Decommodified Fetish: Community Gardens

Free stuff, free stuff, free stuff

Last month, I met your run-of-the-mill Brooklynite: part non-profit worker, part community organizer, and part beekeeper in training. The beekeeping, I learned, was not through the famous NYC Beekeepers Association, which charges apprentices over $3000 to learn the trade. Instead, my acquaintance had joined a seasoned beekeeper taking care of a small swarm of bees in a socialist community garden in Bed Stuy. The work is exhausting but communal, the bees endlessly interesting (and currently in search of a new queen), and the hobby free! 

The five boroughs boast over 400 community gardens today, no thanks to Governor Kathy Hochul. In the 60s and 70s, the NYC Parks Department undertook the transformation of numerous vacant lots in the Lower East Side into community gardens with the help of a food justice group, the Green Guerrillas. While many of the gardens they built are under threat of demolition today (like Elizabeth Street, which is being protected by NYC’s elementary school students), the Guerillas are still standing today, expanding operations to turn urban dilapidation into a movement against food insecurity and governmental negligence. 

Similar stories populate most U.S. metropolitans: in L.A, Filipino immigrants created the city’s first open garden and Atlanta’s gardens were a product of grassroots political activism. They remain a place for communities to ensure their long-term survival and resist displacement by condos. Find your nearest community garden using this world-wide locator. ––Jahnavi Mehta