Climate Week at Caravan of Dreams #5 · Cleaned Transcript
September 23, 2026 · East Village and Loisaida, NY
A walking tour led by Wendy Brawer of Green Map, recorded on a handheld mic from Caravan of Dreams through the East Village and Loisaida. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the order of the walk kept intact. Names spoken on the walk were checked where a source exists; where none does, they stand as the speaker said them. The guide and the two guests who spoke, Haym Gross of the NYC 2030 District and Amy Berkov at the 6 & B Community Garden, are named; people asking from the group are not. It is not verbatim. The recording starts after the pre-tour chatter at Caravan of Dreams and ends mid-sentence at 6 & B.
Download as .txtBrawer · I'm so happy to meet you all. I'm Wendy from Green Map. We help people make maps about sustainability in their community, so of course I brought our new map for you today. Pass them around. This one is about the energy transition right here in the community. I have lived and worked in this neighborhood for a long time, and many Green Map projects start exactly like this: let's go out and see what we can find. We're going to walk for about an hour and a half, and it's glowy out there, so let's do what we can to stay together. We'll stop in lots of places, but try not to get too strung out on the sidewalk. We're not the only ones on it, so let other people pass. I'm coming back here afterwards if you have more questions. If you know something about what we're talking about, please add to it, and if you have questions along the way, let's talk about them. We're in an incredible place. I was here last night for Nate Hagens, and so much of what he was talking about is already happening right here. I know you're from all over, and maybe some of the things that have worked here will also work in your community.
Along the way I'll point out things people fought for in New York City, like this little bike rack. The city bought thousands of them and didn't put them out until there was a campaign: my sidewalk is this wide, I want a bike rack. Your city may have them stockpiled too. That was probably twenty years ago. You see how many bicycles there are in New York now. Back in the day, Wednesdays used to be called Waving Wednesday: if you happened to see another bicycle, you'd both wave. That's how much things have changed.
Brawer · This is Village View, a Mitchell-Lama complex. Mitchell-Lama is affordable housing, one of many types in New York. People paid about $40,000 for these apartments, and their monthly charge is based on their annual income, so it remains affordable. In New York everything is six stories, because at six stories or less you don't need an elevator, so all these buildings are walk-ups. This complex has just been offered something like $30 million for one of its parking lots, and that is one of the big discussions right now: should they sell? Complexes like this often have playgrounds, and it's really important for everybody to have outdoor space.
Here are a couple of things coming up in New York. The SUNNY Act has passed the state legislature and the governor has it on her desk. It's plug-in solar. It already passed in Utah; I would have guessed they'd be first, before California, before New York. It means all these balconies can have their own solar, for their own use at home. It won't go to the grid. There are already a million of these systems in Germany, and it's supporting a lot of energy.
Another thing coming right up is called J-51. It has already passed at the state level, and New York City is voting on it next week. There's already a victory party planned. J-51 will give a cooperatively owned complex like this $60,000 per unit to do capital improvements, as a ten-year tax break. It's already in the state budget; that money is set aside. I just moved into a 1,700-apartment building from 1960. That's $100 million for the energy transition. That's the kind of money we need to really move the needle in New York State.
Q · What kind of buildings are eligible?
Brawer · Cooperatively owned. It can be a small building or a big building, not only Mitchell-Lama. Sixty grand per apartment. I don't know the total.
Q · One more time, the name of the bill?
Brawer · J-51. And by the way, you know those leaf blowers are not good, right? They use as much energy as a truck.
The parking lot they're being offered for is another block that way; this complex goes about four blocks. There are lots of people from Ukraine in these buildings. The timing worked: Ukrainian immigrants were coming in sixty years ago, and it's still a very Ukrainian complex. We have waves of immigrants in New York.
Q · What about my building? It's probably about the same age.
Brawer · Yes. That's part of the reason I'm so excited, and have taken part in the rallies and got my council member on board, because our building needs that. Buildings like this have no insulation, and their systems are from the sixties, a long time ago already.
