Harlem Community Garden Fights City To Prevent Displacement

HARLEM, NY — Supporters of a Harlem community garden that the city plans to replace with an affordable housing building — and other endangered New York City gardens — rallied Thursday morning in front of the New York Supreme Court ahead of a court hearing in the garden's legal battle with the city.

The Nelson Mandela Community Garden is fighting a plan announced by the city in early 2017 to build a development with affordable housing units, restaurant space and a tech incubator on the West 126th Street lot that housed the garden since 2016.

The lot sat vacant for 30 years prior to the community garden's founding. In addition to being an eyesore, the vacant lot often attracted crime, Mandela Garden leader René Calvo said.

"We de-paved it and transformed it into a thriving wildflower garden that supports bio-diversity at its most fundamental level. It’s a garden that removes toxins from the soil through the natural process of phytoremeditation. A garden that is a reverse engine for climate change. A garden that reduces crime, improves mental health, and creates community," Calvo said in a statement.

Demolition at the West 126th Street garden has already begun, supporters said Thursday.

The garden's Article 78 lawsuit against the city is contesting the development plans using three arguments, Calvo said. The primary claim is that the city violated the garden's procedural due process in selecting it for development.

In 2015 the city released a list of gardens targeted for development that resulted in pushback from those green spaces, but the Mandela Garden was not on the list, Calvo said. The de Blasio administration then announced at the end of 2015 that most of community gardens on the list would instead be transferred to the Parks Department's Green Thumb program, but that a number of gardens — including Mandela Garden — would be targeted for development.

"Suddenly we were on this list that we were never on before, Calvo said Thursday. "So we feel that we lost our opportunity to fight back against the city because of that — once that happened the movement broke apart."

Calvo said that only three gardens remain in the fight against the city's development plans: Mandela, Pleasant Village in Harlem and Elizabeth Street Garden in Nolita. Members of the other gardens attended Thursday's rally to support Mandela Garden's legal fight.

The Mandela Garden is also arguing that the city's actions violate the public trust doctrine — a common law precedent that the New York state legislature would have to approve any project that would remove any land designated or implied as parkland. The third argument revolves around a developing legal concept of the "rights of nature." The rights of nature seeks to apply the rights of afforded by personhood to nature, just as they are applied to corporations or ships, Calvo said.

City Councilman Rafael Espinal, who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, called for a moratorium Thursday on the destruction of community gardens in favor of development. Espinal said that community gardens should not be viewed as vacant lots.

"We're here to say that the destruction of community gardens and green spaces in the city of New York has to stop. These are spaces that help build community, help deal with the effects of climate change and we're living at a time where science continues to prove that cities cannot be concrete jungles," Espinal said.

All of the apartments in the development replacing Mandela Garden will be offered at below-market rates — a policy goal cited by many city officials as a positive — but Espinal said a "deeper conversation" is needed in instances where the city is "pitting vital community spaces with the need for affordable housing."

"We can try to find different spaces where affordable housing can work, just the same way they try to move gardens when they believe other spaces work," Espinal said.

The city revealed plans in January 2017 to develop a building at 263-267 W. 126th St. that will contain 29 below-market housing units constructed to adhere to "passive building" standards. The planned development will be the home of Silicon Harlem, a tech incubator that offers seven-week courses on STEM education and enrichment for high school students, according to the city. The third component of the development will be restaurant space, the mayor's office announced in 2017.

Photo by Brendan Krisel/Patch