The Last Page
Glenn, David
0 N JULY 2, 1977, a seventeen-yearold boy set fire to an abandoned tenement building on New York City's Lower East Side. This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that...
...they allow citizens to work on collective projects that aren't directly regulated by the government or by the market...
...DAVID GLENN 128 DISSENT / Summer 1998...
...Giuliani's team may believe that it's striking a blow for freedom and civility, but the residents of Eighth Street know better...
...And certainly not that they're oases of human solidarity and participatory democracy: a visit to an Avenue B garden found two of its leaders squabbling interminably about who should reimburse whom for bake-sale expenses...
...Not that they've made a serious dent in the neighborhood's injustices: crime may be down, but poverty, unemployment, and wasted potential are still the main story on the Celic Garden's block...
...But today the East Village's yuppie/boho population is burgeoning, and pushing ever eastward...
...they give the city desperately needed green space...
...But if Rudolph Giuliani has his way, and the city's gardens are destroyed to make way for private housing, we'll learn once again that the free market can be just as unkind to civil society—just as insensitive to the chaotic forms that bring neighborhoods to life—as any Olympian urban designer...
...and most of them bring together people of different classes and races, and thus make the city seem a little bit less like a terrifying caste society...
...New York definitely needs more green," said one man...
...it is remembered today only because a young firefighter named Marty Celic fell to his death as the building collapsed...
...A couple of dozen individual plots of flowers, herbs, and vegetables surround a large common green...
...And not even the architecture will improve: if recently built East Village yuppie apartments are any indication, the new buildings that replace the gardens will be at least as ugly as any Eisenhower-era public housing...
...This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that struck New York's poorest neighborhoods...
...The garden, which is maintained entirely by neighborhood residents, was born as a wildcat operation in the years after the arson...
...At the Celic Garden's Memorial Day barbecue, which drew well over a hundred people, the new threat to community gardening was on the minds of many...
...Look at these kids running around—do you think they have space to do that in their apartments...
...This new consensus is said to be far more sensitive to the insights of Jane Jacobs—much more willing, that is, to allow private-sector citizen initiatives, in all their chaotic diversity, to bubble up from below...
...And we should also say this: the Giuliani adminstration's efforts to wipe out the gardens give the lie to the conventional wisdom about urban policy...
...What should be said about the Lower East Side's community gardens in the pages of Dissent...
...Ladder Company 18, where Celic served, has given substantial support...
...This past May, City Hall transferred jurisdiction of the Marty Celic Memorial Garden, and 740 other community gardens throughout New York, from the Parks Department to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development—with the mandate that they be auctioned off to housing developers...
...The bad old days of modernist urban planning, we're told, have given way to a new center-right consensus...
...But the gardens are beautiful...
...The center-left urban planning of the postwar years did leave a lot to be desired (and this magazine was not immune to its ethos—early issues of Dissent were full of calls to "tear down the slums...
...Today the site, on East Eighth Street between Avenue C and Avenue D, is the home of a flourishing community garden named in Celic's memory...
...A decade ago, the notion that for-profit developers might be interested in the Celic site would have seemed absurd...
...The project was given the city's official blessing and protection, under a program called "Operation Green Thumb," in 1988...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
