking for work and
if we have funds for them in the future, I'll
make sure to keep you all updated on that. So
please keep an eye out and follow them and hire
them if you have a job that's open.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Hell yeah, And I'm on a bunch of things. You
can follow me on Instagram Marder Kiljoy. You can follow
me on ex at Magpie Killjoy and oh god, I
just said X and ironically.
Speaker 3 (51:33):
Yeah, I was like, wow, that was really impressive. I
don't know, it's an impressive derogatory.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
No, it's yeah, brains wormed me so. But more importantly,
I have a book coming out this fall in September
twenty fourth from Feminist Press. It's called The Sapling Cage
and it's a young adult book about transwitch who saves
the world from a magical enclosure of the commons. It
does not don't worry, it does not say a magical
(51:59):
inclues the comments anywhere in the book. I'm it's more
fun than that. And it is being kickstartered in June
of twenty twenty four. And if you look up The
Sapling Cage Margaret Kiljoy or whatever. I'm sure you can
figure out how to find the kickstarter page and you
can sign up there to get information about when that
kickstarter lunches so you can get copies of it. And
(52:22):
I'm really excited about it's the best book I've ever written,
and I have written a good number of books, and
so that's saying something. Well, I don't know. I mean,
all my books could be trash, but I think they're good.
And Sophie, you got anything like, is there any new
podcasts coming out from her network?
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah, we got two relatively new podcasts. One is Better Offline,
hosted by ed Zitron. It's a weekly sometimes twice weekly
podcast about the tech world and why it's so fucked
up and how it impacts everybody's lives. The other is
a podcast hosted by my best friend Jamie Loftist called
(52:58):
Sixteenth Minute of Fame weekly podcast.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
It looks back at some.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Of the Internet's main characters and how their viral moments
affected their lives and our lives. So, if you haven't
listened already, we have two really great episodes that just
just came out recently about the dress that was white
and gold. Sorry, and about the Boston slide.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Cop Oft slid down the slide.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
And went off walk and then it went as all
over the internet and it's a really great episode and
it's super interesting to check that out.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Yeah, I listened to both those podcasts. I like everything
cool Zone Media does. I know that, and you know
that I'm not chilling because when I have to say ads,
I look like someone just hit me in the face.
But I actually like all cool Zone Media's content. And
better offline is Angry Tech podcast and nothing that Jamie
(53:55):
Loftis records as bad and this one's particularly good. So
next week you can hear more Cool People Who Did
Cool Stuff by listening to it. That's all I got.
Speaker 3 (54:08):
Yay Yay.
Speaker 1 (54:15):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1 (54:22):
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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