In the Savage Beauty of Our Space

This is a piece about community gardens in the neighborhood of Los Sures, also known as Southside, in Williamsburg, New York. More specifically, it is about two community gardens just two blocks away from each other and a few more from my apartment: Hooper Grove of Hooper Street and Keap Fourth of Keap Street and Fourth Street. Both were born around the same time, in the mid 2010s, alongside Williamsburg’s rapid gentrification. Hooper Grove, a native plant garden, focuses on wilding, with over one hundred native plants. Keap Fourth is a produce garden, teeming with a diverse array of fruits and vegetables. Both gardens grow produce and native plants, to some extent. 

They are endearingly gritty. Graffiti spans the walls of buildings that outline their footprint and rats find a home among the shrubbery. Picnic tables, some hanging on by a thread, are scattered with mismatched tools and buckets. Behind only a fence, they are inconspicuous, but far from hidden away.

I wrote much of this essay as I sat at a café patio across from the MTA Hewes station, caddy corner to Hooper Grove. The same café space once hosted the garden’s first meeting nearly ten years ago. Above me down the street, light dances off the stained glass windows of the elevated subway. Jazz wafts from the café and harmonizes with the sirens and honking, while nearby, a gaggle of friendly dealers with cheap weed lounge on folding chairs outside their car.  I have often watched groups gather late at night outside the garden to eat, play Dominican music, drink beers, and dance. It’s a nice place to write.

The whistling of brakes and cranking of metal wheels on the tracks of the M and J lines can be heard from anywhere in the neighborhood, and the perimeters of the neighborhood creep alongside the train, which brings thousands—including myself—to their daily Manhattan jobs.

Hovering above Broadway Street, the subway unofficially divides the area between Southside, or Los Sures—a historically Dominican neighborhood—and South Williamsburg, the de facto home of New York’s Satmar Jewish community.

Barring a deeper look, green space in the area feels minimal. The overhead train and the overflowing trash cans and the glorious smells of the city could distract anyone from the flourishing gardens just steps away. 

But they’re there. In their small fenced-in footprints, they are plentiful. 

While the community gardens of NYC are manifold in character, including “privately owned” gardens overseen by nonprofits or trusts, most now fall under the purview of the NYC Parks department, through the NYC GreenThumb Program.

Born from grassroots activism in the 1970s, the program was inspired by the “Green Guerillas,” who turned abandoned city lots into thriving green spaces with seed bombs and community action. Their efforts led to the founding of the Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden in 1973, the first of its kind in New York City. Building on that legacy, the city now leases vacant lots at token rates and offers material support to help residents establish and maintain community gardens.

Today, there are over five-hundred-fifty community gardens across the five boroughs of New York City, and over two hundred are in Brooklyn. Many are scattered throughout the communities that border the M train, through Williamsburg and into Bushwick and Ridgewood.

Before European settlement, Brooklyn was a mosaic of coastal oak–hickory forest, freshwater wetlands, and salt marshes along the East River and Gowanus Creek. The land that is now Williamsburg would have been home to towering oaks, chestnut, and hickories; understories of viburnum, bayberry, and spicebush; and meadows rich with milkweed, goldenrod, and asters—plants that once sustained Lenape communities and migrating pollinators alike. 

These native species still define what naturally thrives here: plants adapted to salty air, sandy soils, and shifting light. To find them again tells a story of return—an act of remembering what the land already knows how to grow.

Williamsburg, which increased in population by over forty percent between 2010 and 2020, is synonymous with the concept of gentrified Brooklyn. Less crime and more housing, yes, but with it, relinquished identity and skyrocketing costs. 

“Community” is an interesting term in an area known for wannabe hipster transplants. Today, the broader Williamsburg population is as grounded in New York City roots (let alone Indigenous to the land), as a plastic tree planted in an apple farm. I, a recent postgraduate transplant with a tote bag and a shiny degree, am one to talk. 

Along Broadway Avenue, however, the Southside/Los Sures neighborhood of Williamsburg has maintained a sense of individuality, and to my outsider eye, community. It still holds onto a hope of avoiding the wrath of the Lululemon-Sweetgreen industrial complex that ravages Brooklyn. 

As a new resident of the area, with little knowledge of my neighborhood, an affinity for things green and growing, and the hope of finding an entrance to community, I went to the gardens whose titles bear its name. 