Brawer · This is an H-shaped school. The city of New York hired an architect named C.B.J. Snyder, and they built a hundred H-shaped schools in a year. Why are they better? Every room has light and air, and they're mid-block, so it was cheaper land. They also improved fire safety over the previous school buildings. New York City is the largest school district in the United States. Anybody have kids in a New York City school? No, me neither, but I work with a high school. If you get a chance to work with a high school, consider it. It's so thrilling to talk to the young people. I was at a multispecies urbanism event yesterday: places like this are really important for our squirrel friends.
This is one of the few Deco buildings in the neighborhood, and it's very elegant. One thing you'll notice in New York City is a lot of locally owned businesses. We don't have that many chain stores, and there was a block on them for quite a while. There were no box stores here for a long time; I believe it was 7-Eleven that broke it, and the 7-Elevens failed on their own. People didn't want to shop there. They preferred the locally owned businesses. New York almost went bankrupt in the seventies; President Gerald Ford said to New York City, drop dead. This is a famous neighborhood store, the nicest stationers in town.
New York City has just redesigned its scaffolding rules. If you're doing work up above you must have a sidewalk shed, and they've just made them higher. They must have lighting, they must be maintained a certain way. One of the bad things that used to happen is the scaffolding companies would put them up and not take them down until they had another job, so it might sit there an extra year or two or three. It's nice in the winter, because it doesn't get snowy.
Now we're on East 3rd Street. This was the very famous Two Boots. They lost their lease after a million years, but they really brought pizza to the neighborhood. The neighborhood changes constantly. Here's a sign of change right here: Most Holy Redeemer. It has been here a long time, and it's a beacon in many ways because of its clock tower. But the Catholic church just sold it, so all their signage is gone, and we're about to lose this gorgeous building. I didn't come to the protest and I haven't looked at the website yet, but all the markings are down. It's a big loss for people who like architecture and people who like places of respite. I was their tenant: on the other side of the block they have a school, and Green Map was based there for nine years. They were wonderful landlords, except they didn't like us to put Planned Parenthood on our green maps.
When I moved here, Jim Power had started making these mosaics, and here's one of the ones that remained. I moved here in '86. I came from Tokyo, and these really helped make this neighborhood feel like you were living in an art space. There were a lot more murals at the time, and a lot more sense of abandonment as well. Places like this helped us feel centered.
We're going to pass some really cool reuse spots, including Jane's Exchange, one of the very few stores for pregnant people and their infants. It's an exchange. And you can see the A here: they have a good energy rating. Every building has a mark now, and you're supposed to leave it on the front, just like a restaurant, telling everybody whether you're up to date on your energy rules. Right now we have something called Local Law 97. Every building over 25,000 square feet, if they don't start making their energy mark, is going to start being fined, and it's big fines. That one's too small. Here's Jane's right here.
Brawer · Let's see what's going on in this garden. Right now the Harvest Arts Festival is on, the same time as Climate Week: ten days of art and culture in the gardens. I know there are bands here on Sunday. This garden is one of the originals. This is one of the nice things: you have a place in the midst of it all where the stormwater hangs out. It's mostly a beautiful spot of green. It's habitat, it's oxygen, it's peace and quiet, and these are hard things to find here. They have a little stage. Many of these gardens used to have casitas. So many were started by people from Puerto Rico and Latin America, and they'd have a little house in the garden, and people hung out there all the time. Are they growing food here? It's too shady for food. Those are some of the trade-offs. In a lot of places we have food for animals, not for people. Sometimes those animals are rats.
Haym is an architect with 2030 Districts. The district is downtown Brooklyn? Lower Manhattan?
Gross · It's virtual at this point.
Brawer · If you are interested in transitioning a whole community, talk to Haym about how you do this from an architectural perspective. The design community in New York City is vast and has a lot of hands in a lot of different things, and then there's the activist community. Haym has also been involved in solar development, as have I.
