From Caroline Bragdon: Director of Neighborhood Interventions NYC DOHMH (better known as the Rat Lady)!

College students interning with MUSG Bank joined Citizens for NYC‘s Andrew, Chris and Luz along with Bob, K and Rob from the SDR Coalition for a morning of clean up in front of Kim Fong’s BRC.

For more photos at Citizen’s for NYC Facebook page here!

Thank you to all for the infusion of labor. It makes a huge difference!

Team leader Shawntee and her crew:   Bernadette, Edita, Farid, Gabriel, Jamil, Lauren, Matthew, Mayank, Miriam, Neyshmarie, Rajiv, Renyi, Tiffany and Krystal

Reminders from CB3 Office:

Please always call 311 for homeless issues and ask for homeless outreach. (this triggers Goddard Homeless Outreach who should arrive within an hour. They will begin Case Management if one isn’t already started for an individual.

Once you get your complaint number from the 311 operator, let the CB 3 Office know. They will track it and keep records and liaise with the pertinent Agency or Organization.

For crises or issues where someone is endangered or a danger to self, please call 911 immediately.

Heartfelt Condolences to the family. Many thanks to all who came. Beautiful words, music and song.

“It’s Been a Pleasure”

For more photos see M’Finda Kalunga Garden!

City Lab: When gentrification Meant Driving Hogs Out of Manhattan:

“Irish pig farmers…German gardeners, .. the African-American settlement of Seneca Village, worked and lived on the land that’s known today as Central Park. Most of their homes were destroyed in the 1860s to create the park.”

Catherine McNeur: Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City.

 

…Its parks and public spaces were, in large part, funded by fees that the wealthy paid in the hope of creating a place where bourgeois ladies could stroll unbothered by those of lower status.

…Central Park…“the lungs of the city”…creation was fraught with class and racial fallout. The homes of many poor immigrants who survived by processing trash, as well as the thriving African-American settlement of Seneca Village, were seized through eminent domain and destroyed to create a manufactured pastoral landscape…

Many of the underlying conflicts in McNeur’s riveting, meticulously researched account resonate strongly in the New York of today, where deepening economic inequality is fraying the ideal of a prosperous city that can be shared by all its residents: where the churning real estate market is constantly displacing the less wealthy; where rich neighborhoods get pristine parks and poor ones get cracked asphalt…

“[T]he increasingly tamed city privileged one group’s vision for the city and its environment, while amplifying environmental and economic disparity” …”

Photos are available on  The Museum of the City of New York‘s online collection

Two GreenThumb Gardens have existed in Sara Roosevelt Park. Both were begun in the early 1980’s when this area was full of burned out buildings, drug dealers and pimps lining Forsyth Street. Garden creation was key in building and anchoring communities and pushing back threats or harm to neighbors. The people did it while creating beautiful oases of flowers, birds, trees, fish, frogs, turtles, chickens and community.

We are currently reminding GreenThumb of one of those early contributors to the safety and beauty of this neighborhood officially established in 1994 as  The Forsyth Garden Conservancy now the New Forsyth Garden Conservancy as well as the Hua Mei Bird Sanctuary Bird Owners. Garden’s Rising website.

From NYTimes:

“Food From Around the World, Homegrown in New York”

“Sometimes when you arrive in a new place, you don’t have a network you can tap into for support,” Mr. LoSasso said. “By joining a community garden, you’re joining a network of neighbors who are coming from diverse backgrounds who can help new members of their community to get settled.”

Photos of Ted and Richard at their turtle jobs!

photos Steve Elson