Condo Board Votes to Uproot Gardeners

 by Etta Sanders

When Susan Brady looks at the clusters of pink impatiens, the spiky red salvia and the late blooming roses in the gardens alongside the apartment building at 200 Rector Pl. in Battery Park City, she sees a place where residents contribute to the beauty of their neighborhood. She sees a place where her neighbors with children come to dig in the dirt and learn about how things grow. She also sees a garden saved from the ashes of the World Trade Center disaster.

Susan Brady is one of 30 gardeners who have plots in a community garden on the west side of 200 Rector Place in Battery Park City. "I'm very fortunate to be able to garden here," she said. "I feel it makes my neighborhood a home." Photo: Carl Glassman

But some of Brady's neighbors in the building, Liberty Court, see something different. To them the garden's stone-bordered plots resemble a graveyard. In the wintertime they are depressingly barren. More manicured landscaping, some condo owners have told the condo board president, would improve their property values.

"There are people who like the look of community gardens and people who don't," said Kathy Gupta, a Liberty Court resident and garden supporter.

At a September meeting, the condo board agreed with the people who don't. The board voted to send a letter to the Battery Park City Authority terminating the lease for the Liberty Community Gardens. Barring a last-minute reprieve, the gardeners will have to lay down their trowels by next spring.

The gardeners contend that only a handful of apartment owners have complained. The board president, Michael Gaschler, could not put a number on how many residents opposed renewing the lease, but said he had gotten a "blizzard of phone calls" from people who said that the look of the gardens decreases the value of their apartments.

"My responsibility is to the owners, not to the community," Gaschler said.

Nritya Subramaniam, who has lived at Liberty Court since early 2001, is one of those who would like to see the gardens go, saying that they are a neglected eyesore and are not the surroundings that people expected when they bought a home in a luxury building. "When people purchased their property, the plots were landscaped and they expect it to be landscaped with input from the Liberty court residents since it is their property," she said.

Termination of the lease will likely mean the end of the gardens, which were located at West and Rector Streets, and have bloomed for nearly 15 years.

After Sept. 11, the gardeners found the plants they had lovingly nurtured covered with debris from the fallen buildings. That fall the gardens were cleared and cleaned only to be buried again, this time under concrete, to make way for the Rector Street bridge.
A portion of Liberty Community Gardens, viewed from an apartment in Liberty Court. There are 30 garden plots in all. Photo: Allan Tannenbaum

In November 2001, Liberty Court entered into a two-year lease agreement to allow the gardens to be relocated in two "islands" owned by the building on the West Street side. The Battery Park City Parks Conservancy supplied the soil, erected wrought-iron fences and laid out stones to form 30 roughly seven-foot-by-five-foot plots.

When the lease ended, the gardens were granted a one-year extension through Nov. 30, 2004. The arrangement was always meant to be temporary, Subramaniam said, adding that if the Battery Park City Authority wants the community gardens to continue, they will need to find another place for them. "It's not our responsibility to find a space for community gardens," she said.

Liberty Court. Photo: Carl Glassman

But according to Tessa Huxley, executive director of the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy, there is no space to relocate the gardens. "Unfortunately, Battery Park City is being developed pretty intensively," she said. "There aren't a whole lot of options in terms of other places in Battery Park City."

Those who had plots in the pre-Sept. 11 gardens say they had a restorative affect after the tragedy. "The gardens were very therapeutic," said Miriam Kimmelman. "For us to lose our gardens would be devastating after all we've been through."

But Subramaniam said that improving the building's landscaping is also part of the area's renewal. The community gardeners, she said, "need to move on from playing on the sentiment of Sept. 11."

The community gardeners have organized a letter-writing campaign as a show of support. As of late last month, the building's management had received more than 30 letters urging the condo board to reconsider its decision.

Some of those letters have come from gardeners in Seattle, who in the fall of 2001 delivered 1,000 cubic yards of compost made from the flowers that had been laid at spontaneous memorials after the attacks.


"These beds may be inconsequential to you," wrote Seattle resident Kate McDermott in a letter to the Liberty Court Board of Managers, "but to thousands on both coasts, they are symbolic of the indefatigable human spirit that in the face of the nightmare of 9/11 is still able to look to the future and the promise of new life."

On Nov. 3, the community gardeners took their case to Community Board 1's Battery Park City Committee, where they found more than one sympathetic ear. The committee chairman, Anthony Notaro, has a plot of tomatoes and basil in one of the community gardens. Member Tom Goodkind formerly tended a plot there, and Jeff Galloway simply counts himself as a fan of the gardens.

³Iım not a gardener, Iıve never gardened in my life, but I like seeing them there. I think they are a positive thing,² said Galloway.

The committee agreed to draft a letter for the board in support of the gardens and is hopeful that representatives of the condo board would meet with them before evicting the gardeners. ³I donıt get it,² said member Pearl Scher about the opposition to the gardens, ³itıs like being against motherhood.²