There's a big willow tree. What does a willow tree indicate? That's right. You won't believe how close the water is right here: some of it tidal streams, some of it the East River. Here's what's coming up on Sunday: Baby Soda, they're great, and another band. This is a very cool bar, the Book Club. And you're passing New York City's latest version of outdoor dining. During COVID this blossomed as a means to keep the restaurants going. This is the new iteration of how you're supposed to build these, and they have to meet very strict guidelines. The city is deciding right now whether they can be year-round.
That's a credit union. Do any of your communities have credit unions? Anybody belong to one? What's the advantage?
Q · No profit tax. Any money that comes in stays in the neighborhood.
Brawer · That's right. I belong to this one, and I qualify for a Citi Bike discount, so I can get Citi Bike for five bucks a month. That's one of the things we bicycle activists really worked for: a two-tiered pricing system. If you're on food stamps, if you live in NYCHA, if you bank at a credit union, you get $5 a month, and they don't put a $1,000 hold on your credit card the way they do for people paying the full price, 250 a year now.
This is a famous new restaurant. They serve every part of the pig. I'm not into waste, but I'm not into eating pigs.
Brawer · This is Kenkeleba. It's a sculpture garden. Anybody here heard of the Rivington School? It was a well-known welding shop right around the corner in a former gas station. These are some of the artworks. It was activated on Sunday and full of artists. On the other side is a gallery space and studio space, and this building holds about 20,000 works by African American artists, loaned to museums all over the country. They rarely open their own doors.
Right here you get a good look at the church. What we're going to lose is that. To me it looks like the moon when I come out of my office at night to bike home. I'm really going to be sad when that's gone.
Q · Why is it going? Is it being demolished, or sold?
Brawer · It's sold, and it'll probably be housing, like everything else. There's another neighborhood art spot; there are galleries popping in and out all through this area.
We had a well-known housing activist named Mary Spink. She is responsible for 600 units of affordable housing. This building and that brick building over there are her buildings. Here are more gardens. When I moved here they had rabbits, they had chickens, there was even a garden on Avenue C that had a pig.
This building right there: the architect is Chris Benedict, and she and Henry Gifford, who is the boilermaker, developed an early version of Passive House. They have very thick walls in this building. They were determined to use off-the-shelf materials, nothing special, to make it a green building. And they didn't anticipate that people would be buying air conditioners, so it's interesting to see that.
This is the Nuyorican. This is a huge poetry spot, one of the culture spaces in the neighborhood being revitalized and rebuilt. I'm doing a tour on Saturday morning at ABC No Rio, the arts and activism space on Rivington Street. That's a Passive House building, new from the ground up, under construction. Our architect is Paul Castrucci. Passive House. Haym, explain what that is.
Gross · Passive House is a relatively high-tech system built on a very simple idea. The simple idea is that you insulate the building very, very well, like a refrigerator. You make it a very insulated body. You also make it very airtight, so you don't have drafts. And you use what's called energy recovery ventilation. If you make a place very tight, you'd think you're going to suffocate: there's no fresh air exchange. So you have a fairly simple system that brings fresh air into the place and, as it does, preserves whatever the interior temperature is. If it's being cooled in the summer, you keep the cool inside; if it's heated in the winter, you keep the heat. So a Passive House is not only quiet, with filtered air, which is wonderful; you use a tiny bit of energy to heat and cool it, because it's so controlled. And it really works. There are certain aspects, like what materials you use so you don't grow mold in the wall, and you control those things. And it's all electric. It uses heat pumps, a very little bit, to heat and cool and make hot water. And if you do what Wendy and her partner did years ago, and I think it still exists on Pacific Street, they built a net-zero energy building in Brooklyn, because they had solar on the roof.
Brawer · Same architect, Paul Castrucci.
Gross · The solar brought in enough power to offset the energy necessary to heat and cool the building. It was effectively a net-zero energy bill. The only one, as far as I know, for real in New York.