I met Crito, an anarchist former nightclub manager who stewarded Keap Fourth’s identity as an open public space and invited me to a weekend working day.  There, I met Ilya, a ten-year-old with a love of tomatoes, and his mother Susana. At Hooper Grove’s weekly movie night, I met Carla, who looked down at an empty lot from her apartment on Hooper Street for nine years before it became a garden. And I met Aaron, whose revolutionary rewilding vision for Hooper Grove and New York City has diffused in gardens and tree beds across the area.

Our conversations offered a glimpse into their hard, meaningful work of creating and maintaining; gardens and community. 

Keap Fourth and Hooper Grove had both been vacant lots full of rats for years, for decades. 

And Keap Fourth only started in like 2012 so I got involved a year later. As an anarchist, I’ve always kind of felt the need to volunteer and give back to the community in different ways, I guess. I was kind of, maybe the second wave of Bohemian types to move in here in like, ninety-eight.

People come and go, especially in this neighborhood, which is pretty transient. There’s usually a few core people in all these gardens that are around and are kind of more embedded in the neighborhood. But generally, if you have a good infrastructure, people can come and go every year, and you still get everything done, which is how it happens here.

A lot of gardens have individual plots, and that’s how this one started. We had a situation where everybody had half of one of these beds, and so everyone kind of had the same tomatoes and zucchinis and things crammed in. And I kind of pushed and won for all the beds to be communal. Then we have a few elders. We have an old Dominican guy who tends to these beans. We have a Bangladeshi couple that takes over the wall, all the peas and squash back there. 

I do think you can learn a lot from a garden like this. Most of the volunteers that come in here do not know how to garden at all. But for the most part, if you put the work in, you can help in the harvest. I’ve taught people that you need to, like, embellish whatever diet you have with what you can get here, instead of thinking you can just eat off the land or whatever. Even if you can’t live off all the food here, I still save like, twenty, thirty dollars a week in groceries.

We’ve tried really hard to just make people understand that it’s for them, that it’s a public space.  So my thing was, well, let’s just keep it open from ten to seven every day as a public green space. We keep ours open. That’s kind of my initiative. 

But, how do you maintain a safe space where all your vegetables aren’t stolen or whatever goes on, you know, without oversight, without supervision? We try to pick a lot of this stuff green so that it’s not stolen. It’s better to grow smaller stuff that keeps coming back. We kind of tell people that.

We’ve fought pretty hard to keep this place peaceful. A lot of the dealing on the corner’s a pain in the ass. They used to use it as a relay point, or they’d just come in here and smoke weed and take a nap in the afternoon. Last year, we just had people drinking all day and night. And then also, like Andrew across the street, who kind of walks around with his shoes off.

So we have all these people hanging here together, you know? I think that’s the cool thing about volunteering at places like this. I’ve been in the neighborhood almost thirty years, but it wasn’t until I started working here that I understood a little more the neighbors and the pulse.

Things coalesced this year, as far as better volunteers, new people wanting to manage. The space itself has just been beautiful. I just come over from four blocks away, so this is my backyard. I’m an electronic musician by trade, and I used to manage this club called Output. It was Brooklyn’s largest legal techno club, so we’d handle 2200 ravers till eight in the morning, and then I’d come here.

I think it’s helped me mentally, just as a place.

Susana:
I like picking tomatoes. I like going here in the morning, and just grabbing a few tomatoes and seeing what happens. I also like looking underneath and finding things, like sometimes really huge eggplants.

But I mean, Ilya, you also, like, just grabbing a leaf and tasting it, seeing what happens. Because Crito likes to plant interesting stuff. Like, there’s some peppery things. But then also, like, some of the leaves over there, like the basil’s and the mints are very, very spicy and peppery, right? 

Ilya:
Yeah, don’t try them just raw.

Susana:
What kind of tomatoes are we gonna pick?

Ilya:
Maybe the ones that are a little whitish,

A little yellow whitish, kind of. Like this one over here.

Susana:
Ilya, do you want to tell us about what happened to our house?

Ilya:
Well, a few years ago, our house, like, caught on fire, and then we had to move, and we were living in the house right next to that house, and we were looking over the community garden like, “Hey! That might be fun to join.”

Susana:
Because we didn’t really have a backyard anymore, we discovered how nice it is to have common outdoor areas.The whole experience got us much more integrated into the neighborhood.

Ilya [picks up small container]:
There’s some drugs there.

Susana:
Be careful, it’s probably a container for drugs. Don’t lick your hand or anything.

Matthew:
Ilya, what’s your favorite part about the garden? 

Ilya:
Well, I don’t even really know, I just like the whole garden. I used to— which I now learned that it’s really not good for the ground. I used to just get the hose and just sit there spraying the ground for like half an hour, just trying to, trying, trying to soak the ground. And I’m like, looking back, I’m like, Why did I do that?

