Miracle Garden Returning To Harlem After Long Being Abandoned

HARLEM, NY — What used to be a miracle garden for Harlem students in the 1950s is coming back to life under the direction of two New Yorkers.

As a long abandoned and vacant lot squished between Barry's Good Job Hair Braiding, the only low rise remaining on the block, and a gated yard owned and maintained by Columbia University, the Saint Nicholas Miracle Garden is on its way to serving the needs of local students and community members, and providing a space for exploration and education.

After waiting two years for a private developer to finish using the space during construction of the building behind the garden, co-lease owners Judi Desire and Nadege Alexis, from the city's GreenThumb program, finally gained access in April.

They'll transform the space back into a garden, complete with a community space and wheelchair accessible garden beds, three different types of composting, an environmental education component and a public program area. Free bicycle maintenance will also be offered.

"Our goal is to attract more youth and have a youth garden space," Desire told Patch. "Nadege is working on compost projects and at-home worm bins. She's the environmentalist. I'm just the veggie lady and the bike lady.

"Our project is to create Hügelkultur, teach people how to create proper soil, how to go through the composting process using a more up-to-date technique."

Also planned for the garden are hot compost bins, which uses high temperatures to rapidly decompose, as well as vermicompost, which uses worms.

"New Yorkers are not recycling the way that they should," Alexis told Patch. "I really want to do a lot of teaching about the importance of compost and soil. We were able to study, and do a lot of tours from different gardens to see how we can be educational in a small urban garden like this."

Two youth volunteers from the Bronx are currently helping with the space through an internship.

"It was their first time being in a community garden because they both live in areas where they don't have access to a community garden," Desire told Patch.

Currently, fresh vegetables from Gonzalez Farm, a 20-acre farm in upstate New York, are distributed every Thursday and around 20 people are signed up for the weekly produce. There have been a few events to introduce the space to the community since early June, like a CPR event led by FDNY.

The goal is to have a ceremony in April 2022 celebrating the reopening of the space. Before the garden closes in November for the winter season, Desire and Alexis will finalize the garden layout and build raised garden beds.

The space was a "trash-filled lot" that was cleared to make way for flowers planted by youth and the city, according to a June 1958 article by The New York Times. The process took just three hours, an unbelievable stretch of time compared to the two years that Desire and Alexis waited, and will continue to wait, before their own flowers take root.

"There's people looking to grab a lot of these garden spaces," said Desire, who was born and raised in Brooklyn and lived in Harlem for roughly 12 years before moving to Washington Heights. "You hear many stories of a lot of gardens that lost space or lost pieces of it due to development."

"New York is not environmentally friendly at all," Alexis, who especially chided the city's lack of a structured recycling system, said. "Mother Earth gives us so much and we sometimes forget. We don't take time to give back."

Rather than sit with her anger, Alexis took action and has organized clean-ups and sustainable costume-making workshops with Regiven Environmental Project, an organization she founded in 2018 to raise environmental awareness.

Desire and Alexis are currently applying for $7,000 of funding through grants to purchase supplies and support their programming. Alexis said that the next-door garden, William B. Washington Memorial Garden, operated by GrowNYC, is preserved as a historical site, so there's a possibility for the same with Saint Nicholas Miracle Garden.

The lease is for four years, said Desire. "We just need to create a next generation to hold on to these spaces," she added. "If we don't expose our kids to [knowledge] that they have access to it, it could be taken away."

"There's a lot of history at this garden here," Alexis said. "What we try to do is to find ways to preserve our soil, our ecosystem in our urban area, especially when there is a middle of private development."

Saint Nicholas Miracle Garden Produce Distribution Days

• 330 Saint Nicholas Ave.
• Thursdays from 2 p.m. - 6 p.m.
• June 3 - Nov. 4
• SNAP accepted
• See prices for and sign up for weekly produce here