Brawer · It's the first for sure. The state gave us a cash award; that was the first money into the venture. It was literally my husband and my next-door neighbor going off on their bikes and finding an empty lot, and we said, well, let's do it. It took three years to build a three-family that none of us could afford to live in. I think Passive House should be growing faster than it is, but elements of it are. Chris Benedict, the architect back there, joined Mayor Bloomberg's effort on how we get more energy-efficient buildings to happen, and one of the things she said was: we're taking up so much room with insulation, we want a building bonus. Our building was one of the very first to get the bonus. We could build over the typical floor area ratio, so we got to add a 350-square-foot penthouse on top, and that offset the cost of the space. Each of the three apartments has its own electric system. We would do it differently now. That was right after Sandy. Hurricane Sandy showed us that if you had a solar system, you couldn't use the power during an outage; it had to be shut off. Our building was one of the first where you could plug your refrigerator directly into the solar when there was a grid disruption.
Gross · Like a breaker switch. If the power went out, they could have their own. And that can be expanded to a community scale: a community with emergency power, independent, what's called islanded microgrids. By the way, one of the things we're working on is the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a huge project on the water, where they want to give half of it away to developers to build housing. They say it's affordable; we know it's not affordable. Keep that for public use, and we want to build a community energy network there, with a thermal energy network, with solar, with storage, with microgrids, for Red Hook, which is a flood-prone area and also a disadvantaged community. Maybe Mamdani is going to see the light on this. We'll see.
Q · What's the name of the project?
Gross · The Brooklyn Marine Terminal.
Q · With Passive House, is that something a building can be retrofitted to accomplish, or does it have to be new?
Gross · With difficulty.
Brawer · And Paul has done one on Clinton Street.
Gross · It has been done, a number of times. And it's often done for affordable housing, because it brings down the operating cost dramatically, and that really matters.
Brawer · We're going to take a veer off through the construction site. Andrew, who just passed us on the bicycle, is one of the original squatters in the neighborhood. His brother is Paul Castrucci, the architect I was just talking about.
Brawer · Somebody asked whether there are still casitas. This little garden has one, and we're passing through Bracetti Plaza; there's a lot of affordable housing. You get a good view of the casita, and you can see they took what was the skylight from a bigger building to make the roof of their little house. If you're here on Saturday, the Harvest Arts Festival continues all weekend, and gardens like this will be open for music. This one has about twelve trees in its little orchard, apples and pears. It's really important for young people to see that you can grow food like this here in the neighborhood. It may be something we all really need, pretty soon.
This neighborhood is full of all kinds of supportive housing, as well as HDFCs. Around 1980 this neighborhood was full of empty lots. In the seventies landlords torched their buildings and abandoned the land because they could not afford the taxes and the insurance, so the neighborhood was pockmarked with holes. The city said: if you want to live in a building that's currently abandoned, start working on it, put your time in for three months, and you will earn the right to buy an apartment for $250. That was around 1980. There were two programs. That was the legal one. The illegal one was just break in and squat it, and that's what Andrew did. When Bloomberg was around, Bloomberg said, we appreciate self-managed affordable housing, and he sold thirteen buildings in this neighborhood to the people in them for a dollar. My office is in one of those buildings. It was not up to code, so a group called UHAB helped them bring the building up to legal standards. For everybody who was living there and used to putting in money here and there, it was kind of a shock, because all of a sudden you had to pay taxes and cover the cost of the capital improvements.