Matthew:
Do you feel like you’ve learned a lot here?

Ilya:
No. Most of the gardening stuff I learned from my mom.

Susana:
I don’t- I wouldn’t survive in the wild. Let’s be very clear about this, I’m a very urban person.

An interesting part about community gardens is that they’re for the community, but you see fences around them. That friction is there between openness to the community and, like what we just saw on the ground, like a drug container or something like that. Just all the reasons why people would decide to put up a fence around a garden.

Sometimes we’ve had conversations, like, maybe take down the fence. Some of us are in favor of taking down the fence completely. But then also, also kind of understand… I just think it makes community gardens really important that they’re these little sandboxes for those kinds of conversations that are relevant at the societal level. 

As soon as you have a family, then you’re like, oh, actually, even the streets that don’t feel like there’s community, there really is. And this neighborhood is– you know,  there’s so many different– there’s like, really rich people and really poor people on the streets, and it’s an interesting, sometimes frictious, situation.

But, one of the things that I find really important, from just a parenting perspective toward him, is that you have this diversity. There’s people on the streets, and sometimes you get to know them, and then they’re– you know, they turn out to be really, you know, they’re nice, they’re just humans. Also, they just have a very different background. A very different, you know— something happened and they’re there, and you don’t need to necessarily be scared of them. 

Ilya:
I mean, in the neighborhood everyone kind of knows each other, because we all see each other going on the street, and it’s kind of like our neighborhood. I’ve got a lot of friends that live really close, so it’s like, really, like, it’s a really fun place to live because you get to know everyone. 

It’s also beautiful. It can be beautiful, like, sometimes in the afternoon, you see just people like, people partying and stuff like that. Just like, without any tickets, just open on the street, and it’s really fun to just stand there and dance.

I got involved in Hooper Grove because I live directly across the street from it on the top floor, and all of my windows face this space. I’ve lived here since 2007 and it was going on nine years that it was literally dead,  rat infested space. And then one day, there was a sign hanging up saying that it was going to become a community garden. So I went to the meeting, and I’ve been a part of it ever since. I really did help from the ground up. 

Once we officially got the go ahead that we were going to become a garden, the rubble was cleared out, then they dumped dirt, and then they came and dumped two big piles of mulch. So we literally spread all of that mulch by hand and with shovels.

When we got the notification that we were part of green thumb, part of New York City’s Parks Department, we made a big banner that said, 

“THIS IS A PARK” 

“ESTE ES UNA PARQUE.”

And we’re all Brooklyn folk, New York City people, so none of us were that savvy as urban gardeners. It was mostly just dirt, and maybe you could see a little green. 

We also used to have a chain link fence– it was falling down and hideous. After a few years, we were able to get a new fence, but when they tore it out, they completely razed the garden of all of our progress. It’s pretty sad to do that when a group of people have spent hours of manpower and exhausted themselves, but it was for the greater good, because it’s when Aaron happened to come along, and he’s really the one with the vision for our existence as a native plant space. He’s really to credit for the over one hundred species of native plants.

This space has always been intended to be just a shade and sitting garden. A green space. 

And so now, standing in the garden, if you look straight ahead, all you can see is green. 

It changes throughout the year. It’s incredible to watch it change. It’s just amazing to have watched its progress. 

The garden is a big responsibility, and we have real concerns. We’ve been vandalized, or we’ve had plants be vandalized, and that’s always disappointing. But, for the most part, this garden has continued to be a safe haven for the community that the community members look out for. Just having trees and plants has made the street a very desirable zone as well, just next to the garden. 

So that’s pretty cool, because it seems to have really activated the space in a safe way.

There are questions about who a community garden attracts in terms of its placement and serving the needs of the local community. Is it really serving the people who have lived there for decades, or is it serving new people who want to see gardens?

Here, our mission is to increase the amount of green space on the Southside. And everybody’s on board with that. People love to hang out next to the garden, and they’re all pretty much regulars, and so we know all of them now. They’re friends of the garden.

I lived in my apartment for so long, and it took me several years to become more involved in my community. But this is something where, when I come down here and get to meet and know the people who are passing by, that’s like– I’m really involved in my community. I’m actually doing something that benefits the people who live here. I’m contributing.

That’s part of our spirit. We’re staffed by members, and we need to be operated by members, but we’re for the community. So when the garden’s open, anybody can come in and enjoy it. When it’s closed, we think it’s amazing that everyone wants to still sit right next to it and enjoy the green space.  I get so much feedback from so many people of different generations when they pass by. That they love what we do, to keep it going, and that it’s amazing.

