New Community Garden Pops Up in Place of Historic One Bulldozed in 2000

EAST VILLAGE, NY — A new community garden popped up this week at the site of an old East Village garden that was bulldozed in 2000 to make way for an apartment building, EVGrieve reported. The lot had been empty since 2000.

It turns out the new garden between the development Eastville Gardens and the building at 115 Avenue C, between Seventh and Eighth streets, was a joint effort by L+M Development and BFC Partners, an L+M spokesperson told Patch. The garden will be open to the community-at-large, not just to residents of the building, the spokesperson said. Photos of the garden can be seen at EVGrieve.

L+M bought the Eastville Gardens building in the spring of 2016 from BFC Partners for $44 million. BFC Partners bulldozed the historic community gardens, called El Jardin de la Esperanza, to build Eastville Gardens in 2000, prompting furious protests. The company made a deal with the community in 2000 that they would rebuild the gardens, the L+M spokesperson told Patch. The developers worked with a nonprofit called Carmen Pabon Del Amanecer Garden, Inc. to build the garden, the L+M spokesperson said.

The new garden is named after Carmen Pabon, a Puerto Rican community activist who founded the original garden in the late 70's. Pabon's garden lasted for 22 years before it was bulldozed.

Paul Castrucci, an architect who has lived on the Lower East Side for 35 years, designed the garden. Castrucci told Patch a team of community gardeners that included Isabel Pabon, Carmen Pabon's daughter, was involved in requesting certain plants and designs of the garden. "We arranged everything so that there would be as much sunlight as possible," Castrucci said.

A plaque commissioned by the developers for the new garden says:

Carmen Pabon, Mother of Loisaida, Puerto Rican community activist, gardener, poet and actress, founded this garden as an urban sanctuary for children, local artists, Nuyorican poets and the elderly Carmen helped thousands to create a better life for themselves and fed multitudes of Lower East Siders experiencing homelessness.

This garden is the site of one of the six original Plant-a-Lot Gardens, a program established by Liz Christy, Director of NYC Council of the Environment at the beginning of the Community Garden movement in the Lower East Side in 1978.

As sad as the destruction of the garden was, it spurred legal protection of hundreds of other gardens across the city, according to a statement released Friday by Time's Up, a nonprofit environmental organization protecting community gardens in New York City. This is because the community tried to get a temporary restraining order against police who were trying to destroy the garden, but the city destroyed the garden before the judge gave his decision on the restraining order. The judge was so peeved the city didn't wait for his decision that he granted a restraining order protecting all city gardens. So you might say the Esperanza garden's sacrifice saved the fates of hundreds of other city gardens.

Photo credit: Google Maps