In June, I
walked through parts of the South End of Boston with Lynne Potts. She is the perfect guide, a long-time
resident, a gardener, and the author of a soon-to-published book on the South
End. She is also (and primarily) a poet
who divides her time between New York and Boston.
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| Holyoke Street, South End, Boston |
Among other attributes, the South
End boasts the largest concentration of Victorian houses outside London. It grew from filled marshland to middle class
housing, through financial panic to tenements attracting new immigrants, to
absentee landlordism of the 1960’s, to the slow climb back to the diverse,
mostly middle class community of today.
We started our walk on quiet,
shaded Holyoke Street, the sort of street that leads you to wonder how we in
New York manage in a such a crowded and noisy city. It is a street of front gardens: Number 19 is
planted with boxwood, viburnum, rudbeckia, astilbe, clematis, sweet woodruff and wild
ginger.
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| Holyoke Street Front Garden |
Lynne raised her family at Number
11, and now with her children grown she has divided it up into 3 rental
apartments. Along the way she acquired
other houses, borrowing against one to purchase the next. She acquired garden plots in the same way,
picking up one after the other as allotments became available. When she first settled in the South End it
was a slum, and the low cost of houses appealed to pioneers like Lynne, people
with limited resources but with determination, a vision for the future, and a
commitment to the neighborhood.
The rear of the residential streets
are separated by alleys. Once the alleys
divided the rear gardens of the houses, but as single family homes gave way to
multi-apartment condominiums or rentals, the gardens became coveted parking
spots. Only Lynne’s garden remains.
At the end of Holyoke Street is a
section of a narrow, 90 acre, five-mile ribbon of community gardens and pocket
parks, the Southwest Corridor Park. They
exist because of community resistance to a transportation project planned in
the 1950’s and 60’s to extend I-95 from
Route128 into Boston, with a rail line down the middle. The land was cleared, but highway
construction was halted in 1969 as a result of the determination of community
leaders.
Now the rail lines run underneath
and deployed along the five-mile stretch are tot lots, playgrounds, flower
beds, open green spaces, athletic courts and 150 community gardens. As Lynne and I stood in her garden plot
admiring her basil, bikers and strollers (in manageable numbers) crisscrossed
the pathways.
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| Lynn's Community Garden Plot |
The position of South Enders was
that the value of parks and gardens lies in its role in building community
life. Eleanor Strong, an early advocate,
argued that it brings people of diverse backgrounds and ages together
outdoors. Many South Enders came from
gardening cultures, and community gardens help them keep in touch with their
roots. You can see this as you move
along the Corridor; in a section planted by Asian residents, vegetables are
grown vertically on posts climbing to grow horizontally along overhead
shelters.
The apotheosis of this theory may
be seen in the Richard Parker Memorial Victory Garden, started in 1942 in the
Boston Fens. It is the last remaining
vestige of the victory gardens that were nationwide during World War II . Almost everyone grew vegetables then to
offset the shortages created by rationing and the demand for food exports to
the armed forces. (Note: My first garden was the victory garden in our backyard
in Brooklyn.)
Boston’s Victory Garden was part of
the Back Bay Fens, a piece of the Emerald Necklace designed by Olmstead and
Vaux. The Charles River was dredged to
provide fresh water lakes and ponds, but once dredging stopped, the edges
became marshes, silted in by reeds. Tom
Wagner, a gardener on the very edge of the marsh says, “ If you were to step
out of my garden among the rushes, you would sink 15 to 20 feet."
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| Garden Pathway |
After the war’s end the victory
gardens were largely abandoned. As part
of the larger community redevelopment work of the 70’s the garden was divided
into individual plots, eventually reaching 450.
Tom has been gardening there for 16 years, spending about four to five
hours a week tending his plots.
Over the years Tom has managed to
accumulate four contiguous plots. “I was
a co-gardener for a double plot and then my partner, now deceased, obtained
another double garden next to ours. I’ve
been able to continue gardening these plots ever since.”
Applications for acquisition were
somewhat easier in the early days, but there was a high turnover. “New gardeners would sign up, plant, and as
the season progressed the novice gardeners had no idea about the need to weed
and water. They would just drift away.
Now prospective gardeners submit to an orientation before having a plot
assigned to them.”
Most gardeners live nearby in
apartments, and these plots are their only open space. Some are used for growing vegetables, some as
small woodland gardens, others as mini-backyards with all the accoutrements you
could want from umbrellas to garden chairs to picnic table tables to kiddie
pools.
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| A Typical Victory Garden Plot |
What is it that makes these gardens
so much more appealing than the nearby small neighborhood parks? In NewYork the battle for increasing park
maintenance budgets is never-ending. Yet
the community gardens seem to thrive. Is
it because everyone gets to do his or her own thing? Is it the Jeffersonian principal of home
ownership applied to apartment dwellers?
Do volunteers in public parks only get to do what is assigned to
them? If you let them do their own thing
in a public park, would that result in landscape anarchy?
In Boston, city engagement is
minimal. The Parker Gardens are on publicly owned land and the city supplies
only water; everything else is provided by the gardeners and their
association. Could a version of these
large-scale community garden projects engage the general public in maintaining
neighborhood parks? It’s something to
think about in the long, dark winter, but not in the growing season when all we
want to read about is what everyone else is doing.
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| Roosevelt Island, N.Y. Community Garden Plot |