It’s hard to maintain these spaces. In New York, people move frequently, people are busy, people have their lives. So a big aspect of the success of these spaces is just people being able to help out and keep it going.  That’s our biggest need — people coming to open it up on the regular.

I think sometimes people pass by and they think that we just went crazy with the plants or something, but it’s very intentional, with the goal to create a sustainable micro ecosystem that revitalizes itself season after season and attracts pollinators.

I would want them to know that in the savage beauty of our space, it’s fully intentioned for the betterment of the community and the local environment. 

At Hooper Grove, we have more than 100 species of native plants. They range from woody shrubs to a couple of larger, semi-tree big shrubby guys like pussy willow and our weird box elder. 

And then we have a whole lot of different native wildflowers. Goldenrod and asters and various cone flowers and New York iron weed and various perennial sunflowers and violets and bee balm and phlox and a variety of native grasses. 

This garden is an attempt at rewilding. These are the things that should be growing here, and they are necessary for any of the wildlife that we might be interested in seeing or supporting in this area. We have to find the things that can survive the conditions here.

All of our green space in New York City is very fragmented. We have some backyards, but mostly they’re full of non native plants and invasives, and we have various edges and weird spots where weeds grow, and sometimes they’re native weeds. And then we have our parks, which are often filled with grass which is not native and doesn’t support any kind of wildlife. So we have to do what we can to make a space for our pollinators, our insects, our birds, where they can find the food they need.

If you can feed some bugs, then you’re feeding birds and then potentially bigger birds or mammals, and it’s supporting the food web.  So we grow native plants to support native insects, pollinators, spiders, ladybugs, beetles, flies, wasps, bees, butterflies, moths, true bugs, all of these things we support because they make the world work. They are necessary. Without these bugs, we will all die.

And in this time and space, we can make a noticeable ecological difference by providing all our native fauna with their appropriate flora. So, for example, we have bees that only use the pollen of native hibiscus who are habitually in our garden because we provide that native hibiscus, and that is the goal: to support all of these relationships of survival. If we’re not supporting that, we aren’t really serious about, like, caring about ecology.

And the tiniest bit of work is all it takes. You can have some pots on the sidewalk. You can have a small planter anywhere, and you’re going to help. Tree beds are a great place for native plants.. anywhere you can put this kind of thing. There are many marginal spots in New York City that can support this kind of small-scale wildlife restoration.

I have had the opportunity to see the garden change through the years, and it’s really filled in quite nicely. And it works well. In some ways, it takes care of itself, as in a meadow or a prairie where things shift all the time and kind of manage themselves.  There’s so much life happening here, you can kind of just work with it, and let it happen.

And everybody likes flowers. You end up giving flowers away, and you end up talking to all the various people and meeting these folks who, like, have been doing the same sort of thing in this neighborhood for decades. And they’ll stop by and they’ll be like, you know, good job buddy. Like they appreciate the effort.

There are folks from the various communities who hang outside our garden all the time. And it’s just part of the culture of this block of this neighborhood that folks hang out outside, and that’s great, and they often help us out by helping us keep the sidewalk clean and the area clean, and we help them out in various ways. It’s good to be friends with your neighbor.

It’s an interesting thing working in a community garden. It may be a passion, but it is also volunteering, and like trying to do some good.  

You know, you’re not Batman, but you can do some good shit.  

I meandered back to Keap Fourth Garden on a mid-October afternoon to write my tying words to this piece, and stumbled upon a young boy’s seventh birthday party. The garden, slowly yellowing, is preparing to hibernate for the winter. But the space is still very much alive.  

I watched children cheer and scream and dash in and out of the greenery while a diverse crowd of parents drank wine and schmoozed at the picnic table. Birds chirped in the peach tree above me while music played from a car down the street. I picked some tomatoes, two green bell peppers, and a handful of purple snow peas for my dinner.  An ice cream truck drove by, singing. Car horns greeted each other. The children shouted and giggled. And the train shrieked and rumbled and whistled, just a few blocks away. 

Matthew Nekritz, Mad Agriculture’s Research and Journalism Fellow, is new to the post-graduate world, receiving his bachelors degree in Social Studies from Harvard College last May. And he’s new to Brooklyn, where he lives and works. He cares deeply about food, justice, and dignified human connection. His senior thesis, “So All May Eat”: An Ethnography of America’s Longest Running Pay-What-You-Can Café, explored concepts of dignity, community, and belonging at SAME Café in his hometown of Denver, Colorado.