My building was one of those buildings. I came in later, but we got one of these J-51 tax abatements for capital improvements. The city said, we're ending the program, do you want to be one of the last to get $600,000? Which then was a lot of money. That building is still not paying taxes, and when it does again, it will be held to the earlier number. So it's really advantageous for affordable housing. HDFCs all have an income cap: you can't make more than X. If you're looking for an inexpensive apartment in New York, put HDFC into Zillow or into UHAB and you'll see what's available. They are all self-managed, which means you get to help do the work. In the building I work out of, people take care of the garbage, somebody collects the rent checks, everybody pitches in. My building had a 30 percent flip tax. I just sold my old apartment in there, and I paid more in flip tax than I did to buy the apartment. But it was totally worth it; the building is the reason. That's an HDFC right there, I believe. There are 2,000 buildings in New York City that are HDFCs.
If you're here on Friday, there's a garden right over there hosting a GreenThumb get-together. Watch out, there's dog poop. Souvenir of the city. This building was a school; many buildings have been transformed over time. You don't see that every day: that's a squeegee guy, waiting for people to clean their windshields and get a tip.
Brawer · Do you know Harvey Epstein? He's the council member. He's about to move into this space. This is Avenue C. One of the cool things is the two-way bike lane on Avenue C. In a lot of ways this is a cultural corridor, but over the last year we've lost several things on this block. Do you know Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping? They're really wonderful. They were right on the corner there for a couple of years. This is still a community space right here.
Q · How are we doing on time?
Brawer · Halfway. We're okay. These buildings that are three stories: this is affordable housing from the Giuliani era. They call it an error. Giuliani didn't think we could walk six floors, but everybody knows we can. That's a brand-new mural. Any guess what this building is? This is a data center, folks. It's been here a long time. It was a supermarket.
Q · How disappointing.
Brawer · Down here you have the Sixth Street Community Center, which has been here a long time. There's a fabulous garden on this block, and when we come back around we're going to stop in a garden with one of the gardeners. I wanted to point out this block. This is Giuliani's idea of affordable housing; he shorted us by 50 percent by only making it three stories. Down the block is an old squat. Who helped that squat? Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter came and worked on it, and that was the very beginning of Habitat for Humanity. It's called Mascot Flats. Last year they named this Jimmy Carter Way. The signs are at that end of the block. There's so many things under your feet, everywhere you go, that have made a difference.
Q · What's a squat?
Brawer · People just break in. It was a squat, and now it's legal, obviously.
Gross · Is that the building that had the windmill?
Brawer · No. Haym's asking about a building on 11th Street, which we're not going to go by, but it was also a little squat. They put a windmill and solar panels on the roof in the mid-1970s, and they were told they could not sell the power to the energy grid. There was a lawsuit. The building won. That became the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, and that is the beginning of the intertie for solar. That gives all of us the right to generate electricity on our roof and sell it to our local grid. And that's why the SUNNY Act is so important: that energy will stay in your apartment and power your own stuff. It's more complicated, but it's a real step forward.
Q · Which act gave us the right to generate our own power?
Brawer · The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. I try to include that building on my tour, but today we're not able to. This is 7th Street. I'll show you what's under 7th Street in two more blocks. It's got a lot of historic housing on that block.
Brawer · Have any of you heard of La Esperanza, a community garden that Giuliani had destroyed? It resulted in the protection of another 400 community gardens. This garden was around the block, but in a way it got moved here. This is a pretty lively, flowery space; a lot of arts and culture happens here, yoga and so on. That's the police station, built when this neighborhood was more of a war zone. Right here, on me, there was a line; they've painted it out now, but that's how deep the water was during Hurricane Sandy, right here. This whole neighborhood was in darkness for about five or six days. If you want to see what it looked like, go to greenmap.org/bikeready. I made a video about how bicyclists came to the rescue, and how bikes became critical for communications, evacuation and getting around when everything was down.
These are cell towers, and they came without any notice to the community. It's kind of a cell tower, but they're also Links: free phone calls anywhere in the United States, and you can power up. When the phone booths were being removed from New York, the question was, what can we put in instead that's equitable?
