by Chris Penalosa
Daniel Bowman Simon is flipping through the pages of a book from the early 20th century; inside, it contains photos of people gardening on huge plots of land in New York. The aged book contains a piece of history at NYU that most people have never heard of. Simon read from the inside cover, “This book Children’s Gardens for Pleasure, Health, and Education by Henry Parsons was written in 1910 and published in New York. He was the secretary and practical adviser of the Children’s International Farm League and director of the Department of School Gardens at New York University.”
Simon is a PhD student at NYU Steinhardt’s Food Studies program. He describes how the Gardens department offered courses to teachers as part of a continuing education program. This was a time when people had a much different relation to farming. “At that time, most businessmen had grown up on farms,” recalled Simon. “There was still some real connection between city dwellers and their rural roots.” This rural connection Simon was talking about evaporated as New York developed in the 20th century. Simon mentioned how one large garden in Hell’s Kitchen was paved over by Robert Moses for the West Side Highway project. However, in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in raising food in urban areas.
In 2010, Simon, along with other Steinhardt students and faculty, wrote a petition to NYU administration for an urban garden. The petition included components such as a mission statement, goals, site design diagrams, examples of programming, and even an operating budget. It was well thought out. The proposed space was an eighth of an acre plot behind Silver Towers, on West Houston, which currently houses faculty. The towers were designed by the architect I.M Pei in the 1960s. Amy Bentley, Professor at Steinhardt’s Food Studies program, recalls when Simon pitched the idea for an urban
garden. She quotes Simon, ‘You know that piece of ground in back of Silver Towers? That’s grass. There’s a fence around it. There’s nothing. I think we should put a garden there.” Bentley was living in Silver Towers at the time and Simon asked if she could take pictures of the site for him. She recalls the condition of the lot, “It really was dead space. There was a fence around it, it was a grass museum, nobody noticed it when they waked past, it was definitely unused space, but it had a really good south facing orientation.”
But there were a few hurdles to overcome before seeds could go in the ground. First, it took a bit of advocacy work to get NYU administration on board. Simon recalls the back and forth process with the administration. “On July 29th 2010, there was a meeting; myself, some members of faculty here, students and a whole bunch of people from NYU administration, people from sustainability, up on the 12th floor of Bobst where President Sexton has his offices. And it was this really optimistic meeting,” Simon said. But later that year in December, NYU told Simon that it wasn’t quite ready for an urban garden.
It may have not been the right time for NYU, but meanwhile, in New York city and on the rooftops of Brooklyn, urban gardening was really starting to take off. Professor Bentley recalls the policy shift, “And then, I think one of the turning points was two or three years ago, Scott Stringer, Manhattan borough president, did a big report on urban gardening in New York City. Bloomberg is quite interested and involved in public health campaigns, bringing fresh fruit to people, vegetables, [to] increase the health of the population and understood and got that this was a good thing for the city… I think that got NYU’s attention.”
Nearly a year and a half after Simon’s meeting in 2010, NYU Green Grants released a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a campus innovation challenge. A green grant is available to students, faculty, and staff to help pilot and incubate environmental projects at NYU. Dave Seward, coordinator for Green Grants, describes that special challenge. “With the Green Grants, we have an open RFP. Tell us what you want to do. With the campus innovation challenge, we actually stated, we’re looking for an urban farming proposal. That one was specifically was allowed to have a higher budget as well because it was a special RFP.”
Faculty from the Steinhardt Food Studies program responded to this RFP, with a special classroom component known today as the Introduction to Urban Agriculture course. Amy Bentley describes the idea behind the farm, “We thought, let’s do something where we’re not just reading and thinking about urban gardening. Let’s actually do it and teach students about it through an actual garden. That was really important to us. We thought about it not only as a teaching classroom but a research space as well. We’re happy to entertain anybody on campus who wants to test what it’s like to grow XYZ in New York City, next to Houston Street. Our hope is that it can be some kind of research lab in thinking about improving urban food.”
This academic portion of the urban farm was something that caught the attention of Dave Seward and NYU Sustainability. The Steinhardt Food Studies program was awarded the grant to pilot the urban farm. But there was one final catch. “We hit a huge snag,” recalls Bentley. “They said we cannot put one thing on this land until we get landmark status approval because we don’t want to have to undo everything if they say, “Sorry, this won’t work.”
With the help of NYU’s legal team, the farm was able to get this approval from the Landmarks Committee in a rather quick process that could have taken years to get. At the moment, it is the first urban agriculture project to get Landmark’s approval on a landmarked site. Though the approval was granted for a year, Professor Bentley is confident the farm will get a longer term permit.
At the moment, the farm is put to rest for the Winter, but Laurel Greyson, professor of the urban agriculture
course, proudly rattles off a list of crops the urban farm produced so far since June. “Tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, jalapenos, sweet bell peppers, we had some arugula, different herbs… varieties of watermelon… a whole bunch of different lettuces, beets, radishes, turnips, kohlrabi… some cauliflower…” Professor Greyson hopes students will take away practical farming skills. “We’re sort of going over everything you need to know to be a really efficient and self-sufficient urban, or really, rural farmer,” she says.
For Adriana Fernandes-Halloran, a current student of the urban agriculture course, the farm lab is a great opportunity to reconnect with growing food. “I just wanted to put my hands in the soil, that’s all. I think it’s a great asset for NYU students to be able to walk a few blocks and be able to connect with the soil and learn how to grow your own food,” said Adriana. She hopes to apply what she’s learned in this course to help bridge gaps in food access in low-income communities.
If you are a current NYU student, you can enroll in the two-credit, Intro to Urban Agriculture course, in the Spring. Volunteers are also happily accepted. For more information, e-mail urban.farms@nyu.edu.