Lost On 9/11: Bruce's Spirit Lives On In Inwood Community Garden

INWOOD, NY — Aaron Scott never met Bruce Reynolds, but he knows there is evidence of him throughout the Inwood community garden that has sat as an oasis within Isham Park for 50 years.

Reynolds is in the ever-inching expanding English Ivy, certain Euonymus trees and shrubs that peer down at the garden floor, and in the jumbled remnants of the old wishing well that lays at rest within the green space.

"His and his family’s spirit fills every corner of their beautiful garden," Scott told Patch.

Scott is the director of volunteers at Bruce's Garden, a community green space that sits near 11 Park Terrace East within Isham Park.

Each year, the garden has a noticeable influx of visitors during the week of September 11th.

People that knew Bruce — Upper Manhattan community members, locals who knew his father J.A. Reynolds, Park Rangers, Port Authority Police Officers, or those that simply know the story of the garden's namesake — come to pay their respects to the man who died 20 years ago on Sept. 11, 2001.

The George Washington Bridge and the World Trade Center are about as far away as two points can be from one another in Manhattan. The actual distance is roughly eleven miles.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Bruce Reynolds, an officer within the Port Authority Police Department, rushed from his post at the Upper Manhattan bridge into the flames of the twin towers.

Reynolds, the 41-year-old father of two young children — and a man who grew up in Inwood — died that day sacrificing his life for others.

On the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Reynold's "spirit" is still firmly planted and growing in the form of a community garden in Inwood.

Adrian Benepe, the former Parks Department Commissioner and current President of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, first met Bruce in the early 1980s when they both worked as Urban Park Rangers.

“He (Bruce) really understood nature and had a love and acknowledgment of nature more than most city kids," Benepe told Patch. "That led to his career at the Parks Department, and then his love of people led to the Port Authority Officer job, and then, of course, he died saving people.”

To fully understand Bruce's story, though, you must travel back to his original roots in Inwood.

Reynolds was five when he moved with his family in 1965 from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Inwood.

Bruce and his parents were one of the first African American families to move into the predominantly white, Irish-American neighborhood.

"If we didn't get involved in the community, it wouldn't be an ideal place for Bruce to go out and play, considering the singular position he was in," Bruce's father, J.A., told the late New York Times reporter and longtime Upper Manhattan resident Jim Dwyer in 2001.

The elder Reynolds got his family involved in the community by setting his then 12-year-old son Bruce, and a few of his friends, to work clearing an abandoned area of Isham Park.

"Much of the work done during the day was destroyed by night," reads a description of Bruce's Garden on its website. "Determined, Bruce’s father recruited 30 gang members to help assist in the area’s restoration. This outreach plus funding from the New York Department of Youth Services empowered and brought neighborhood youth together to restore the park."

The area of the park that Bruce and his father began restoring in 1970 is the bustling community garden seen today.

In 2021, Bruce's Garden has a long list of volunteers that help organize different programs such as children's education and craft classes, art installations, music, dance, theater, book readings, various workshops, and those locals that like to focus strictly on gardening.

After graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1980, Bruce joined the Department of Parks & Recreation as an Urban Park Ranger, where he worked for many years expanding his knowledge of nature.

“He is the world’s nicest guy, affable, he made friends really easily and that’s why Park Ranger was a perfect job," Benepe said.

In 1986, Bruce reached his boyhood dream of becoming a law enforcement officer when he joined the Port Authority Police Department.

All the while, J.A. Reynolds and other Inwood residents continued to tend to the quiet garden in Isham Park.

Bruce met his future bride Marian McBridge four years later in Ireland, married her soonly thereafter, and bought a house in New Jersey. Bruce and Marian spent summers in Ireland, and the couple had their first child in 1997, followed by a second in 2000.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he made his final 11-mile dash to the World Trade Center.

Bruce's parents J.A. and Geraldine Reynolds were heartbroken over the loss of their only child.

“You definitely got the sense of Bruce’s spirit in the garden, and particularly of his father J.A., who was obviously brokenhearted, lost his only child and a father of two young kids," Benepe told Patch. "He poured his emotion into tending the garden and he was very insistent with me that we make sure the garden survives not just Bruce, but also survives him.”

On May 18, 2002, Benepe, who was Parks Commissioner at the time, formally dedicated and memorialized the garden by naming it Bruce's Garden.

Mr. Reynolds died on Feb. 24, 2020.

Bruce's Garden still grows in Inwood.