That's Jen, from the Lower East Side Girls Club. There's a little garden. We're going into this one right here. You're at the epicenter of the community garden district. Down the block is MoRUS, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. This is artwork by Rolando Politi; he works with community projects, and they make new flowers every so often. There's yet another incredible garden, Pancho's Garden. That we have been able to keep 55 community gardens in this neighborhood is incredible. When I moved in here, Mayor Giuliani equated community gardens with communism and kept trying to get them out.
Brawer · This is La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez. This is a community garden over there; these are all fruit trees, an edible food forest, a tiny one. There's a lawn where there's full-moon yoga. This is the environmental center; they have some of the best compost in this garden and a really well-organized tool department.
Let's stop here a second. I'll show you something. This garden was here before I got here, and Buckminster Fuller set up a dome in the middle of it; there are little divots there. So you can see the neighborhood: this is 1609, with 1867 layered on top. You have a little view of the related map on the map I gave you. We are right in here. These are underground creeks. Look at the original shoreline, how deep in it was. All of this is landfill. You hear about the Collect Pond in New York as if it was salt water; half of it was fresh water. Every map shows it differently, because it changed. There's the canal at Canal Street, there's Minetta Spring. We no longer have this giant river at 110th Street, but we have the Harlem Meer. I think maps like these are really important for people to understand how much humans change the places where we live. Another thing I love about these maps: anything in red is an Indian village, so this is Lenape people. This is currently called Corlears Hook. It was their landing spot, and there's a ferry there now, which I tried to get them to call Lenape Landing. They said only the Lenape people can name it.
Q · I know some people who can get you to talk to the Shinnecock, but I don't know about the Lenape.
Brawer · I do know someone up there. This is a brand-new solar pavilion. That's part of the reason I wanted to bring you up here. It's by Pvilion. I was the designer in residence at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in 1997, the very first time the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt had one, and they commissioned this company to make a solar tent, and they're still going. They have a contract with the Air Force to do solar covers out in the desert. When they dug for the pillars here, they hit water, flowing water. Those underground rivers are still here. You can see a willow tree; there were three or four more that fell during Hurricane Sandy and, the year before, Irene. Willows last about thirty or forty years; they're not forever. This is now a co-working space for the community, and it powers everything that's going to go on here. If you're here next week you'll see a spa here. Last night there were films. Here's the older solar, manually tilted a couple of times a year to stay on the sun. Very simple. It powers the pond.
Check out that squash. I was once in a garden where the grapes were ready, and it was like a feeding frenzy for the birds. Unbelievably moving. You'll see fruits and vegetables all over the place here. These stairs are funky; be careful. This is the community medicinal plot on my left, and there are workshops a couple of times a month on using herbal plants. All of these are individual plots; people decide themselves what they're going to plant each year. There are a lot of permaculture principles at work in here. By the way, New York City says you must put food in raised beds and you cannot use the ground, because there were buildings here. There might be lead paint, there might be asbestos. The assumption is that all the land is contaminated.
We're going to pass this sculpture by Jackie Brookner. It's a big tongue. Sometimes it has water trickling over this side. She used natural systems as a water-cleaning program, and this got donated after she passed away. You can see how great this garden is. Over the years many things have come and gone, but it's a really wonderful thing to have. The pond is really full right now with lotus. The controller for the little solar is somewhere in there. This gazebo collects stormwater in these barrels. If you need a little water for your plants, this is the first place you get it. These barrels are also collecting rainwater off the roof, but only this side, the south-facing side, is solar. The other side is native plants. Last night they screened a film about the making of that over the last couple of years.
Come back to La Plaza. It's always a blast here, and it's always open. If you want a schedule of events, the newspaper has it, though it's easier to look online now. Community gardens often take care of the tree beds out front, and this is no exception. They have two little free libraries here. Anybody here belong to a community garden? Where's yours?
Q · South Slope. We have food and non-food plots. We don't have raised beds, but we've had to do extensive soil testing to find out what areas are safe. The plots are individually stewarded by members, so a lot of it is up to what they want to do with the space and whether they grow food.
