Tim May wrote... "I said I saw the same thing in Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Both are said to be "progressive" communities, but in both places the so-called community garden areas are essentially for hoboes and deadbeats to scratch at." Well, there's a selection effect that's going to take place in many of the cities under discussion. In NYC both rich and poor live in the city (sometimes within blocks of each other, though $$$ are pushing non-$$$ to the outer boroughs). In a lot of American cities, your "inner city" is inhabited by lower income folks and carless down-and-outs almost exclusively. So of course you'll see community gardens overrun. In NYC the phenomenon is entirely different. First of all, the gardens are almost always gated and barbwired. For two, its primarily the non-drugged members of a community that are working the garden, and a prime reason for creating the garden is to pretty up and otherwise crappy looking block. The flowers and produce of the garden are almost tertiary. In addition, in NYC we see a lot of abandoned properties that remain brick/rat/garbage lots for years and years, and so the locals decide to do something about it and clean it up. (Sometimes its city property, sometimes 'private'). Of course, we could talk about philosophy and what these people "should" do, but if I were living in one of those areas and didn't have the $$$ to move out, I'd definitely try to fix up our community, and to hell with philosophies of "collective ownership" statism, communism or so on. You want your block to look nice, and the locals DO something. How simple is that? And then, after years of working the garden, the neighborhood starts to look/feel better and then all of a sudden an "owner" appears who wants to bulldoze your garden. Fuck that. I'd be pissed off too, and try to fight the 'dozers. If Tim May or somebody like him tried to sit me down and explain his philosophies for a few hours and why I "had no right" to stop the 'dozers, I'd probably say, "Well, I'm not smart enough to understand your theories, but I wish you well with them. Hey--there's the bulldozers, gotta go!" -TD _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
Tim May wrote... "I said I saw the same thing in Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Both are said to be "progressive" communities, but in both places the so-called community garden areas are essentially for hoboes and deadbeats to scratch at."
Minor technical correction - hoboes are migrant workers, as opposed to tramps, who are migrant non-workers, or bums, who are non-migrant non-workers, and hoboes aren't likely to be hanging out in that kind of area, at least during the times of year there's active gardening going on, because that's when they're most likely to be working on farms. That may be different down in Watsonville, where there's a lot of railroad connectivity and a lot of farms, but up in Santa Cruz and certainly up in Berkeley, it's much more likely to just be bums.
At 10:21 AM 05/12/2003 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: In NYC the phenomenon is entirely different. First of all, the gardens are almost always gated and barbwired. For two, its primarily the non-drugged members of a community that are working the garden, and a prime reason for creating the garden is to pretty up and otherwise crappy looking block. The flowers and produce of the garden are almost tertiary.
Yup. Barbed wire definitely spruces up a community.....
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Tyler Durden