Brawer · That's so cool. Let's keep going; we've got somebody waiting for us at another garden.
Brawer · This is Ninth Street, and coming up on the right is CHARAS/El Bohio. That was one of these H-shaped schools that became a community center. Do people know the name Chino Garcia? He and a poet, Bimbo Rivas, started a community space there, like thirty years ago. When I came to New York, people said, go here if you want to find out about housing, go here if you want to find out about theater, go here if you want to write a poem. It's currently under wraps. Will it come back? There's a chance. There are a lot of creative spaces along here, and it's an inspiring place to work. Mayor Giuliani, remember I said he hated community gardens? He auctioned off every garden he could, and he also auctioned this off. It sold for about $3 million, and the developer was blocked from turning it into luxury housing. It's now back in community hands, sort of. We only need $150 million, and it will reopen as a community space. I know we're laughing, but even ABC No Rio: when I was on the board of that arts and activism space, maybe ten or twelve years ago, we were looking for $800,000. By the time I got off the board, we were looking for eight million. By the time they broke ground on the new building, $21 million. And the city coughed it all up, pretty much. This is a really important church: Trinity has a beloved free food program.
This is an open street. This neighborhood was organized, even before COVID, to open Avenue B to pedestrians and bicycles. It still has some parking, but we're nibbling away at the parking. Open streets were created all over New York City during COVID. Does anybody have an open street in their neighborhood? They're incredible party spaces. Cars are supposed to go 15 miles an hour. This was the first community-managed open street, and I was on the Wednesday team: we took the barriers down and put them up on Wednesdays. It was a total pain, so I'm really glad it's now permanent. Of the fourteen blocks of Avenue B, we got eight of them to be open street blocks. It changes from area to area, where the bikes are, where the cars are, but it was considered pretty successful.
Brawer · This is Tompkins Square Park. It was leveled out by Peter Stuyvesant, who was, I think, our second governor of New York, and it was a parade ground at that time. It's got a very important memorial in that section. People like me are excited: there are now four ping-pong tables in this park. We have three colors of squirrels: black, grey, and reddish ones, ginger squirrels. This park fills up with fireflies in the summer, and there's tons of music every weekend. In the mid-eighties there was not a stick of grass left in this park, and people were living in it. I don't know if you've heard of the Tompkins Square police riot of 1988, but you're walking there. They made the paths wide enough for a police car. They added gates so they can close it at night. They created children-only spaces: adults aren't allowed in without a child. Same at the dog run: you can't go in unless you have a dog. There's a very active Friends of Tompkins group putting in native plants. We are losing the elm trees here. This is one of the oldest stands of American elms left, and every storm we lose another tree or two, so sometimes they close the park when it gets stormy. The city has been very hands-off about activity in this park, and it's been very nice for the community to self-manage.
Two years ago, in the winter, that school became the migrant reticketing center, and we had so many people waiting here to get a thirty-day shelter ticket or a bus ticket somewhere else, who didn't have coats or hats. They had been bussed up here from Texas by their governor, and this neighborhood rallied. It's still a distribution point for food and other migrant support to this day. We're back to Avenue B. We're almost back to 6th Street, and we're going to stop in the garden on the corner.
Q · Are there other tours like this?
Brawer · New York City is loaded with choice. I'm doing a different tour on Sunday you could join, and there's one Saturday afternoon. Grab me after. Oh my God, we're early. We did really good, folks. I also do bike tours, which are even more dangerous.
Brawer · You can see how enormous this garden is. This is Amy Berkov. She's a community biologist and a plant-insect specialist, recently retired from City College. Wait for everybody to come in.
Berkov · You're at 6 & B, the corner garden. Don't get confused: there's also one called 6BC half a block away, and that has been a source of confusion, because they're all over Instagram for their treehouse, and people come here looking for the treehouse, which we do not have. This is 6 & B Community Garden, and we have been here since 1982, 1983. There were originally three buildings on four lots. If you look at a map of where the community gardens are in New York City, you'll see they have very clustered distributions, because they were in low-income areas. Landlords just deserted their properties, and drug dealers moved in. The city didn't like that, so they put cinder blocks in the windows and doors, but the dealers just broke through the cinder blocks. Then the city just came around. They didn't have any money; we were broke. This is when Ford was saying to New York, drop dead, in four-inch red letters on the newspaper. So the city just tore down buildings and left the debris behind, and the people who lived around there didn't like that, because it was worse than having the drug dealers. So people started banding together and building these community gardens. That's the genesis of them, and that's why you find them in clustered distributions: those were the areas the city really didn't prioritize. The South Bronx, parts of Brooklyn. Now, of course, we have this real asset for the neighborhood, for better or worse.
What gardens do for climate: one thing we have is permeable ground. That is probably the most basic thing. All gardens, no matter what you plant, no matter what you do, have permeable ground, and that helps prevent flooding, because, as you probably know, we have a combined sewer system in this area. If you have very heavy rainstorms, the rain and the sewage go to the same place and the system can't handle them, and there are overflow outlets that go into the rivers. That's how sewage ends up in our water bodies, and that's not a good thing. So permeable ground is one good thing. We're also set up to catch rainwater. And the plants themselves absorb a huge amount of water. If you look at any of these trees, you can see the above-ground part, but you have to imagine the below-ground part, the root system, and that's what's involved in sucking a lot of the water out of the ground and pulling it up through the entire tree, way up to the tips, where it diffuses back into the atmosphere through pores in the leaves. A tremendous amount of water gets recycled like that.
Q · The roots can be as big as the tree we see?
Berkov · When you look at a tree, you see a canopy line, and as a ballpark guesstimate we'd say the roots occupy that same area. The roots go out as far from the trunk as the canopy does.
Q · What about the heat island effect?
Berkov · I'm a teacher; I talk loud. Of course it's much cooler where you have shade than where you don't. The heat island effect is basically that we have so much built property, and it's all absorbing heat and releasing it at night, so we never really cool off the way you would in an area with more natural vegetation. When I did my thesis research, studying plants and insects, the place I did it had no roads going to it; it would take you a week to walk there if you weren't going to fly. When I was out there it was hot and humid during the day, but it cooled off a lot at night; you had to sleep with a blanket. And on the once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when I'd go to the coast to do some business, where there were cities and roads, I would not have been able to stay without air conditioning, because it just doesn't cool off when you take all the plants away. Even here, we did some projects down at Corlears Hook Park where we used Wendy's heat gun, which I broke, and it's really amazing, the difference even a little bit of shade makes in temperature. Even before we had the heat gun, you would feel it as you walked away from the garden.
I made this up at some point, looking at the ecosystem services of our trees, because, believe it or not, not all gardeners love trees. There's competition for everything, and trees compete for the sun that gardeners want. We have one person with an herb garden in a shaded area; it was shaded when she put it in. But then she's like, we've got to cut down that tree, it's ruining my herbs. I'm like, you can grow herbs on your windowsill. I didn't want to be impolite, but sometimes I'm not polite. These are our four biggest trees, and these are from the city's data. The city has the Tree Map, and you can get the value of the ecosystem services.
Brawer · The Tree Map was started by the city when they were trying to make the economic case for street trees. You can find every single city tree and see how much stormwater, how much energy it's saving, how much habitat it's creating, and then they give each tree a financial number. The tree in front of my office is a dollar a day. That is paying us in something we can understand. And of course we love the tree.
Q · Were those dollar values, and what were the units? Annual?
Berkov · A dollar value. Annual. The thing I looked at was annual dollars.
Brawer · Amy and I are both part of East River Park Action. If you went to the park about four blocks that way, you would not see a tree. The city, in its wisdom, cut down a thousand mature trees, just as COVID was getting underway, and they raised the park. This is our stormwater and our surge and sea level rise for
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